PENGUIN The Silence of the Girls: From the Booker prize-winning author of Regeneration

Such a startling wonderful read.

Read this prior to hearing Pat Barker talk on the book at next months Durham Book Week.A vivid and graphic depiction of the Trojan War from a female slave inside the Greek camp as others have described. Well worth the purchase price. You could really picture what it might have felt like to have been there among the squalor and horrors of war. Little glory here.I would have given this a 5 except that I think it would have benefited from a couple of pages of potted story context and a whose who of the characters. Those well versed in their Homer and classical history will have no problem for the rest a simple aid would have helped.

Writing the story of Achilles from the viewpoint of Briseis is not a bad idea, though as one reviewer has already pointed out, the author does not seem to have quite made up her mind about this, sometimes taking up Achilles' story with much absorption too. It might have been a better book if it had been tightened up a bit, and some of the more banal observations and expressions taken out. As it is, it is not a bad read, if something of a pot-boiler. The problem of how to make ancient people talk is not well resolved, and the author has the Myrmidons talk like soccer hooligans or disaffected residents of a decaying council estate, with the "f" word sprinkled liberally throughout, which is very grating for the reader. Lesser problems include, for example, references to "coins" (pp. 86 & 273), which the Greeks and Trojans did not then have, and "cod" (p. 275), which is an Atlantic fish. More troubling are the pages that describe Achilles' assistants, Automedon and Alcimus (pp. 254-255), in a way that is remarkably close to what what David Malouf wrote in his 2009 novel "Ransom" on the same subject (pp. 168-171): not only their imagined characters, and the thoughts of Achilles at the time, but even the wording sounds much the same. Hmm.

What were the people who gave reviews on? Why was this book shortlisted for any literary prize at all? I read one third of it (and I normally sticks through till the bitter end even with bad books), but this prose is unbearable: sounding like an entitled, uninteresting millenial (talking about kebabs and manicures, amongst other pointless and just supid anachronisms) the author manages the mean feat to make us root for anyone but the supposedly heroine of this book. AVOID! My copy is going into a papier mache' project.

This is the latest in a spate of recent retellings of ancient Greek stories. Here Pat Barker gives centre stage to Briseis, a queen whose city is sacked by the Greeks besieging Troy, and who becomes a trophy slave of the Greek warrior hero Achilles. Much of the narrative, told with heartbreaking frankness from her point of view, conveys the misogynistic humiliation, degradation and abuse that she and her fellow female slaves are subjected to. Barker is well known for her vivid descriptions of life and conditions in the trenches of WWI, and of the toll this took on the people whose lives were affected by this slaughter and suffering. Here she gives a possibly more visceral account of warfare before the advent of high explosives and machine guns, but the combat scenes are therefore more personal and vicious. I found many aspects of this hard-hitting account almost too much to bear, but it's an important contribution to the rewriting of myth and legend which involves hearing the stories (and songs) from the perspective of those who were largely ignored by the contemporary bards and poets, or were seen mostly as adjuncts to and possessions or trophies for the male combatants: the women.

Poorly edited, but that’s to be expected for Pat Barker. I usually like the storyline though, because the style is just awful but this time I was just bored throughout. Gave it to a charity shop.