*Starred Review* Queen Briseis and the women of Lyrnessus watch helplessly from the citadel as Achilles destroys the city, slaughtering their husbands, fathers, sons. When Briseis is made Achilles' slave as a prize of war, the one comfort in this horrifying new existence is Patroclus, Achilles' comrade and friend. When Agamemnon attempts to claim Briseis as his own, it changes the tide of the Trojan War. In graceful prose, Man Booker Prize winner Barker (Noonday, 2016), renowned for her historical fiction trilogies, offers a compelling take on the events of The Iliad, allowing Briseis a first-person perspective, while players such as Patroclus and Achilles are examined in illuminating third-person narration. Briseis is flawlessly drawn as Barker wisely avoids the pitfall so many authors stumble into headlong, namely, giving her an anachronistic modern feminist viewpoint. Instead, the terror of her experience of being treated as an object rather than a person speaks (shouts) for itself. Patroclus tells her things will change, and if they don't, to make them, to which Briseis, utterly powerless, replies, Spoken like a man. The army camp, the warrior mindset, the horrors of battle, the silence of the girls Barker makes it all convincing and very powerful. Recommended on the highest order.--Bethany Latham Copyright 2018 Booklist

Barker, author of the Booker-winning The Ghost Road, speculates about the fate of the women taken captive during the Trojan War, as related in Homer's Iliad. Briseis, queen of the small country of Lyrnessus, was captured by the Greek forces and awarded to Achilles, fated to serve him as slave and concubine. Through her eyes readers see the horror of war: the sea of blood and corpses, the looting, and the drunken aftermath of battle. When Agamemnon demands that Briseis be handed over to him, Achilles reacts with rage and refuses to fight, and when his foster brother and lover Patrocles is killed, having gone into battle in Achilles's stead, Briseis becomes the unwitting catalyst of a turning point in the war. In Barker's hands, the conflict takes on a new dimension, with revisionist portraits of Achilles ("we called him the butcher") and Patroclus (he had "taken his mother's place" in Achilles's heart). Despite its strong narrative line and transportive scenes of ancient life, however, this novel lacks the lyrical cadences and magical intensity of Madeline Miller's Circe, another recent revising of Greek mythology. The use of British contemporary slang in the dialogue is jarring, and detracts from the story's intensity. Yet this remains a suspenseful and moving illumination of women's fates in wartime. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

An accomplished hand at historical fiction respins the final weeks of the Trojan War.For her 14th novel, Booker Prize-winning Barker plucks her direction from the first line of the Iliad: "Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles...." The archetypal Greek warrior's battle cries ring throughout these pages, beginning on the first. The novel opens as Achilles and his soldiers sack Lyrnessus, closing in on the women and children hiding in the citadel. Narrating their terrifying approach is Briseis, the local queen who sees her husband and brothers slaughtered below. She makes a fateful choice not to follow her cousin over the parapet to her death. She becomes instead Achilles' war trophy. Briseis calls herself "a disappointment...a skinny little thing, all hair and eyes and scarcely a curve in sight." But in the Greek military encampment on the outskirts of Troy, she stirs much lust, including in the commander Agamemnon. So far, so faithful to Homer. Barker's innovation rests in the female perspective, something she wove masterfully into her Regeneration and Life Class trilogies about World War I. Here she gives Briseis a wry voice and a watchful nature; she likens herself as a mouse to Achilles' hawk. Even as the men boast and drink and fight their way toward immortality, the camp women live outwardly by Barker's title. Their lives depend on knowing their place: "Men carve meaning into women's faces; messages addressed to other men." Barker writes 47 brisk chapters of smooth sentences; her dialogue, as usual, hums with intelligence. But unlike her World War I novels, the verisimilitude quickly thins. Her knowledge of antiquity is not nearly as assured as Madeline Miller's in The Song of Achilles and Circe. Barker's prose is awkwardly thick with Briticismsbreasts are "wrinkled dugs" or "knockers." And she mistakenly gives the Greeks a military field hospital, which was an innovation of the Romans.A depiction of Achilles' endless grief for Patroclus becomes itself nearly endless. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"WAR IS MEN'S business," Hector says in the "Iliad." Pat Barker begs to differ. The British novelist has made war her subject, winning the 1995 Booker Prize for "Ghost Road," the final novel of her remarkable World War I trilogy, "Regeneration." In her new novel, "The Silence of the Girls," she takes on the foundational war story of the Western canon, giving voice to the muted women of Homer's "Iliad." It's a rich premise, since in the "Iliad" (if not the "Odyssey") Homer's women remain underrealized - static as statues, waiting patiently upon their plinths to be awarded as prizes, enslaved or sacrificed. Even Helen, the cause of the crisis between the Greeks and the Trojans, remains little more than a disembodied name. While the "Iliad" begins in medias res, with the weary Greek armies encamped on the shores of Troy nine years into their stalemated war, Barker starts her story a few months earlier. The Greeks are closing in on the outlying Trojan settlement of Lyrnessus, home of Briseis, who is destined to become Achilles' war trophy. When Agamemnon commandeers her, Achilles becomes famously enraged, refuses to fight and leaves the Greek army rudderless. Achilles' beloved Patroclus goes out in Achilles' armor and is killed by Hector, sparking an act of extraordinary vengeance. It's potent stuff, and almost entirely blokey. Women cause the fights, but the men have them, and they get all the action and all the speaking roles. Barker wants to end that silence. She allows us to get to know Briseis before Achilles and Agamemnon start fighting over her. It is Briseis' voice, in a first-person narration, that largely carries Barker's interstitial chronicle. Occasionally, and briefly, Barker switches into third person. The reason for the switch remains, for this reader, unsatisfying and opaque. Nothing in particular, either narratively or structurally, seems to be accomplished by the change of voice. Indeed, both voices are, for a writer of Barker's large gifts, curiously flat and banal. I began to lose faith on the first page of the novel when Briseis describes the retreat of the Lyrnessus women and children, hastening from their homes to seek refuge in the citadel: "Like all respectable married women, I rarely left my house - although admittedly in my case the house was a palace - so to be walking down the street in broad daylight felt like a holiday." The jarring inauthenticity of this sentence is sadly characteristic of the novel as a whole. It's implausible that a Bronze Age woman in a besieged city would be enjoying a stroll as she hears "shouts, cries, the clash of sword on shields" just on the other side of the city gates and knows that her husband and brothers are out there, fighting for their lives. And soon the clichés fly like arrows, blotting out the sun. A dying man is "wriggling like a stuck pig"; the Greek looters are like "a swarm of locusts," bad memories "cut like daggers." And we're not even at Page 15. If, as they say, each generation requires its own translation of Homer, what Barker attempts to offer here is an "Iliad" for the age of #MeToo. However, it's unlikely many readers need to be reminded that an ancient army was "a rape camp," as Briseis reiterates in her final soliloquy. If Barker is really after conveying the violent abuse of women in wartime, she's remarkably circumspect about it. Rape by Achilles: "What can I say? He wasn't cruel. I waited for it - expected it, even - but there was nothing like that, and at least it was soon over." Rape by Agamemnon: "So what did he do that was so terrible? Nothing much, I suppose, nothing I hadn't been expecting." I HAVE mixed feelings about these cool, sanitized depictions: relief to be spared harrowing details of sexual violence, but also vexation. To confront a subject redolent of pain, then to shy away from describing it seems, in some ways, a feeble choice, if not a betrayal of the countless women who have suffered, and who suffer still, from war's ardent atrocities. It's not that Barker doesn't have it in her to convey horror. In a searing moment, she describes Agamemnon prying open Briseis' mouth and spitting a gob of phlegm into it. It's ghastly and cruel and one of the few instances when this reader felt authentic emotional recoil because, yes, that is exactly the kind of depravity in which a brutal conqueror might engage. Henry James famously warned historical novelists never to go back more than 50 years beyond their own era, since "the old consciousness" would surely elude them. I've always thought James undervalued the universality of human experience - the timeless nature of love and hate, grief and joy and all of the common, powerful emotions that shape us. The endurance of the "Iliad" is in itself evidence of this. We all know talented, arrogant asses like Achilles, who indulge their rages no matter what the cost, in boardrooms just as on battlefields. We can all identify with Priam's desperate grief for his fallen son. Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy and Hilary Mantel's magisterial "Wolf Hall" offer more recent examples of novelists who reach far into the dark backward abyss of time and give convincing voice to old consciousness. Unfortunately, Barker's voices are dissonant and unpersuasive. The girls, alas, remain silenced. Women cause the fights, but the men get all the action. GERALDINE BROOKS'S most recent novel is "The Secret Chord."

Following the fall of her city to the Greek army, Briseis, former queen of Lyrnessus, sister city of Troy, is awarded to Achilles as his captive and concubine. She tells her story of slavery, rape, and survival as an insider witnessing the strategies of Achilles and his closest companion Petroclus. Achilles comes to value Briseis to the point of refusing to go to battle when Agamemnon demands her services. The Greek army, demoralized by the loss of their greatest warrior, begins to lose ground to the Trojan forces until Petroclus dons Achilles's armor, fighting and dying in his place. Grief-stricken, -Achilles reenters the fray and Troy is conquered. Barker gives the ancient tale of the ten-year-long siege and inevitable fall of Troy new life by presenting the women's point of view, showing women as the most vulnerable, and in many ways, most courageous victims of war. Readers will come away from this brilliant, beautifully written novel convinced that the so-called glorious death in battle is less important than the strength and determination required to survive against all odds. VERDICT Both lyrical and brutal, Barker's novel is not to savor delicately but rather to be devoured in great bloody gulps. A must read! [See Prepub Alert, 3/26/18; "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 8/18.]-Jane -Henriksen Baird, formerly at Anchorage P.L., AK © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.