The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

There is perhaps no other tale in European culture that synthesises history, myth, literature and perhaps religion as famously and as frequently as Homer’s Iliad. So often has this story of Bronze Age conflict been adapted, one might wonder why an accomplished writer, known for her apposite, pungent and penetrating comment on contemporary society and its issues should turn to it for inspiration. It is a question that recurs throughout a reading of The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.

Surely an intentional pun on the similar film title, the substitution of Girls for Lambs, plus the associated allusion to insane slaughter and violence ought to point a reader toward the eventual direction of the book. The fact that this contemporary reality emerges gently and subtly is further evidence of Pat Barker’s profound writing skill. In a less accomplished writer’s hand, this rather blunt concept might just bludgeon the reader’s experience with polemic in a similar way to Achilles’s sword occasionally dealing with heads. But in Pat Barker’s hands, the idea works supremely and subtly.

The Silence of the Girls begins with a victory for Achilles in which a Trojan adversary is defeated and killed before his city is sacked. Men and boys are slaughtered, as well as most of the women, except for those deemed worthy of abduction as slaves, an office that would demand regular calls to duty. Young women thus become the chattel of victory, the spoils to be despoiled at the hands of the brutes, all to be suffered in the submissive silence of slavery.

Briseis is a king’s daughter who loses most of her family in the city’s sacking and it is through her eyes that the story is seen. She herself becomes a prize. Achilles, the half god, half man superhero, is the obvious claimant, but Briseis ends up in the confused clutches of Agamemnon. Achilles mysteriously withdraws from battle, apparently to sulk, and the Greek cause in the war with Troy suffers severely as a result.

Now thus far this might sound like a conventional rewrite of a well-known and well covered story, but Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls sees events through the eyes of the newly enslaved Briseis and her viewpoint adds much to the familiar territory. It is through her prism that we see an ancient world that is foreign to us but familiar to her. Her observations become interpretations of its customs, beliefs and assumptions. Like Helen, the beauty whose abduction started the conflict, Briseis is young, eligible and marriageable. Unlike Helen, Briseis was already on a losing side and must endure her gender without privilege, though in the bedroom their differences in position might just have been minimal, mere details of posture. While the males enact their increasingly ritualised conflict, Briseis and the other women hold everything together via food, comfort, kindness and tolerance. Their reward is further use, always with the threat of death nearby, if ever the fancy were to wear off.

In the case of Briseis, the fancy of Agamemnon was always in question, like his geography, but Achilles, it seems, regards her as something more than a mere bed-mate, though he seems have difficulty expressing his feelings. A thoroughly modern man, we presume. When Agamemnon gives way and Achilles claims his prize, there develops a bond which might pass for marriage. But somehow, any acknowledgement of a woman’s rights seems to be beyond the imagination of these committed warriors.

And this lack of ability to see self-interest extended by greater tolerance is doubly underlined when, at the end of the conflict, a sacrifice to the gods is needed to ensure a fair wind for the voyage home and this automatically has to entail killing someone who is young, virginal and female. Old habits, no matter how hard-set, simply do not die.

By the end, the significance of the title and Briseis’s relationship with Achilles has thus become clear. Contemporary films and genre fiction still make their point by sensationalising male violence against women, and perhaps relations between the sexes still bear some of the hallmarks that characterised the behaviour of these Bronze Age brutes. The difference, perhaps, is merely one of degree.

The Silence of the Girls is a challenging read, but not because of difficult language or deviousness of plot. Indeed, like much great drama, we know what is going to happen in advance, since the story is so well known. The joy is learning how things happen and how they are interpreted, and thus the difficulty arises because the reader must operate on different levels of awareness throughout. To ignore this contemporary parallel would render The Silence of the Girls just another re-write of an old story, and it is much more than that.

Doves Of War by Paul Preston

Writers of fiction are often accused of forcing their characters to jump through ever more fanciful hoops to satisfy a presumed need for engaging plot. The fact that reality often amplifies the unlikely to the near incredible regularly reminds any reader that considered fiction rarely overstates any issue that derives from our usually random human recklessness. Rarely, for instance, when dealing with war, does fiction place women in the front line. And equally uncommon is the recognition that women are also often in the front lines of politics, even when they might continue to be under-represented amongst the professional practitioners of the art.

And so we often need the kind of reality check that a balanced historical account can provide. Paul Preston’s Doves Of War is precisely the kind of book that can provide comment on all these themes and thus bring us back to earth with an eye-opening bump.

Doves Of War presents contrasting biographies of four women who were directly involved in the hostilities of the Spanish Civil War. Priscilla Scott-Ellis is born of the English upper crust and supports the Nationalists. Nan Green is also English, but motivated by a commitment to left-wing politics. She lines up with the Republic. Mercedes Sanz-Bachiller, a Spaniard, marries into the political life of Vallolid. Margarita Nelken, Spanish-speaking and Spanish-born, but Jewish and branded a foreigner by her enemies, becomes a significant actor on the political left. And so we follow the lives of four women, two on the left and two on the right, two outsiders and two insiders, two who celebrated victory and two berated in defeat. Their stories thus contrast.

It is much to the author’s credit that these lives are presented in a fair and unbiased way. Paul Preston’s personal take on the history of Spain’s war is well known. But in Doves Of War he consistently ducks opportunities to make points about the politics of the struggle, except when the politics are lived out in the lives of his subjects. Committed readers on either side of the argument might feel frustrated at this, but the overall result in that Doves Of War avoids polemic and lets the detail of these four women’s stories demand the reader’s uncomplicated attention. The first subject, for instance, was born into privilege and wealth, thus making political points easy to score. The second is very much the nineteen-thirties pro-Soviet apologist and activist, and caricature might thus beckon. The third is a long-suffering wife dragged into the limelight and the fourth is the driven polymath intellectual. In some way or other, all four could be presented as caricatures or used as vehicles to score other associated historical and political points. Aspects of all four lives could be stressed to demolish them as people or belittle their contribution and commitment. But the author always shies away from cheap shots, even consciously avoiding them, always preferring to analyse rather than judge.

What happens to these four women is the meat of Doves Of War, so this review will avoid reference to the detail of the individual stories. What the review can do, however, is note that each of these lives presents a series of events that is stranger, more heroic, more tragic, more convoluted, more complicated and much more profound than anything a writer of fiction might implausibly create to impose on a character. The twists and turns of these lives, each one pummelled by events and scarred by war leave the reader breathless just trying to keep up.

The style, however, is not easy. Paul Preston is an historian, not a sensationalist or indeed a sentimentalist, and these tales, as presented here, are more documentary than Hollywood. Their content may be stranger than fiction, but the material is considered, discussed, referenced, sourced and checked. Nothing is ever over-stated. Doves Of War displays immense scholarship and, whatever the author’s obvious sympathies, he offers tremendous respect for these four differing women who, in their different ways, gave their lives to the causes they supported.

Philip Spires website

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

When I read Snow by Orhan Pamuk a second time, I will pay more attention to its central character, nicknamed Ka. He is a poet, a Turkish émigré, fresh from Germany. He’s also a journalist and is travelling to Kars, a town in north-eastern Turkey (can the similarity of name be mere coincidence?) to investigate a series of crimes. It’s the detail of these crimes that give the book its poignancy, tension and fascination. 

Girls have committed suicide. These are crimes. In Islam suicide is a sin, eternally damning. So what drove apparently happy, conventional, balanced young women to take their own lives? On the surface there are some obvious candidates for the answer. Turkey’s secular though military state requires women not to wear a scarf, while their religion demands it. Could it be this political and cultural tension that has provoked these women, out of shame, to end their lives?

My review will not be a plot-spoiler. In the case of Snow, that would also be hard, because it’s the issues and contexts that matter, not the events. Suffice it to say that while in Kars, Ka meets many people who can offer opinion and proffer hypothesis on the town’s recent history. There’s a newspaper owner who, in order to promote circulation, predicts the news. There’s an old-fashioned communist, a one-time agitator, whose current activities appear to be thoroughly questionable. There’s a travelling theatre group who will play great roles in the plot. There’s an underground Islamist on the run. He’s called Blue, surely a reference to themes raised in My Name Is Red. Political associations of colour might be naïve, but might also be a tad revealing. There’s military personnel, policemen, secret agents, an occasional murderer. There’s also snow, and enough of it to cut off the town and prevent outside knowledge of a shooting coup where interests vie for control.

And if this were not enough, there’s a hotel owner with two daughters of stunning beauty. One, İpik, was once the apple of Ka’s desire. His return promises a long-deferred bite of forbidden fruit. But then there’s politics, history, culture, religion, rules, regulations, laws, even personal preferences that can get in the way. Snow is a complex novel whose density needs to be fully entered for a reader to share its preoccupations. It’s an intense experience, a miasma of contradictions, political, cultural, religious, the whole gamut. 

The only problem with Snow, in my opinion, is its central character, Ka. This is why next time I must be more careful to assess his sincerity. Unlike most poets of any worth, he writes from revelation, not from hard work, etching out a word at a time. For me, this does not seem genuine. But then, as the book unfolds, the reader realises that these are merely Orhan Pamuk’s own recollections of Ka, described from afar. Some years later, he has tracked the poet down to his apartment in Germany, soon after he has been murdered by an anonymous assassin. Now I wonder who that might have been? As ever in Orhan Pamuk’s work, Snow is deeply enmeshed within the characteristics and contradictions of Turkish culture and society.

Equally, as we would expect from Orhan Pamuk, it allows the Western reader (politically and culturally Western, not geographically) to appreciate how Western values, so rarely questioned on the inside of the argument, can be perceived as essentially imperial, colonial and perhaps oppressive. If you like your reading to provoke thought, please do read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.

Ladder Of Years by Anne Tyler

Delia, short for Cordelia, is the central character of Anne Tyler’s Ladder Of Years. As usual for Anne Tyler, Delia is a Baltimore resident, a wife, a mother and probably, at least from the outside, a pillar of strength and dependability in both family and community. The children are growing up. Which children don’t? Bet then it’s how they grow up that matters, isn’t it? 

Sam, the husband, is doing moderately well. Moderate seems to be the word, as far as Sam is concerned. He’s hardly made a success of the business he inherited from Delia’s father, but the family survives to inhabit a middle class, rather liberal niche in the common psyche. As Ladder Of Years opens, the family is holidaying by the sea and Delia is dressed, mentally, for the beach. And then, without warning, even to herself, she takes off. Just like that, whatever “that” might be.

She absconds. Goes missing. Disappears. There’s suspicion of drowning. A report appears in a Baltimore paper. The family fears she has come to harm. But no, she hasn’t. In fact, still dressed for the beach she is heading off to a place she doesn’t know with a stranger. It’s no particular stranger, just a stranger. Quite soon, and with new clothes, a new address and a changed life, Delia takes on a new identity. 

Though Baltimore wife and mother still lives in her head, she’s become a new Delia, single, independent and employed. In this new guise, she inter-reacts with her new community and gradually becomes part of it. Why did she leave the apparent safety, security and responsibility of her family? Not even she can answer. What slowly begins to emerge, however, is that Delia’s choice of opting out becomes increasingly one of opting in. 

By degree the characters in her new life start to become more demanding. Without needing to state everything explicitly, they start to assume Delia’s support and claim reliance upon her. She, of course, responds and finds that she now has two levels of responsibility created out of the demands of her new life and continued contact with her family. Interestingly, Delia, this pillar of support, never feels either at home or secure in either role. 

 And so it is via this scenario of identity change, relationships of dependency, insecure self-image, alongside a fixation of demand that Anne Tyler relates how Delia’s life unfolds. Delia notices a lot about people, but she’s no great analyst. Surely she’s the type to apologise before expressing an opinion, but would harbour unspoken bigotries like the rest of us. At the start of the book she seems confused. By the end, a few more rungs along the ladder of life, she apparently remains so. Perhaps the ladder is horizontal … and with irregular spacing… But then Delia has little time to consider such arcane ideas. After all, there are things to do, people to talk to, arrangements to be made, jobs to be done…

Worst Fears by Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon’s novel Worst Fears starts and finishes with bereavement. It examines how a woman deals with simultaneous loss and revealed betrayal. Alexandra is an actress, if I might be excused such gender specificity. She is also quite successful. She is currently appearing in a London West End production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She is therefore away from home a lot. Her husband Ned has just died, apparently discovered on the floor of the family home by a visitor. It was a sudden and massive heart attack. Alexandra wonders what might have brought it on. She takes time off work, thus allowing an understudy temporarily to take her role. 

She returns to the rickety, old, antique-stuffed cottage in the country. It is perhaps a rural idyll that now has to be rewritten. Her worst fears are that there is more than meets the eye. She also has some hopes, but from the start it seems unlikely they will be realised. She is greeted by the dog, Diamond, who seems to know something is wrong. She contacts local acquaintances, Lucy and Abbie, whom she suspects know more than they are saying. Hamish, her husband’s brother, comes to stay to help sort things out. Sascha, Alexandra and Ned’s little boy is with Irene, Alexandra’s mother. It happens often when Alexandra is away at work. 

Her husband Ned, as usual needed space at home to concentrate. He was, by the way, was an authority on theatre, a critic, an expert on Ibsen and also interested in costume design. As Alexandra delves into recent events, she discovers a tangle of interests, relationships and liaisons. All of them have implications for her, despite the fact that she was often not directly involved. The protagonists relate directly to one another. They socialise, if that might be the right word. They interact. They act. They play-act. Alexandra’s worst fears begin to materialise. Ned’s surname is Ludd. It is surely not a coincidence that he shares a name with one of the wreckers of history. He is the only developed male character in the novel, despite his being dead. He never speaks, but his presence pervades, perhaps even controls everything that the still living can do. The truths of his life have been at best partial, his interests specifically personal. It seems that the women are positioning themselves to lay claim to ownership of his memory. 

And thus recollection, rumour and revelation unfold their tangle. The above may suggest a rather one-dimensional approach towards a feminist moral, but it is much more subtle than that. This thread is there, of course, and is epitomised when Alexandra’s part in A Doll’s House – itself a play about women and emancipation – is exploited to success by her understudy via sexual stereotyping. And Worst Fears opens with two of the women involved viewing Ned’s body, their attention drawn to a part of his anatomy that is to become one of the book’s main actors. Their reverence is sincere as they genuflect before their flaccid altar. This accepted, it seems also that the book deals more fundamentally with the more universal issues of self-interest and selfishness. All of these characters, despite their often social or private relations, are in conflict. They compete with one another and even with themselves. When liberation becomes a possibility, it is revealed as no more than an opportunity for even greater self-obsession, a means of shutting out the interest of others. 

 As the plot of Worst Fears unfolds, the impression it leaves is that these accomplished, middle-class, apparently comfortable people are all still engaged in a primeval struggle for raw animal dominance. The currency that is hoarded in the process remains the same as it would have been if the characters had never evolved from quadruped apes in a forest gang. There is no liberation here, for anyone, except, that is, via their words, the very weapons they use to prod, punch, pierce the reality that effectively confines them to themselves. These could be anyone’s worst fears. View the book on amazon Worst Fears

The Cleft by Doris Lessing

I often wait a day or two before writing a review. I find that my appreciation of a work often changes on reflection, sometimes magnifying the experience, sometimes diminishing it. In the case of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, a little distance has considerably enhanced the initial impression, which was less than favourable. 

The Cleft is quite a short novel. It just seems long. The language isn’t difficult, likewise neither are setting or plot. Not that there’s much of either. We begin with a society that’s entirely female and where procreation just happens. When “monsters” appear, babies with ugly extra bits on the front, they are either killed or mutilated. Killing involves leaving the tiny bundles of flesh on a rock for eagles to take. But the cunning birds aren’t always hungry.

A community of squirts - grown-up monsters – begins to thrive and the women find they have to interact. New activities are mutually invented and suddenly all is change. A new race or perhaps merely a new society develops via proto-parents, develops at least twice, in fact. Journeys are made. Promised lands reveal promise. New orders establish themselves.

Meanwhile, we realise that this creation myth is being related by a Roman gentleman who has his own domestic battle of the sexes. At first sight this extra layer of narrative seems redundant. Eventually an elemental force binds the myth to the narrator’s present. The link is tenuous and as a plot device, its impact fails. It does, however, conceptually link the narrator with the related myth. After all, Romans were themselves created, they believed, out of a myth where a pair of lads were nurtured by an animal. 

The military tradition (equals male) by which Rome prospered was founded on the social control of Sparta, not the demos of Athens. Sparta was probably the ultimate macho male society, where the old were revered and women were chattel, though they could own property. Doris Lessing at one point refers to Spartan youth being separated from their families at the age of seven to hone military and combat skills via camaraderie. Such an exile the monsters of The Cleft invent for themselves.

Galling at first reading and later informative were the repeated gender stereotypes that dominate Doris Lessing’s narrative. The repeated use of these bludgeoning concepts had more than an air of artifice. Looking back, I now see that this actually enhanced what emerged as the book’s overarching idea, which is our need for myth and the necessity of reducing it to the level of populist fairy tale. The eagles who nurtured the monsters play god. The way we organise our society demands certain role models, while ceremony, often barbaric, such as genital mutilation, allies us to ideals and ideas we prefer not to question. In the end we have to explain elemental forces beyond our control and myth is our refuge. Stick with The Cleft. It’s a tortuous journey, but it is worth it in the end, an end whose only solace may only be found in myth. 

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Brick Lane by Monica Ali

A review should always try to address its subject in its own terms. The purpose, after all, is many-sided, to summarise, paraphrase, contextualise, all with the express intention of informing a potentially interested participant of the nature of the experience on offer. Any proffered review that merely says I did or did not like it is thus entirely specious, since it conveys nothing of the work in focus, only the doubly-uninterpretable reaction of a dismembered, effectively anonymous opinion.

So in the case of Brick Lane by Monica Ali a dutiful list of the elements must begin with the setting. For the majority non-Londoners, Brick Lane is a market street in East London. It is just up the road from the eastern fringes of the City of London, the financial centre that boasts gleaming towers and vast wealth. (Or perhaps it once did!)

But over the years Brick Lane has been a magnet for new migrants, communities marginalised by both origin and destination. It has also been a centre for political action of all shades. The current occupants of this social clearing house are Bangladeshis and the street, in particular, has become a centre for Bangladeshi culture and food.

So, at the centre of Monica Ali’s novel is a Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, who arrives in Britain to meet her husband, Chanu, an apparently slobbering slob, imbued with more social manners than domestic. But arrangement suffices, as Nazneen learns to cope with married life in a foreign place in which she has no ties and little communication. Nazneen’s experience in London’s Brick Lane is juxtaposed via an exchange of letters with the parallel experience of Hasina, her sister in Bangladesh. The two women’s experiences eventually diverge as local pressures demand decision and action. The contrasts, along with the considered tensions between white working class racism and Muslim identity promotion in east London ought to provide a powerful vehicle with which to explore worlds of culture, experience, relationships and ideology.

Brick Lane, unfortunately, falls short of every destination. Unfortunately again, the characters are weak, the artifice feels false, the vibrant location is portrayed as dull and the passions of ideological difference are confused and politically limp or naive. Brick Lane was an ambitious project, but it began confused and lost direction as it progressed. It does have its moments, but its hours are long, and not a little tedious.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read A Thousand Splendid Suns having just finished Kite Runner. I would like the opportunity to live life again (who wouldn’t?), if only to have a chance of reversing the order of this experience. I suspect that had I read A Thousand Splendid Suns first then none of the criticisms I raise about the book would even have been imagined, let alone expressed. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a wonderful book, a compelling and gut-wrenching story of two women, Mariam and Laila, who share a husband throughout the years of Afghanistan’s tragedy and turmoil. The fact that Khaled Hosseini can sustain expression, narrative, emotion and interest across two novels with ostensibly similar themes in the same territory is testament both to his supreme skill and the depth of the country’s despond.

Where Kite Runner tells the story of two boyhood friends approaching maturity, separating and reuniting, A Thousand Splendid Suns presents two women who are forced together by arrangement. As in Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini presents ethnic and social class differences as the givens of the story. Similarly, Afghanistan’s turbulent thirty years from the mid-1970s is more than a backdrop: it is the very substance of the idea, eventually revealed as the flesh on the story’s bones, the driving force of circumstance that creates the inevitability of the characters’ fate.

And this is why I wish I could read both books again in the different order, because too often in A Thousand Splendid Suns I felt I had been there before. The backdrop came just too much to the fore, in some parts so much so that I felt Mariam and Laila became puppets of its detail and demands.

That, I suppose, may also be part of the point. Whereas Kite Runner concentrated on male experience, A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on women and, given what happened in Afghanistan over those decades, it may be that the sense of subservience to the turn of events is the very essence of these women’s experience. Thus, it is almost true to say that they were not, themselves, protagonists. They were done unto.

Mariam and Laila differ in age, ethnicity, birthright and social class. They both, and for different reasons, finish up unhappily married to the same man, Rasheed, older than both combined, brutish, bigoted and sadistic. Rasheed is thus a symbol for the traditional male role without declaring himself as such. In Western terms, we read this “tradition” as misogyny, however, and it is here where I find the book’s weakness. In my opinion – for what it’s worth, and not much at that - A Thousand Splendid Suns would have been an even greater novel had Rasheed been cast as a more liberal figure and had he also suffered as a result of his own conflict with the requirements of changing times. But Khaled Hosseini made A Thousand Splendid Suns from the women’s stories and a more complex role for their husband might have deflected attention from them.

The two women had quite different experiences of youth, and demonstrate quite different capacities to relate to others and even to life, itself. But they have enough in common to need to act together, to need to form a relationship, less than an alliance, more than acquaintance. Pragmatism might have been easier, but the two women develop a real bond, a relationship that shares out the pain, disappointment and unfulfilled dreams of their marital confinement. There is tragedy aplenty and ultimate resolution of a kind.

And then it was the eventual similarity between Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns that prompted me to take my eye off the ball, to lose a little bit of interest in the story at mid-point. But if this is a criticism then it is an extremely minor one. As I suggested at the start, had I read the two books in the opposite sequence, I would probably have levelled my criticism differently. But having also said in a review of Kite Runner that I would not criticise the book for a lack of explicit position on the politics, I feel that in A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini ought to have said more about the status and role of women. Mariam and Laila live a tragedy, but they are also offered as icons for something bigger, which is women’s position in the society at large. In A Thousand Splendid Suns I thus wanted the author to offer explicit comment on the plight of his characters, at least some general comment, even a dose of polemic to merely label absurdity. Alternatively, as I stated earlier, he could have made Rasheed, their aging husband, a little more complex, a tad more endearing in order to offer a source of the social attitudes without the need to justify them.

But these are all minor points. A Thousand Splendid Suns is, in its own right, another supreme achievement by Khaled Hosseini and a further reminder to all of us that ideology imposed blindly can be a blunt and dangerous instrument.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns