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A review by marmoo
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? No
3.0
There’s no shortage of literary projects that set out to dig out the female collateral buried in foundational male epics, though not all of them assemble those excavated remains with equal skill. While it remains an interesting project for holding up a mirror to our modern gender norms—and perhaps tracing some of them back to the source—this addition to the canon of canon-critical feminist retellings never fully cohered for me.
I’m intrigued by Pat Barker’s effort to give voice to the unsung victims of the Trojan war, I just wish that voice was a wee bit more distinctive. For all that the novel centers the unlucky Briseis, it doesn’t give her a whole lot of depth.
One never gets the sense that Briseis is a woman from a different time and worldview, which is generally my yardstick for success in historical—or historical-ish—fiction. The insertion of slang vernacular (“Cheers, lads,” quoth Achilles on his first up-close appearance) seems intended to recontextualize the mythic violence as something more familiar, but it had a jarring effect.
Likely that’s by design, foregrounding the continuity of female suffering during men’s wars down through the ages, but it has the unfortunate effect of once again pulling focus from the titular women and back again to Achilles. Unlike Briseis’s bland first-person narration, the third person shift in his section draws us into an unsettling and (sorry!) more interesting world, a world governed by deadly notions of honor and the whims of the gods.
Still, despite the sometimes underwhelming prose, Pat Barker effectively wields the brutality of her chosen setting to jostle readers out of our familiar reactions to a familiar story.
I’m intrigued by Pat Barker’s effort to give voice to the unsung victims of the Trojan war, I just wish that voice was a wee bit more distinctive. For all that the novel centers the unlucky Briseis, it doesn’t give her a whole lot of depth.
One never gets the sense that Briseis is a woman from a different time and worldview, which is generally my yardstick for success in historical—or historical-ish—fiction. The insertion of slang vernacular (“Cheers, lads,” quoth Achilles on his first up-close appearance) seems intended to recontextualize the mythic violence as something more familiar, but it had a jarring effect.
Likely that’s by design, foregrounding the continuity of female suffering during men’s wars down through the ages, but it has the unfortunate effect of once again pulling focus from the titular women and back again to Achilles. Unlike Briseis’s bland first-person narration, the third person shift in his section draws us into an unsettling and (sorry!) more interesting world, a world governed by deadly notions of honor and the whims of the gods.
Still, despite the sometimes underwhelming prose, Pat Barker effectively wields the brutality of her chosen setting to jostle readers out of our familiar reactions to a familiar story.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual violence, Slavery, and War