Reading List: The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker

Hello readers and welcome back (finally!) to the Reading List. As mentioned previously I am trying to work in more BIPOC and (contemporary) female authors onto the list. To that end I decided to pick up a book my wife found within the Free Little Library in our neighborhood, Pat Barker’s 2018 re-telling of the Iliad, The Silence of the Girls.

The beginning of a trilogy of novels, The Silence of the Girls is a radical retelling of Homer from the point of view of Briseis, a slave girl and daughter of the king who is captured during the Trojan War. I should say right up top the story does contain all the regular beats of the war (Myron’s death, Agamemnon's scheming, Achilles and his refusal to fight, Patroclus and his death, Priam’s scheming, Hector’s death, Achilles’ also eventual death) but from an entirely female perspective. It also shows brutally the perspective of the slave women of the camp and how they had to deal with their lives. If you’re familiar with the Iliad, you will be familiar with this story. Having never read Homer before this, I was blown away by the use of language to convey a powerful story I had heard (and seen; yes I watched the awful Wolfgang Peterson film Troy in my youth) before. Oh and I should mention (*spoiler alert*) Briseis becomes pregnant with Achilles’ child, and he marries her to one of his good friends to end the tale.

While the entire story takes place from the female perspective there are shifts back to Achilles’ point of view during the points where he won’t fight and other times. This I felt honestly was a little jarring and took me out of the story. I had expected the entire story to be narrated by a female and these shifts to the main character were ultimately distracting in a very well written book. I just wish the author would have picked a perspective and stuck with it. This is the first in a trilogy so I will definitely be looking for the other two in the series, either in Little Free Libraries or elsewhere.

Despite the odd changes in perspective I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Trojan War or the Iliad to get it from a highly unusual perspective but one that is equally important. In this day and age of The Odyssey getting the big screen treatment we should never forget the source material, nor how it can be changed to get a new story out of it. This one may not be recognizable at first but it shows how the best stories can get re-told over and over again to create something new. Sorry this one took me so long to read through, I have a lot going on with both my jobs right now and the union so have even less time to read. But thanks as always for joining me on this reading adventure.​