The Silence of the Girls
In the ninth year of the siege of Troy, the Greek hero Achilles raids the town of Lyrnessus, and in one day Queen Briseis loses her husband, her entire family, her status, her home, and her freedom. Slave to Achilles, his prize of war, Briseis becomes a pawn in the quarrel between Achilles and the Greek commander, Agamemnon, an episode central to the Iliad. Barker reframes the classic epic to study the parts of the conflict such songs leave out: the filth and discomfort of camp; the endless, mindless grind of war; the decay and seepage of injured bodies; and the mute horrors endured by the women, who must weave, serve, clean, tend, and submit to rape in return for their survival.
Though narrated for the most part by Briseis, who has a front-row seat to Helen’s perfidy, the gutting violence of battle, and the silent suffering of the Trojan women, the story’s real cynosure is Achilles, the relentless demigod whose tortured past and unrepentant brutality fascinate his captive, and despite her professed revulsion she prefers him to what she endures with Agamemnon. Barker’s blunt, bruising prose comes near crooning as she leaves Briseis behind to focus on Achilles’s anguish over the death of his companion Patroclus, his defeat of the Greek hero Hector, and the final confrontation with Priam, King of Troy. Barker’s insight into the underbelly of war, the world of slaves and captors, of the wounded and tortured and dying, laced with occasional residue of the mythic heroic age to which the epic belongs, brings this old story of Achilles and his rage to modern readers with fresh tenderness for the power of human endurance and resilience: an ancient legend not simply reanimated, but made vigorously alive.
