how the hell could certain historians read the words ‘and though the dead forget the dead in the house of hades, even there I still shall remember my beloved companion’ and think that’s just bromance?? like come on dude you can do better than that.
“Name one hero who was happy.“ I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason’s children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus’ back. “You can’t.” He was sitting up now, leaning forward. “I can’t.” “I know. They never let you be famous AND happy.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you a secret.” “Tell me.” I loved it when he was like this. “I’m going to be the first.” He took my palm and held it to his. “Swear it.” “Why me?” “Because you’re the reason. Swear it.” “I swear it,” I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes. “I swear it,” he echoed. We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned. “I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.
Review:The Silence of the Girls Author: Pat Barker Genre: Fiction, revisionism, mythology
Revisionist fiction or retellings still fill bookshelves to the brim these days—old fables pop up with shocking twists, we see fairytales shed their Disney-fied formula to give newer nods to their darker roots, and we even come to know stories of antiquity thrown in with “cyber” sensibilities. With the unremitting creativity of writers today, the possibilities are endless. Readers may clamor for something “original”, of course, but I find that there is charm in revisiting familiar narratives refashioned for the modern eyes.
Personally, I enjoy reading reimaginings of classic myths. I was rapt, for instance, while leafing through the story of the tragic Greek hero Achilles and his bosom companion Patroclus in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. I devoured Circe, a feminist take on a classic character from Homer’s The Odyssey by the same author, with equal fascination. There is also Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, spun from the decades-long wait of Penelope for her husband Odysseus from the Trojan War. None of these felt old to me. In fact, they gave substantial and refreshing heft to the original materials. Since then, I’ve been on the prowl for modern narrations of old legends.
That’s why when I heard about Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls—events of The Iliad, but told from the perspective of a significant female character—I just know I have to grab a copy.
The Silence of the Girls gives a #MeToo voice to the women of Homer’s epic poem, particularly to Briseis, who becomes the “war prize” of Achilles after the Greeks sacked their kingdom. Hark back to your high school required reading days and you may remember that in the story, as a prize of honour, Briseis is the linchpin of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. The feud resulted to the former withdrawing from the battle against the Trojans, almost bringing defeat to their side. No more than a “status symbol,” Briseis is virtually voiceless there; we are deaf to what she feels, or what any woman in the story (who isn’t a goddess, for the immortals have a lot to say regardless of gender) has to convey other than grief and sorrow.
In this book, she introduces the readers to the margins of the largely masculine framework of the Homeric poem, swinging the spotlight from swift-footed, angry halfgods and bouts for glory to the harrowing truths that the war’s “collateral damages” must suffer. Barker’s pen made their lives palpable on the pages: we get to take a peek at the “rape camp,” we meet bed-slaves, former queens made to scrub dirt, young girls who get their throats slit to appease the dead or some wrathful deity, mothers who’ve helplessly watched their husbands and children get butchered. There’s blood and spit and sweat and tears, and not just in the battlefield. Barker truly doesn’t pull any punches here.
But true to its title, Briseis’ thoughts remain either in her head only, with the readers as the only witness, or with their small circle of bed-girls. “Silence becomes a woman,” a character reminds her of an adage twinned with their fates for all their lives. The book, in effect, becomes a psychological journey of individuals “muted” by their male-dominated society. “They were men, and free,” Briseis says. “I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.”
Surprisingly, the novel is not told from Briseis’ perspective alone. We get brief chapters of Achilles’ thoughts, too, starting in the second volume. The first shift of voices was jarring, and my initial thought is that this defeats the very purpose of the book, which is to give a platform to her experiences. But I think this change is understandable and necessary, as Briseis is absent at the turning point of The Iliad that made Achilles go back to war again: the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved friend. The inserts also provide a helpful crutch to the portrayal of these men, where we see them get fleshed out past the observing eyes of the sidelined victims—they are characters, too, after all, and not just one-dimensional, violent caricatures. Scenes in the battlefield are a welcome change as well. Barker’s descriptive writing is magic, and the readers get treated with vivid images such as this:
“On the battlefield, the Greeks fighting to save Patroclus’s corpse recognize the cry and run towards it. What do they see? A tall man standing on a parapet with the golden light of early evening catching his hair? No, of course they don’t. They see the goddess Athena wrap her glittering aegis round [Achilles’s] shoulders: they see flames thirty feet high springing from the top of his head. What the Trojans saw isn’t recorded. The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.”
While most of the iconic scenes are recreated well (Achilles’ howling grief as he receives news of Patroclus’ demise at the hands of Hector, his berserker’s wrath while dragging Hector’s dead body around the gates of Troy, Priam’s visit to Achilles to retrieve his son’s dishonored corpse), I wished that Barker zeroed in more on the lives of the women at the camp. While reading the book, the Bechdel Test came to mind—will this even pass it? The lives of these girls maybe forever entwined with men, but they have their pasts to speak of, to make them rounder as characters. When Nestor tells Briseis to forget her past, I was hoping for a silent revolt. “Forget,” Briseis thinks of the order. “So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as a bowl of water: remember.” The rebellion seemed to have petered out early.
The writing style would have been impeccable if it weren’t for the anachronisms strewn across the whole thing, modern phrases that stick out. I’ve heard that Barker said this is deliberate on her part to emphasize the tale’s timelessness, but some of them just don’t fit, like pieces squeezed into the wrong puzzle. Still, for the most part, the narrative is a magnificent treat.
Unflinchingly honest, The Silence of the Girls is a significant work of fiction that would be best read right after The Iliad itself.
Being semi-divorced from my bookworm world last year did not in any way diminish my love for literature; what it did reduce, obviously, is the chunk of time I used to allot for reading. That said, 2015 is not exactly as awash with several reads as the previous years. Luckily, I still managed to stumble upon a few titles that I will not trade for several hundred mediocre books.
Without further ado, here are my top “unputdownable” lit picks in 2015 in no particular order:
Title:The Song of Achilles Author: Madeline Miller Genre: Mythology, revisionism, fantasy,romance My rating: ★★★★ (4 of 5 stars)
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The true brand of a good tale, I once heard, lies in a string of four words signifying the storyteller’s power over his audience: “And then what happened?” These words indicate a sliver of magic in the middle of action, wedged between this or that plot point; it is a question posed as a half-baked sterling review, an evidence that the truly gifted tale-spinners can prod readers to continue thumbing through the pages for answers.
Contemporary literature pushes the challenge to summon these words up a notch, especially for authors who opt to give revisionism or retellings a go. How would you keep your audience spellbound when they already know what would happen?
Madeline Miller knows exactly what to do, as evidenced in her debut novel The Song of Achilles.
Unfazed by the herculean task of taking on one of the greatest Greek literary masterpieces of all time, Miller manages to weave a story that feels simultaneously old and fresh. She borrows significant parts of Homer’s The Iliad for her novel’s backbone, though instead of giving the narrator’s seat to her titular character, she bestows it to a rather vague figure in the source material: Patroclus, the brother-in-arms and, in this universe’s canon, lover of Achilles.
(That detail alone could ignite a debate, but let us take it here as a fact the same way Plato did in his Symposium, Aeschylus in his lost play Myrmidons, or William Shakespeare in his Troilus and Cressida, shall we?)
The story unfolds as a bildungsroman. After accidentally killing a boy over a game of dice, the young prince Patroclus is exiled from his homeland to the faraway kingdom of Phthia, where he crosses paths with Achilles for the first time. Achilles, branded well even before he was born as “the best of all the Greeks”, is golden, beautiful, swift, and strong—essentially everything that Patroclus thinks himself to be the opposite of. But the envy and bitterness Patroclus harbors towards the boy vanished when they forge an unlikely a bond, a friendship that soon blossoms into love. They grow up together and nurture these feelings, despite risking the ire of the gods. Destiny, however, catches up to them: Helen of Sparta was abducted, and every Greek hero was called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Choosing a life replete with glory and fame over one lived in obscurity and irrelevance, Achilles joins the cause. Fearing for his beloved, Patroclus could only follow.
And this, as many of its readers would know, is where the tale latches itself onto the fateful events of The Iliad: how the Greeks and the Trojans engage in a ten-year warfare, how Achilles is dishonored by King Agammemnon, how Achilles nurses his wounded ego and withdraws from the battles, and how Patroclus decides to take matters into his own hands, unwittingly diving headfirst into his own downfall.
Enthralling and soul-wrenchingly poignant, I think The Song of Achilles proved it rightly deserved the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012.
Since this patchwork of Greek events has been refashioned as the autobiography of the self-effacing Patroclus, the novel in its entirety takes an unassuming tone. It seems that Miller makes it a point for Patroclus to take the whole vehicle with him, as even his personality makes the novel’s title an altruistic dedication to the love of his life instead of being the story his own life.
This takes us to what many “classic fans” are pointing out as this story’s Achilles’ Heel: characterization. I have seen it argued many times that Miller’s Patroclus is in no way the same Patroclus that Homer created. The former is molded to be overtly maternal, a tad too “feminine” by preferring the art of medicine and cookery, buzzed by his undying love, and a “total zero” when it comes to the battlefield. Homer’s Patroclus, they say, is much stronger. He fought like a true warrior and is not underscored to be the bottom to Achilles’ top.
What they failed to pay attention to is the obvious: it is Miller’s Patroclus, not Homer’s. How is it that any Greek myth can have fifty versions that can be considered correct, and this cannot? Note, too, that Miller’s Patroclus is crafted to be an unreliable narrator. Just because Patroclus considers himself weak does not mean he truly is. What kind of assets should a character possess to be considered “strong”, anyway? Why would he be tagged in a prophecy as “The Best of the Myrmidons” if he is weak? Miller is throwing clues at you here. This is The Iliad sailing in the modern times, and she is making you take a step back and reassess what a “strong” character should be like.
Achilles, for his part, is a striking albeit lonely portrait of a Greek warrior. Throwing away my initial view of him as a child-man throwing a tantrum, I reopened my eyes to his character to learn his real tragedy—his semi-divine birth. He is a bevy of almost’s: almost a god, almost immortal, almost good enough. What’s worse is he would not simply die; he is prophesied to die young.
Acutely aware of his mortality, he seeks eternal life in the form of fame and glory, of his story etched in songs and urns. He simply cannot hold back if he wants to be immortalized. His emotions then, too, are of extremes, explaining why he practically goes berserk when he learns of what happens to Patroclus at the hands of Hector. See, Achilles does not seek any other person to get close to because he already has everything in Patroclus: a bosom companion, a friend, an adviser, a lover. Losing the man equates to everything being taken away from him. With his grief and wrath tearing through his hubris, he returns to the battlefield not for honor or reputation like everyone else, but for his fallen beloved friend.
Stepping back for the big picture, these two characters are pushed in the forefront romance-bound, with big chunks of the novel portraying them as younglings exploring their feelings. With that, I think it is only understandable how…hormonally charged some chapters came to be (I could do without that certain soft porn-ish bit actually, but we have passion-crazed teens at our hands, so…)
This does not mean the whole piece has degenerated into a lump of, to borrow from fandom-speak, vanilla slash. Even if emotions are highlighted, there are so much more going on in the story that Miller successfully delivers. From time to time there are slips with switches between modern and period-appropriate tones, but these are not exactly unforgivable. The purple prose that threateningly rears its head more than once in it is not deplorable either, as it sometimes do lend the words a splendor that readers can enjoy. If I will have one thing I disliked about it, it is how hastily-paced the chapters of the Trojan War seem to be, presented in stark contrast of the slow build-up of the first half of the book.
But the real beauty of The Song of Achilles, I think, lies in how Miller utilizes her literary tools to tug at the readers’ feelings. It could not be reiterated enough that the material she worked on is not new—we are talking about a three thousand-year-old poem here, and there is no escaping that even if her market consists mainly of young adults. Those who have played hokey instead of completing the required Homer readathon back in high school must have taken to SparkNotes for their Iliad and Odyssey book reports; if not, they might have watched an Iliad-inspired flick starring a very brawny Achilles played by Brad Pitt (with an armor-stealing Patroclus as his…uh, baby cousin). There is practically no reason for anyone to not know anything about it. Because of this, she knew she could not make the readers ask “and then what happened?”. What she did instead is wrote the tale in a way that will make her audience say, “This author knows that Iknowwhat will happen, and she’s making sure I’m relishing every step I’m taking until I get there.”
This technique gives her foreshadowing a different flavor, especially the ones pointing to the looming tragedy involving the two main characters. The audience that knows will take these bits of forewarnings as rungs—painful ones—towards the inevitable ending. I surmise that every time Achilles nonchalantly wonders “What has Hector ever done to me?”, a staunch supporter of the leads gets a shard of his or her heart shattered again, tenfold.
Over all, this has been one roller coaster of a read. I repeatedly go back to some passages just to revel at their raw beauty, sometimes to even cry at them. I would shamelessly admit that this book made me want to revisit Homer’s masterpieces again, just so I could see my darling characters again in a universe that classicists have unreservedly adored.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
i saw then how i had changed. i did not mind anymore that i lost when we raced and i lost when we swam out to the rocks and i lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. for who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?
