Through Briseis’s clear eyes the Greek base, peopled by fighting men and captive women, was revealed to be a “rape camp”. Achilles – terrifying, charismatic and doomed to an early death – is hard to sideline.

It wasn’t an easy task Barker had set herself. Published in 2018, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was a rewriting of the plot of the Iliad from the point of view of a captive queen, Briseis, over whose possession Agamemnon and Achilles fell out. To Pyrrhus and Alcimus they are doubly invisible because they are slaves and because they are women. These other Trojans, though, are of no account. There are plenty of other Trojans in the Greek camp, hundreds of them. He is thinking of Calchas, the priest, and Helenus, the Trojan prince who – under torture – revealed the information that enabled the Greeks to enter the city.

But which one? Alcimus, Pyrrhus’s chief lieutenant, points out that there are “only two Trojans in the camp”.

He wonders who could have attempted this act of respect. The Greek Pyrrhus, who hacked him to death at the foot of an altar, is displeased. The mutilated body of the sacked city’s king, Priam, has been left lying in the dunes by the Greek camp, stinking and covered all over – as Pat Barker’s narrator horribly notes – with “flies, thousands of them … like a fuzz of black bristles”. Its warriors, even its unborn male babies, are all dead.

The women of troy pat barker review