Pat Barker beautifully fills in the gaps in the “Iliad”

The Silence of the Girls. By Pat Barker.Doubleday; 304 pages; $27.95. Hamish Hamilton; £18.99.

BRISEIS, an enslaved Trojan queen, speaks only once in the “Iliad”. Yet she is crucial to Homer’s epic: Agamemnon’s seizure of her from Achilles enrages the Greeks’ indispensable warrior, leading to his withdrawal from the battlefield. In “The Silence of the Girls”, Pat Barker makes Briseis her central character. The result is a masterful and moving novel.

Ms Barker, a British writer best known for the “Regeneration” trilogy about the first world war, gives Briseis and the other Trojan slave-girls voices that feel refreshingly modern, steeped in history though they are. They are bawdy, motherly, angry and abused. They keep watch on the men who killed their relatives and now treat them as sexual objects. Domestic details are piercingly described, bringing the squalor of the camp to life:

Even from that distance I caught the stench of sweat, today’s sweat, still fresh, but under that the stale sweat of other days and other nights, receding into the far distance, the darkness, all the way back to the first year of this interminable war.

The story flickers between Briseis’s recollections and a third-person narration of the progress of the war. This combination allows Ms Barker to switch nimbly between the daily drudgery of the camp and the horrors of conflict, described in all their gut-spilling drama. It gives the novel the pace of a thriller, blood-soaked spears and shields suddenly glistening on the page, while also making the characters painfully real.

Through Briseis’s eyes the relationship between Achilles and his manservant (and presumed lover) Patroclus is acutely observed. She glimpses them on the beach, leaning forehead to forehead, a moment of tenderness in a callous world. Later, she befriends Patroclus almost against her will. She even comes to half-love Achilles, her captor.

In this telling Achilles, notionally a demi-god, is a flawed, fleshy mortal. When Patroclus is killed in battle (disguised as Achilles), his devastation is visceral. Ms Barker zooms out to relay the isolating quality of mourning:

Nobody looks him in the face now, it’s as if his grief frightens them. What are they afraid of? That one day they’ll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they’re incapable of it, because grief’s only ever as deep as the love it’s replaced.

Her use of similes is almost Homeric in its brilliance. When Nestor, a wily Greek leader, first suggests that Patroclus might fight in Achilles’s place, he sees “possibilities work like maggots under the young man’s skin”. In the women’s hut, “faces, clustering round the lights, shone like the pale wings of moths”. In Ms Barker’s hands, these venerable scenes and mythic names magically become new.