“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.” ― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2011)
WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD
DISCLAIMER: This review is, first and foremost, constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. I can’t forecast whether or not you, reading this, will like it yourself, not only because I’m quite terrible at recommendations because I always assume that people will like everything I like. If you decide to read this book because of this review and end up not enjoying it, I humbly apologise. Please don’t get your hopes up if you think they might be let down. I think the book is great, but that’s a matter of opinion. Lots of people hate it. So it goes.
I’ll admit
it; I’m a little bit biased when it comes to ancient history, but I promise I’m
being as impartial as possible when I say that I was enchanted by The Song of Achilles. Ann Patchett
(an author, although not the author of this book) calls the 2011 novel
“startlingly original,” and she’s not completely wrong: while Madeline Miller,
author of The Song of Achilles by day and our hero by night, has
approached this story from an atypical perspective, the story itself is not of
her creation. Formally, it belongs to the blind bard Homer, who composed it
(with slightly less homoerotic subtext) under the name of the Iliad in the 8th century BCE (although
realistically it belonged to everyone; Homer was just the guy who wrote it
down). The Iliad is the story of the ten-year
Trojan War, and of its demigod hero Achilles, who was fated to be the best
warrior known to man, but also to die young should he choose to pursue his
divine destiny. Troy would immortalise him, avenging his untimely death by
cementing him into the woven tales of generations to come as the greatest hero
of all time, but he would also be, you know, dead. In the age of Achilles –
roughly 1250 BCE, 500 years before the Iliad was even published – you only
chose mortality over glory if you were inclined with intense stupidity, and so
Achilles fulfilled his prophecy, fought like War Machine at Troy, and died an
unforgettable hero. The Song
of Achilles follows this same
storyline, but what made Miller’s adaption so interesting was the fact that the
hero of Troy was not, as would have been expected from a book bearing his name
in the title, the central character. Taking this place was Patroclus, Achilles’
boyhood best friend (in antiquity the term for this was therapon, meaning 'dearest
companion’ or ‘brother-in-arms’) and, in Miller’s work, his lover. Historians
worldwide have for centuries speculated and debated over whether Achilles and
Patroclus actually existed, and if so, were actually lovers rather than just
inseparable friends – Plato’s Symposium assumes that the boys were a couple,
although the Iliad never makes the distinction – but
Miller’s work does, and damn, does she do it well. Awkward and shy in
comparison with Achilles’ confidence, grace and composure, Patroclus is exiled
from his home kingdom at ten years old and is taken in by Peleus, king of
Phthia, the son of whom is none other than Earth’s Mightiest Hero himself.
Patroclus swiftly falls for the mischievous, straightforward and charming
prince, and Achilles promptly follows suit, but almost as soon as the boys are
able to express their love to one another, they are called to war by the cry of
a Greek king whose famously beautiful wife was stolen by a devious Trojan prince.
Troy being the site of Achilles' prophesised demise, the two boys are reluctant
to answer the call to arms, but Achilles' thirst for kleos (along with other binding factors
– you’ll get the joke if you read the book) sends them sailing for Troy, where
the two lovers will both face some of the hardest decisions of their lives.
I could
pretend not to gush, but I’m not going to kid myself. You’d think that as a
future Classics major, a simple retelling of an enormously famous piece of
classical literature wouldn’t really ruffle my feathers, but you’d be wrong –
oh, so wrong. By some strange miracle, The
Song of Achilles genuinely
surprised me on each and every page. I gasped, I screamed, I danced with the
idea of throwing the book out a window more than once; the story simply gripped
me, so tightly that it hurt to put it down, with such magnetism that I could
barely walk away. There's no denying that it was, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
the chemistry between Achilles and Patroclus that breathed such captivity and
life into this reiteration. I’ve read many reviews in which people complained
that this book about the Trojan War has very little of the Trojan War actually
in it (only about half the book occurs during the war, whereas the Iliad begins in its ninth year), but
that’s one of the things that really sold this book to me; almost half of it
was dedicated to establishing a literally epic love story. Sure, the fighting
and bloodbaths were pretty cool, but who doesn't love a little bit of teen
angst dating back to the 13th century BCE? Patroclus’ quiet but turbulent
infatuation and Achilles’ deep and fierce passion oozed through the pages until
I was infected by their star-crossed love, too. It’s helpful that Miller is
quite an accomplished writer: her prose, while nowhere near the eloquence of
the bard from whom she borrows, nevertheless tangoes and salsas across the
page, elegant and violently emotive all at once. Her characters are
well-developed: there was such stunning juxtaposition between the individual
voices that you almost knew who was speaking without even reading their name.
Achilles was cool, collected and bluntly honest, his phrase-work confidently
rolling off the tongue like a cat stretched in the sun; Patroclus was weedy,
jittery and nervous, but had a calm voice of reason and a strong sense of right
and wrong. Chiron was candid and wise, Agamemnon arrogant and proud, Odysseus
sharp and witty but not altogether unkind; these personalities didn't bounce
off each other listlessly, but interacted fluidly, rendering each character
unique in their own small and subtle, but also vibrant and outstanding, ways.
In
retrospect, I can’t really pin down any specific thing about this book that
coerced me into loving it so deeply, but Rick Riordan’s review of The Song of Achilles spoke of how the story coming from
Patroclus’ point of view opened new windows through which to analyse the Iliad, and on reflection, this
was one of my favourite things about the novel. Many big-shot reviews labelled
Miller’s prose as simple and juvenile, but they’ve forgotten the two most
important points: one, that this is YA, and two, that Patroclus was simple. “It was unlikely for my
father to have allowed us to be alone together,” he tells us in the first
chapter; “his simple son and his simple wife.” This is no wily and
silver-tongued Odysseus, no brave and forthright Achilles; this is Patroclus,
simple and scrawny but loyal to the bitter end. His story is so captivating
because he tells it so plainly. There are no vast metaphors, no rousing
paragraphs of rhetoric; as Riordan says, Patroclus cuts straight through the
grandeur and heroism of the Iliad to show us the story of the humans
behind the heroes. This was what sold the novel to me. Miller hasn’t simply
rehashed Homer’s epic hero; she has dug deeper, found the lamb within the
mighty lion, and coaxed it into the open, bringing us a story of humanity,
compassion and suffering – and above all, timeless love in a hopeless place.
TL;DR: As a
future Classics major, I already knew what happens in the Iliad, but somehow The Song of Achilles managed to break me anew.
The quiet pain and fierce passion of this stunning tale gripped me iron-tight
and dragged me along behind it - I'm lucky to have come out the other side
relatively unscathed. Prolific writing skill has joined forces with
comprehensive understanding of both ancient history and how to move a modern
audience to create one of my favourite stories yet - this is, without a doubt,
the best book I've read so far this year, and I'm sceptical as to whether any
will manage to surpass it. Granted, I'm biased, given my innate fascination
with Classical Greece and its mythology, but give me at least a little bit of
credit: this book is really, really good.
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