 First edition (UK) | |
| Author | Pat Barker |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Greek mythology |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton (UK) Doubleday Books (US) |
Publication date | 4 September 2018 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 293 |
| ISBN | 0385544219 |
| Followed by | The Women of Troy |
The Silence of the Girls is a 2018 novel by English novelist Pat Barker. It recounts the events of the Iliad chiefly from the point of view of Briseis.
The plot begins when Greeks led by Achilles sack Lyrnessus, describing the looting and burning of the city, the massacre of its men and the abduction of its women including Briseis, the childless wife of king Mynes. When the women are handed out to the leaders of the Greek raiders, Briseis, as beautiful and of royal blood, is given to Achilles.
The plot then becomes that of the Iliad, covering the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon over Chryseis, which results in Achilles yielding Briseis to Agamemnon, Achilles' subsequent refusal to join the fighting, then the deaths of Patroclus, Hector, and finally Achilles. Briseis has become pregnant with Achilles' child shortly before his death, of which Achilles has foreknowledge; he marries her to one of his lieutenants, and the story ends as the Greek warriors depart the Trojan shores to return to their homes, accompanied by Briseis and the female war captives.
The story is told chiefly by Briseis in the first person, with interjections giving Achilles' internal state of mind. However, as the title suggests, Briseis' narrative is almost entirely internal; except in flashbacks to times before her capture, she speaks out loud hardly at all and with only a few handfuls of words.
Parts of the closing sequence, describing the fate of Troy's women and the sacrifice of Priam's daughter at Achilles' burial mound, are taken from The Trojan Women by Euripides. [1]
The novel features appearances by many characters from the Iliad including Priam, Nestor, Ajax the Great, Agamemnon, and Helen of Troy. It portrays with great intensity the brutality and filth of the war, and the emotional state of Achilles and Patroclus. Achilles' mother, the Nereid Thetis, appears but only speaks to Achilles when he grieves for Patroclus; she asks what's wrong and says she will bring him armour.
The Silence of the Girls was generally well-received. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] According to Book Marks , the book received "positive" reviews based on 14 critic reviews with 4 being "rave" and 7 being "positive" and 2 being "mixed" and 1 being "pan". [7] In Books in the Media , a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a 
(4.75 out of 5) from the site which was based on 9 critic reviews. [8] On Bookmarks Magazine Nov/Dec 2018 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a 
(3.5 out of 5) based on critic reviews with a critical summary saying, "The Silence of the Girls joins the ranks of recent novels that give voice to women during the classical era, including Mary Beard's SPQR (2015) and Madeline Miller's Circe (2018)." [9]
Reviewers universally noted the novel's intense, often coarsely raw, portrayal of women's experience of war and its complete lack of glamorisation or praise of anything military. The following passage was excerpted by multiple reviewers: No longer an issue of decorum, now it’s about staying alive. "I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son," declares Priam when he prostrates himself before Achilles begging for Hector’s body. “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do," Briseis thinks bitterly, "I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers."
Some reviewers (Gilbert in The Atlantic, Wilson in The Guardian) commented with disfavor on Barker's use of contemporary idioms, arguing that it was jarringly out of sync with the novel's Trojan-war backdrop. Several noted the parallel with Circe by Madeline Miller, also from 2018 and also accomplished by turning a minor figure from Homeric myth into the protagonist of a novel.
In Greek mythology, Achilles or Achilleus was a hero of the Trojan War who was known as being the greatest of all the Greek warriors. The central character in Homer's Iliad, he was the son of the Nereid Thetis and Peleus, king of Phthia and famous Argonaut. Achilles was raised in Phthia along with his childhood companion Patroclus and received his education by the centaur Chiron. In the Iliad, he is presented as the commander of the mythical tribe of the Myrmidons.
In Greek mythology, Agamemnon was a king of Mycenae who commanded the Achaeans during the Trojan War. He was the son of King Atreus and Queen Aerope, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra, and the father of Iphigenia, Iphianassa, Electra, Laodike, Orestes and Chrysothemis. Legends make him the king of Mycenae or Argos, thought to be different names for the same area. Agamemnon was killed upon his return from Troy by Clytemnestra, or in an older version of the story, by Clytemnestra's lover Aegisthus.
In Greek mythology, Hector is a Trojan prince, a hero and the greatest warrior for Troy during the Trojan War. He is a major character in Homer's Iliad, where he leads the Trojans and their allies in the defense of Troy, killing countless Greek warriors. He is ultimately killed in single combat by the Greek hero Achilles, who later drags his dead body around the city of Troy behind his chariot.
The Trojan War was a legendary conflict in Greek mythology that took place around the 12th or 13th century BC. The war was waged by the Achaeans (Greeks) against the city of Troy after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology, and it has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's Iliad. The core of the Iliad describes a period of four days and two nights in the tenth year of the decade-long siege of Troy; the Odyssey describes the journey home of Odysseus, one of the war's heroes. Other parts of the war are described in a cycle of epic poems, which have survived through fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid.
Thetis is a figure from Greek mythology with varying mythological roles. She mainly appears as a sea nymph, a goddess of water, and one of the 50 Nereids, daughters of the ancient sea god Nereus.
Briseis, also known as Hippodameia, is a significant character in the Iliad. Her role as a status symbol is at the heart of the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon that initiates the plot of Homer's epic. She was married to Mynes, a son of the King of Lyrnessus, until the Achaeans sacked her city and was given to Achilles shortly before the events of the poem. Being forced to give Briseis to Agamemnon, Achilles refused to reenter the battle.
In Greek mythology, Neoptolemus, originally called Pyrrhus at birth, was the son of the warrior Achilles and the princess Deidamia, and the brother of Oneiros. He became the mythical progenitor of the ruling dynasty of the Molossians of ancient Epirus. In a reference to his pedigree, Neoptolemus was sometimes called Achillides or, from his grandfather's or great-grandfather's names, Pelides or Aeacides.
Troy is a 2004 epic historical war film directed by Wolfgang Petersen and written by David Benioff. Produced by units in Malta, Mexico and Britain's Shepperton Studios, the film features an ensemble cast led by Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Sean Bean, Brian Cox, Brendan Gleeson and Orlando Bloom. It is loosely based on Homer's Iliad in its narration of the entire story of the decade-long Trojan War—condensed into little more than a couple of weeks, rather than just the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the ninth year. Achilles leads his Myrmidons along with the rest of the Greek army invading the historical city of Troy, defended by Hector's Trojan army. The end of the film is not taken from the Iliad, but rather from Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, as the Iliad concludes with Hector's death and funeral.
Patricia Mary W. Barker,, Hon FBA is a British writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. Her work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken. In 2012, The Observer named the Regeneration Trilogy as one of "The 10 best historical novels".
The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is a key element of the stories associated with the Trojan War. In the Iliad, Homer describes a deep and meaningful relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, where Achilles is tender toward Patroclus, but callous and arrogant toward others. Its exact nature—whether homosexual, a non-sexual deep friendship, or something else entirely—has been a subject of dispute in both the Classical period and modern times. Homer never explicitly casts the two as lovers, but they were depicted as lovers in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato. Some contemporary critics, especially in the field of queer studies, have asserted that their relationship was homosexual or latently homosexual, while some historians and classicists have disputed this, stating that there is no evidence for such an assertion within the Iliad and criticize it as unfalsifiable.
There are a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Trojan War in literature and the arts.
The Posthomerica is an epic poem in Greek hexameter verse by Quintus of Smyrna. Probably written in the 3rd century AD, it tells the story of the Trojan War, between the death of Hector and the fall of Ilium (Troy). The poem is an abridgement of the epic poems Aethiopis and Iliou Persis by Arctinus of Miletus, and the Little Iliad by Lesches, all now-lost poems of the Epic Cycle.
In Greek mythology, Meriones was the Cretan son of Molus and Melphis or Euippe. Molus was a half-brother of Idomeneus. Like other heroes of mythology, Meriones was said to be a descendant of gods. As a grandson of Deucalion, Meriones' ancestors include Zeus, Europa, Helios, and Pasiphae, the sister of Circe. Meriones possessed the helmet of Amyntor, which Autolycus had stolen. He inherited the helmet from his father Molus and later gave it to Odysseus. Meriones killed seven men at Troy.
The Iliad is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the Odyssey, the poem is divided into 24 books and was written in dactylic hexameter. It contains 15,693 lines in its most widely accepted version. Set towards the end of the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states, the poem depicts significant events in the siege's final weeks. In particular, it depicts a fierce quarrel between King Agamemnon and a celebrated warrior, Achilles. It is a central part of the Epic Cycle. The Iliad is often regarded as the first substantial piece of European literature.
Ransom (2009) is a novel by Australian author David Malouf. It retells the story of the Iliad from books 22 to 24.
L'ira di Achille, internationally released as The Fury of Achilles, is a 1962 Italian historical drama set in the ninth year of the Trojan War and is based primarily on Homer's Iliad. The film was directed by Marino Girolami and starred Gordon Mitchell as Achilles. It was released in the UK in 1963 as ACHILLES and was filmed in EuroScope and Eastman Color.
Madeline Miller is an American novelist, author of The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018). Miller spent ten years writing The Song of Achilles while she worked as a teacher of Latin and Greek. The novel tells the story of the love between the mythological figures Achilles and Patroclus; it won the Orange Prize for Fiction, making Miller the fourth debut novelist to win the prize. She is a 2019 recipient of the Alex Awards.
The Song of Achilles is a 2011 novel by American writer Madeline Miller. Set during the Greek Heroic Age, it is a retelling of the Trojan War as told from the perspective of Patroclus. The novel follows Patroclus' relationship with Achilles, from their initial meeting to their exploits during the Trojan War, with focus on their romantic relationship. In 2012, The Song of Achilles was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Troilus and Cressida is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1602.