The Voiceless of the Trojan War
Review of Pat Barker's "The Silence of the Girls" (2018)
Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) rips The Iliad from the hands of heroes and gives it to the women they conquered.
This is not Achilles’s story. It’s not even really about Patroclus, or Hector, or the gods who pull the strings of war.
It belongs to Briseis—the woman Achilles claims as a prize, the woman history remembers only as a footnote. But Barker, renowned for her powerful novels about war, won’t let Briseis be silent.
"Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles...How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’."
Winning the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize, The Silence of the Girls gained acclaim as a landmark feminist retelling of a classical myth. Critics praised its raw, uncompromising approach to depicting war's impact on women.
"These are the women's quarters, where women wait to hear which of their men have died."
A Slave in the House of a Killer
The novel follows Briseis from her life as a Trojan queen to her transformation into Achilles' war prize.
Her city is burned, her family slaughtered, and her fate is reduced to what one man decides.
She watches the great warriors of legend—Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus—not as awe-inspiring figures, but as brutal, flawed men who shape the world through violence.
The war rages around her, but her battle is quieter: survival in the house of the man who destroyed her life.
This is a novel about powerlessness, but it is not about submission.
Barker makes you feel the weight of Briseis’ silence—the things she cannot say, the grief she cannot show, the anger that simmers beneath every forced smile.
“I will never forget that she cried for me when I was not able to cry for myself.”
She is trapped, but she is watching.
Where Barker shines
The prose is raw, unflinching, and stripped of romanticism.
Barker doesn’t write battle scenes with the grandeur of Homer; she shows you the aftermath.
“Gradually the looting stopped - there was nothing left to take - and the drinking began in earnest. Several huge vats were wheeled into the square and jugs passed from man to man…and then they turned their attention to us.”
She shows the rotting bodies, the raped women, the children turned into slaves.
“This is what free people never understand. 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 else's.”
She forces you to see the cost of war not through the eyes of the victors, but through the ones they leave behind.
“I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.”
Throughout the novel, Barker systematically deconstructs classical heroism.
Achilles isn't a golden god but a complex, often terrifying young man. Barker never lets you forget that, to Briseis, he is both protector and captor.
“How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that -- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.”
The tension in their relationship is masterfully done, full of quiet horrors and complicated, ugly emotions.
“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
Patroclus becomes more than just a companion – he's a counterpoint to Achilles's rage.
“You’re a monster, do you know that?”
“Yes, oddly enough, I do.”
He threw his arm across Patroclus’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s eat.”
Barker shows how even the most celebrated heroes are shaped by trauma, showing remarkable psychological complexity.
“Now, he can see what he’s been trying to do: to bargain with grief. Behind all this frenetic activity there’s been the hope that if he keeps his promises there’ll be no more pain. But he’s beginning to understand that grief doesn’t strike bargains. There’s no way of avoiding the agony–or even of getting through it faster. It’s got him in its claws and it won’t let go till he’s learnt every lesson it has to teach.”
But later:
“Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment. He rarely, if ever, thinks about the future, because there is no future. It's amazing how easily he's come to accept that. His life rests like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand, a thing so light the merest breath of wind can carry it away. From somewhere - perhaps from Priam - he seems to have acquired an old man's acceptance of death. He knows there's no future and he really doesn't mind.”
And yet, Briseis is not a typical feminist heroine. She is not fiery, not openly rebellious. She knows the price of defiance. But she is watching, and Barker makes you watch with her.
In a world where men write history, sometimes survival is its own act of defiance.
What might disappoint you
The pacing is uneven, particularly in sections that focus on camp life.
The shift between Briseis's and Achilles's perspectives, while innovative, doesn't always feel seamless. Where Briseis’s voice is searing, Achilles’s sections feel unnecessary.
Barker's unflinching approach occasionally risks becoming repetitive, and her modern sensibilities can feel slightly jarring against the ancient setting.
But perhaps that’s the point. This is not a mythic retelling designed to dazzle. It’s meant to unsettle.
The Verdict: A Story That Refuses to Look Away
The Silence of the Girls takes the epic grandeur of The Iliad and drags it into the dirt. It is not a story of war heroes. It is a story of the women left in their wake, the ones who were always there but never heard. Barker does not rewrite history—she reclaims it.
“We’re going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.”
Read Next:
If you want another perspective on the Trojan War, Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships gives voice to many women of the myth.
Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles shows these masculine heroic figures in a softer light. But her Circe is another feminist reclamation of an infamous Homeric footnote female character, this time from The Odyssey.
For non-fiction, Mary Beard's Women & Power offers excellent context about women's historical silencing.
And if you want to stay in the world of brutal, unromanticised myth, Barker’s sequel, The Women of Troy, picks up where this one leaves off.