The phenomenon by which groups of animals all suddenly begin to copy a new behaviour – such as blue tits learning to open milk bottle tops – has been called morphic resonance. Something similar to the blue tits’ discovery seems to be happening to fiction.
In the Fifties, Mary Renault made ancient Greece so much her own, with bestselling novels such as The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, that few dared to go near it. In the past few years, that has suddenly changed. Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 Home Fire updated Antigone, and Colm Tóibín’s House of Names and Natalie Haynes’s The Children of Jocasta tackled The House of Atreus. Madeline Miller, in The Song of Achilles, reworked the Iliad, and then, with this year’s Circe, the Odyssey. Now Pat Barker has joined the throng with The Silence of the Girls, which tells the story of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the slave girl awarded to Achilles in the 10th year of the Trojan war, a prize that sets in train the events that lead to the city’s fall.
It may seem an unusual move for a novelist who has hitherto chiefly been preoccupied with the two world wars in works such as the Regeneration trilogy (the third of which won the 1995 Booker Prize) and the Noonday trilogy. Yet Barker’s subject has always been violence – and, curiously, the feminisation of men who endure it. The great insight afforded to Regeneration, her novel about the treatment of the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart, was about how men in the trenches became very like women.
In The Silence of the Girls, she now gives a voice to the voiceless: the innumerable and usually unnamed captives, free women turned into slaves and chattels. It reminds us just how reified the female sex were in the ancient world, something we can be made to forget by the force of plays about transgressively powerful women such as Medea and Antigone. In the Iliad, Briseis is unusual in being one of the few women, besides Helen and the Trojan royal women, to be given a name by Homer. An 18-year-old princess of Lyrnessus with slaves of her own, she becomes Achilles’s trophy and bed-slave after choosing not to die when her city is sacked. She becomes, to the Greeks, “it”.
Barker has never minced words about sex, and her heroine’s repeated rape by Achilles is as grim as you might expect. (“He made love – huh! – as if he hoped the next f--- would kill me”.) Those used to Mary Renault’s rapturous descriptions of Theseus’s feelings for the captured Hippolyta will get a shock. In fact, Briseis is lucky: the 14-year-old virgin Chryseis has to take it up “the back passage” from the loathsome Agamemnon. Briseis is also fortunate in that her post-coital sea bathes and appearance remind Achilles of his mother, the sea-nymph Thetis who abandoned him as a child.
Several feminist writers, among them the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Madeline Miller, have written about how Thetis must have felt, forced to give birth to a mortal child doomed to tragic greatness. In The Silence of the Girls, you wonder how Barker will deal with the impending problem of gods and miracles, since her novel’s tone is pragmatic and its forte is psychological insight. Her solution, when it comes, is to show you a relationship that, despite being supernatural is, well, Oedipal. And as the goddess Thetis “walks back into the sea, sinking beneath a swelling wave, her black hair fanning out across the water, there for a second, then gone,” we know she is about to be one more bereaved mother.
Memory and trauma are repeated themes in all Barker’s novels, as is survival. Here, the enslaved women must learn to forget the horrors of seeing their children, brothers, husbands and fathers slaughtered, to endure rape whether by one man or many, and to survive in the Greek war camp. This they do with humour and resilience. A particularly good detail is that they also must weave, and so get the “hacking coughs” from inhaling minute particles of wool, which would have been familiar to Northern millworkers. In many ways, in fact, the caustic, drily funny voice of Briseis is not a million miles away from those in Barker’s 1982 debut Union Street, about the lives of women in her native north-eastern England. Interleaved with Briseis’s account is a more lyrical third-person version of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, which follows the Homeric original in leaving it ambiguous whether they were and are lovers. It doesn’t (as it does in Miller’s Song of Achilles) matter. What does is that Patroclus is a kind man.
It is his kindness that causes Briseis, Achilles and the reader to love him, and it is his kindness and courage that bring about his doom. Some of the most moving passages of the original, such as Achilles’s horses weeping for the dead Patroclus, are missing, and what happens to Hector’s dead body is also unexpected. Apart from Thetis, we see no other gods. What we do see is suffering, and much of it. “It would have been easier, in many ways, to slip into thinking we were all in this together, equally imprisoned on this narrow strip of land between the sand dunes and the sea; easier, but false. They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave,” Briseis observes, tartly. What we get is a samizdat version of the Iliad, muttered under the breath by the overlooked, shadowy, but ever-watchful underclass.
Without the Homeric heroics, nobility, and divine pity, what is left in this taut, masterly, wholly absorbing novel is still one of the greatest stories ever written. In the Iliad, Briseis simply disappears from the story after cutting her hair in mourning for Achilles. Barker’s novel plays with this uncertainty to make us fearful for our heroine’s future. Will she, like Chryseis, get taken to Troy and meet her doom there? Does she have feelings for Achilles, who is seen by the women as “a butcher” rather than a godlike hero, but is eventually almost kind to her?
Even if she is “stuck inside his story… with no real part to play in it,” she is a survivor, after all. In the end, and most surprisingly, a kind of happiness is wrested out of ruin. It is not generally known that the omission of Pat Barker’s Regeneration from the 1991 Booker shortlist by the all-male panel of judges was the trigger for the foundation of the Orange (now Women’s) Prize. Barker’s omission from this year’s Booker longlist is a decision equally lamentable, for The Silence of the Girls is a book that will be read in generations to come.