The Silence of the Girls
By: Pat Barker / Narrated By: Kristin Atherton, Michael Fox
Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
Raw, visceral, unapologetic writing—brutal, beautiful, stunning
This was one of the hits we’ve had this year for our little audiobook club; I chose it because I’d just listened to the author, Pat Barker’s, Regeneration, and I’d really, really liked it. But after we’d finished this, The Silence of the Girls? Wow—I had to tell my mom and my sister that, yes, they had to listen to that one, but no, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as this.
If you’re tired of the #MeToo movement, just stroll on by as you’re likely to be peeved by this as it is unapologetically: Men at war make for a horrific environment for women. Indeed, some of the more negative reviews have been penned by men who think it’s just far too extreme.
Alas, while it might be inCREDibly depressing as it is, I don’t think it’s anywhere near the reality of what happens to women in war. If you’ve listened to The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, you’ll probably go into this thinking that Patroclus was a lovable little Hug-Bear, being the brother-type that our heroine, Briseis, needs and looks to. Here? Well, we see him as a man who’s as much a part of the war machine as everyone else: Kind, yes. But even he has a Trojan woman as part of the spoils of war. It’s just that he treats her better than all the other men treat their spoils, but you know she wouldn’t be in his bed were she not trapped by defeat.
This is the story of The Iliad as told by Briseis, once a Trojan queen but now the primo prize of war for Achilles. She is able to walk the camps, able to see what has become of the Trojan women—slaves, prostitutes, concubines, layers of the dead, scrubbers of the soiled. Raped and beaten, taunted and tormented. And so very voiceless, just struggling to survive another day. It morphs between the thoughts of Briseis to the happenings of Achilles, Patroclus, and King Agamemnon and as such uses two fabulous narrators: Kristin Atherton and Michael Fox, both of whom turn in intense and fearless performances. It took me awhile to get used to Fox as for the longest time the story is only that of Briseis. But once I got into his rhythm, got a chance to hear that he managed the voices of all the women, Briseis in particular, I was totally won over. If you don’t like the book, it won’t be because of flawed narration. Likely, it’ll be because you haven’t a sensitive bone in your body.
You just can’t see what happens to Briseis, how Achilles and Agamemnon use her like dogs fighting over a bloody bit of rib, and not be moved, even enraged. The men of the camps come to view her as the cause of the contention and animosity between the men, totally giving the two a pass for their vanity, their pride. (And don’t even get them started on what they’ll do to Helen once the Greeks have won the war: She’ll be raped by all the men, raped till she’s torn apart, raped even after death.)
Pat Barker is in a league all her own when it comes to writing of horror and death and pain (Pain so great that the body simply moves forward, the spirit left behind). Only she could take such an ancient classic and turn it into something so moving and readily accessible. And perhaps that’s the only flaw I could find in the book: In the attempt to make it so current, so alive, modern language is used by the soldiers. Patroclus and Achilles often shout things like: I bloody will not. And such. I found it a bit jarring, but hey—Seriously! That’s the only flaw.
And a final additional kudos for Atherton’s narration. Listen to this book, and feel the quiet devastation, the quiet strength at the end, when all has been said and done, when all corpses have been readied and burned, and tell me Atherton didn’t carry all of it, the weight of the entire Trojan defeat, the defeat of Trojan women bound for Greece.
Truly a stunning performance of some of the most raw and intense writing out there.
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