‘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.’
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My initial reaction to this one was that it isn’t Madeline Miller’s ‘The Song of Achilles’. It took me a few hours to realise that I was doing such a disservice to this book with the comparison.
Pat Barker joins an incredible trend of giving voices to those women who have so often been silenced in both literature and history. This isn’t ‘The Song of Achilles’ because it isn’t a love story, it doesn’t focus on the heroes and it definitely doesn’t pull its punches.
We follow Briseis, once Queen of Lyrnessus and now slave of Achilles, part of his spoils for successfully sacking her city and killing her family. While watching the all-too-familiar story unfold from the sidelines, we are continually reminded not just of her total lack of agency, but of all the nameless, faceless women who form part of the backdrop of this Ancient Greek epic. Even Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ is depicted as a woman caught in the tides of history (or, more accurately, HIS story), a slave to the decisions of men and yet held accountable for all of them regardless.
It’s a powerful, harrowing account not just of the mothers, daughters and wives of The Iliad but of all women who have lived (or still live) with little or no control over their own destiny. There’s all the heroes and glory, battles and grief that you’d expect but you witness it all through the eyes of the women wondering whether each sword stroke will make their lives better or worse.
This isn’t a perfect novel. There’s a few awkward perspective shifts, the pacing is sometimes a little off and I think a lot of people will prefer the beautifully tragic, ‘The Song of Achilles’ but it is a fantastic retelling in its own right.