|
|
Title | The Silence of the Girls
| |
Author | Pat Barker
| |
Cover Art | Sarah Young
| |
Publisher | Penguin - 2018
| |
First Printing | Penguin - 2018
|
|
|
|
Title | The Women of Troy
| |
Author | Pat Barker
| |
Cover Art | Sarah Young
| |
Publisher | Doubleday - 2021
| |
First Printing | Doubleday - 2021
|
| |
|
Category | Mythology
| |
Warnings | Rape, Slavery, Abuse
| |
Main Characters | Briseis, Achilles, Pyrrhus
| |
Main Elements | Mythology
| |
Website | ---
|
|
 The Silence of the Girls
When her city falls to the Greeks, led to victory by the godlike warrior Achilles, Briseis' old life is shattered. Abducted and shipped to the Greek camp on the battlground at Troy, she goes from queen to captive, from free woman to slave, awarded to Achilles as a prize of honour. She's not alone. On the same day, and on many others in the course of a long bitter war, innumerable women have been wrested from their homes and flung to the fighters.
As told in The Iliad, the Trojan War was a quarrel between men - over Helen, stolen from her home and spirited to Troy, a voiceless female icon of male desire. But what of the women in this story, silenced by their fates? What words did they speak when alone with each other, in the laundry, at the loom, when laying out the dead?
In this magnificent novel of the Trojan War, Pat Barker summons the voices of Briseis and her fellow women to tell this mythic story anew, foregrounded their experiences against the backdrop of savage battle between men. One of the great contemporary writers on war and its collateral damage, Pat Barker here reimagines the most famous of all wars in literature, charting one woman's journey through the chaos of the Greek encampment, as she struggles to free herself and to become the author of her own story.
The Women of Troy
Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors - all they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind has vanished, the seas becalmed by vengeful gods, and so the warriors remain in limbo - camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, kept company by the women they stole from it.
The women of Troy.
Helen - poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over.
Cassandra, who has learned not to be too attached to her own prophecies. They have only ever been believed when she can get a man to deliver them.
Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king.
Hecuba, howling and clawing her cheeks on the silent shore, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead.
And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. Once again faced with the chance to shape history.
Masterful and enduringly resonant, ambitious and intimate, The Women of Troy continues Pat Barker's extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest classical myths, following on from the critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls.
I'm approaching the end of a year of reading books about the Trojan War. I started with the Iliad and here I am now with Barker's The Women of Troy trilogy. I keep thinking I will get bored, I mean how many different times can I read the *same* story...only it isn't the same story every time. I've read books from the point of view of the men, from the point of view of the women, and some even from the point of view of the gods. And even when the point of view is the same, each author fills in the gaps their own way. In one, there were no gods...you know the plague? That was just a trick dreamed up by Odysseus. Were Achilles and Patroclus lovers? Well that was kind of unanimous, but to varying degrees. Why did Achilles and Agamemnon fight over Briseis, was it really about honour or just a ruse to lull the Trojans out of their gates? What did Briseis think about the whole thing, first being owned by Achilles, passed along to Agamemnon, then back again. Did Agamemnon truly not lay a finger on her, as he proclaimed?
The Iliad is a tale about a disagreement of two men over the fate of one women. We know what the men felt about it, but how did she feel, knowing she was in the middle of everything? Of course Homer's tale was written by a man (at least we assume so, it's fairly certain there was no one person who was actually Homer, maybe the great secret will be it was written by a woman?) and for men, with the girls being little more than livestock, so what did it matter what they thought? And while we shudder now at the thought of women being taken for slaves, frankly, it wasn't that much different than being handed off to her husband's family. Women should be seen, not heard, and serve their men well.
Barker's take was a little darker than some, more brutal, it was the only one that went into the same graphic detail of how Achilles dispatched his opponents. There is rape, and violence, children being tossed from city walls and girls sacrificed, but also moments of tenderness. The women were property but one could grow fond of them after all. I found it well written, and easy enough to read I could get through a hundred pages a day, and I never got bored even though I knew what would happen next, if not the particular details the author would add to fill in the gaps.
Now I'm treating this as a fantasy, but other than a single appearance of Achille's mother, the gods do not factor into the tale beyond the fears the Greeks have of losing their favour.
Even before I finished, I put the next book on reserve at the library. This one was interesting in the sense that it covered a period of time barely touched any other book. Almost all of the book takes place during the time Troy fell and the Greeks had not yet left, trapped by poor weather. So you really see the day-to-day life of the camp, which, seeing as it had been there for 10 years wasn't just a collection of tents, they had plenty of time to build houses and stables.
An interesting thing I noticed was that Barker chose to tell all the women's tales from the point of view of Briseis. But there are actually several male characters who get a chapter or two to speak their mind, such as Achilles, his son Pyrrhus and the priest Calchas. For what it's worth, most of the male characters also rarely got to have voices in any other book (Achilles of course the exception), and she gave them twists I didn't expect. Pyrrhus always came off as a sadistic psychopath, almost the embodiement of pure evil, but here she reminded us he was a sixteen-year-old who arrived a few days after his legendary father had died, and now had to live up to a man he'd never even met. It managed to earn my a little sympathy for him.
I suppose it's possible that Barker could continue this story, show how the women adapt to living as slaves or wives of the Greeks, but as they have now been scattered across the Greek lands, not sure how well that would work if Briseis remains the sole narrator. There are a few we know how their story ends, Hecuba throws herself from Odysseus' ship (seeing was what was ahead of him, and he the only survivor, at least she got it over with early on), Cassandra is killed by Agamemnon's wife, Andromanche I believe goes off to create a Trojan settlement in Italy. But those were the famous women, what about the ones that were slaves even in Troy?
There are always more stories to tell.
|
