325 pages
Publisher: Penguin
Publishing Date: August 2018
Book Club Read
Blurb
When the Greek Queen Helen is kidnapped by Trojans, the Greeks sail in pursuit, besieging the city of Troy. Trapped in the Greek soldiers’ camp is another captured queen, Briseis. Condemned to be bed-slave to Achilles, the man who butchered her family, she becomes a pawn in a menacing game between bored and frustrated warriors. In the centuries after this most famous war, history will write her off, a footnote in a bloody story scripted by vengeful men – but Briseis has a very different tale to tell…
Review
They say, and this book’s blurb confirms, that history is written by the victors. But it is only a tiny part of the truth I think. Because, in general, it is the men who were victorious who get to tell the tale, and the tales tend to be about those men, too. The women, if they do get mentioned are mostly an afterthought, an aside, irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. The blurb promises us a different perspective – Briseis’s – but is that what we get?
Not according to Briseis herself. Near the end of the book, she says:
Looking back, it seemed to me that I’d been trying to
escape not just from the camp, but from Achilles’ story; and I failed. Because,
make no mistake, this was his story – his anger, his
grief, his story.
In many ways this is still The Song of Achilles (pun intended). Everything that happens to Briseis from the moment the book starts until the very last paragraph is the result of Achilles’ actions, choices, and decisions. What’s more, when we get to the second part of the book, we suddenly get a new, third-person perspective, next to Briseis’ first-person narrative. Achilles who, until that moment, had only been shown through Briseis’ eyes, now gets a voice of his own.
So even in a book called The Silence of the Girls, eventually the one girl who has been given a voice is occasionally silenced. And I’m not sure that it was entirely necessary. Surely the stories of the ancient Greeks and the Trojan War are well enough known that the readers could be trusted to see Achilles only through Briseis’ eyes? Would his despair after Patroclus died have been any less obvious or heart-wrenching if Briseis had described it? Did we need his thoughts and guilt trips to recognise the humanity in this demi-god? I have no way of proving this, but I can’t escape the feeling that our process of feeling (at least) some sympathy for him would have been as powerful (if not more so) if we had seen it through Briseis’ eyes; if we had been part of her very reluctant journey to the point where she sees that Achilles wasn’t all bad – that in many ways he was as much a victim of circumstances and the times he lived and died in as she was.
On the other hand, maybe Archilles’ point of view goes to prove a point – the point being that girl voices were silenced, as the title of the book tells us.
Mind you, especially in the earlier part of the book, there were times when Briseis' words made me sit up and brought tears to my eyes.
A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing.
A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in
anybody elses.
Later on, Briseis adds:
…and a slave will do anything, anything at all, to stop
being a thing and become a person again.
A statement made more interesting by the fact that when push comes to shove, Briseis decides against doing the one thing that might have made that transition back possible, be it only for a short while.
Suffice it to say that I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this book. While I wouldn’t call this an easy read, it was certainly very smooth. The reservations I mentioned above don’t make this any less of a powerful story, beautifully written. It gives the reader a perspective we’re not normally given, and it certainly provoked numerous thoughts and feelings while I was reading and now that I’ve finished the story. If I have to grade this book (and I will be asked to do as much in the book club meeting), I give this book four stars.
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