The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker caught our readers’ attention readily with Achilles reputedly saying to Apollo ‘But we both know if you weren’t immortal, you’d be dead’. However, we found reading became more difficult quickly as the material in the book was brutal—not life as a woman wants it—with women and children treated as chattel. Yet, perhaps due to the quality of the narrative, we were engaged. “I looked forward to reading a chapter or two each night when I went to bed.”
We were confronted with a grim portrait of male culture—fighting all day and drinking all night, and a hopeless picture of women’s life—enslaved, brutalized and toiling, where the afterlife was the main hope for solace.
We found the introduction of so many characters interrupted the reading experience—who’s on first and who is playing, and what was their nature—who are the gods, the demigods, and the ordinary mortals?
In a departure from our usual format, we explored how the book raised “Then & Now” questions. Firstly, we discussed the continuing use of rape as a weapon of war, and the recent report from the Ukraine where 25 women in an occupied shelter were repeatedly raped for the purpose of ensuring that they would never produce a Ukrainian baby. Our group lamented with sadness how this echoed the low value assigned to women in Homeric times and the reported contemporary concern that refugee women may end up being housed by predators. One member remarked upon the concurrence of infectious disease and war, the plague during the Trojan war and COVID-19 during the Ukrainian invasion, and the associated blaming games. We noted the remarkable perversity of Apollo as god of healing/music and plague/vengeance.
We debated the use of modern idiom to describe the sexual violence. Many found these descriptions jarring and questioned the need to use them. Upon reflection we, and possibly the author, realized we had no way of knowing what words the women from 1200 BCE would have used to describe those events and their circumstances. And recognized that the author wanted to be graphic about the pain experienced by the women. Furthermore, we appreciated that from the beginning of the book there was little evidence that the narrative language was rooted in the past.
“This is a very brave topic for the author to have chosen”, commented one member. Modern knowledge of the period in which the Iliad was written and the time in which the supposed events occurred is limited. It is likely that our knowledge of male culture during those times exceeds our knowledge of female culture. We can criticize what the author chose to develop and what she left fuzzy. Nonetheless, the group shared the concern that it was difficult to locate in the place where the action was happening and found the use of modern language a barrier to transcending from now to then. There was a suggestion that the presentation of this material in verse form with a chorus (like the original) might have been more appealing.
Many commented upon ‘missed opportunities’ related to character development but we realized that Pat Barker may have heard that we did not want to include a book with more than 400 pages on our reading list.
