The Silence of the Girls

Last autumn my wife and I went to Greece to visit some of the great classical sites. I'm ashamed to say that this was my first trip to the mainland. I blogged about it here and here (and also wrote about the importance of introducing young people to the classics here).

One of the sites we visited was Mycenae. Here, on this great citadel, Agamemnon reigned as king. Here he mustered his fighting men and led them down the valley to Nauplius from where they set sail for the Trojan War. Just below the ancient city is the mighty Bronze Age tomb built in around 1250 BCE. In the excitement of its discovery in the nineteenth century, it was at once claimed to be Agamemnon's tomb. Whether he was buried there or not, the name Agamemnon's Tomb stuck. The marvellous "Funeral Mask of Agamemnon" which was unearthed during that excavation and is now in the Archaeological Museum of Athens certainly dates from before his time.

It's one of the most impressive monuments in Greece, a place to make you think. It takes you straight back to the Iliad, Homer's story of the Trojan War. Or, we should say, selected episodes from that nine-year conflict that was seared on the Greeks' memory and played such a vital part in framing their sense of identity and destiny. I'd taken the Iliad to Greece on my tablet, and for a few minutes I sat in front of the tomb's colossal entrance reading selected paragraphs. It was like reading the gospels in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and Galilee, or Bede's story of Saxon England in his churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow here in North East England. Context is everything.

I'd grown up with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Retold for children (Tales of the Greek Heroes), they belonged to a precious little canon of books by my bedside, endlessly re-read, that included the Arthurian Legend and Robin Hood. And launching into the classics at a boys' prep school, I suppose I imbibed the notion that these stories set out notions of ideal manhood to be emulated, as far as possible, by prowess on the rugby pitch. Agamemnon, Achilles and Ajax, Hector and Paris - who wouldn't want to grow up to be like these fine warriors who brought lustre to the blooded plains of Troy?

So far, so gendered. At Christmas I was given Pat Barker's new novel, The Silence of the Girls. I'd read her Regeneration Trilogy about the Great War, and some of her other novels. In one way, The Silence of the Girls reminded me of Regeneration: I won't say that she is the only contemporary novelist who knows how to depict war, but I will say that there are none better. I'd forgotten how visceral her writing is, how concretely she describes human trauma, how she won't let the reader evade the sordid, repellent specifics of what it is like to fight and be fought. She makes you feel the pain, not by indulging needlessly in the horror of it all, but by troubling to articulate it, write accurately about it so that you catch every jot, every tittle.

An archetypal man's world, you would think. Well, no. That's the brilliance of this novel. For it sees the Trojan War from the female perspective, as if it were told by the Trojan woman whom Achilles is given as his trophy for success in battle. Part concubine part slave, Briseis has a complicated relationship with Achilles, but that is nothing to her predicament when Agamemnon decides that he wants her for himself, to replace the woman whom he has reluctantly had to release to appease the gods. The mighty sulk this induces in Achilles and his refusal to go out and fight is the central premise of the Iliad. But it had not struck me before how this places a woman right at the heart of the epic. (Other than Helen of Sparta, of course, who was the pretext of the Trojan War to begin with.)

Reading a text like the Iliad from the standpoint of someone who is (a) an enemy, (b) a slave who is always subject to the power, not to say abuse, of another, and above all (c) a woman transforms your entire view of it. When I taught the Hebrew Bible I urged students to discover how studying familiar texts from the standpoint of oppression and marginality sheds all kinds of new light on them whether they are feminist, queer, political or postcolonial readings. The insights of liberation theology into how we read the story of the Exodus have been with us for half a century or more. I'm simply saying that as a lay person when it comes to classical literature, Pat Barker's approach was a revelation.

The Silence of the Girls - it's such an eloquent title. Are the Iliad or the Exodus texts remotely interested in listening to the voices of the women who experience the traumas narrated in those stories? But if you peer into the interstices, women are there, waiting to be heard. In Exodus, Miriam, Aaron's sister, summons the Hebrew women to sing and dance their own story of deliverance in which feminists hear a distant echo of far-off times when women would one day take their place alongside men in leading others: sing to Yahweh, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.

And when you look again at the Iliad having read Pat Barker's novel, women are silent no longer. You realise how strong the Trojan women were, dignified, noble, intelligent, tender. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy they notice what is happening, pay attention, interpret events, share insights about human nature. They compel you through suffering to imagine in new ways. At least, that's how I began to construe Pat Barker's Briseis. It's superbly done, with a purity of vision that you want to catch as a reader. And when you put the book down and return to the twenty-first century and the relentless conflicts of our own time, you long for the vision not to fade just yet as you try to make sense of it all.

Oh, and doing whatever it takes to make sure that women and girls are silenced no more in our own day. Pat Barker’s novel is a manifesto of empowerment, and her unforgettable Briseis an emblem for women of all times and places. But the battle for equality is not won yet!