Book review: The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker
0
35
The epigraph of Pat Barker’s new novel is taken from Philip Roth. “You know how European literature begins?” says the teacher in The Human Stain. “With a quarrel. All European literature springs from a fight... And what are they quarrelling about? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarrelling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war.”