Achilles, god-born, golden-haired, fleet of foot, and tragic hero of the Trojan War , has long inspired bards and poets — and more recently a slew of novelists and film directors. Madeline Miller’s first novel, The Song of Achilles , distinguishes itself by virtue of its homo-eroticism. This is the story of Achilles as told by Patroclus, his dearest companion and, here, lover.
The novel was recently announced to be the winner of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction, a UK-based literary prize for the best novel written by a woman in English. Although the chair of judges’ declaration that Homer would be proud of Miller is perhaps a stretch, The Song of Achilles has a good chance of bringing this ancient story the kind of mass popularity The Iliad itself long boasted.
Miller says that she wanted to “to combat some of the homophobia” that she sees too often. The exploration of how the relationship between two young boys grows into life-long love is sensitive and credible, but the sex scenes can seem cheap. And gratuitous. Patroclus tells us that his mind slides away “like a fish who would not be caught” from the idea of heterosexual intercourse, but he nevertheless beds Achilles’ one-time wife:
“And then, at the slow rising of tide inside me, her legs, light but firm, wrapped around my back, bucking me into her, drawing out the spasm of pleasure.”
The strong sexual current that surges through the book would be enough to keep many readers going, but Miller, who is a lover of drama as well as the Classics, is also a consummate purveyor of suspense.
It is easy to zip through the 300-plus pages in a day. But while the slower, more laborious reading of The Iliad , the novel’s main inspiration, draws up a deep draught of pity, The Song of Achilles barely manages to provoke a tear. This in despite of the all too up-close-and-personal first-person narrator, and the sympathetic depiction of both protagonists. Here Achilles is not chiefly a pride-hungry killer of men, but a youth as likeable as he is beautiful. The warrior who outrages gods and mortals alike by the treatment he metes out to Hector’s corpse is here traumatised the first time he sees blood spilt. In Miller’s account, the girls who form part of Achilles’ war booty at Troy are amassed not to serve his bed but because Patroclus wants to spare them rape and slavery at the hands of the other Greek leaders. And although the bloodlust of both Achilles and Patroclus is finally brought to bloom in Troy, and their Iliadic avatars start to heave into view, it is only after much painful deliberation and heartache.
These are protagonists we can relate to, far removed from the grand, often arrogant, public personae depicted in Greek literature. And yet, though we remain riveted to their story, the book is somehow emotionally flat.
Bold characterisation
Miller has a talent for vivid similes that immediately bring before the reader this Homeric world. Achilles’ lyre playing is “bright as lemons”. The Anatolian Briseis, newly captured, speaks Greek with words “like new leather, still stiff and precise, not yet run together with use.” So too Miller’s bold (re-)characterisation of several of the Trojan War regulars, Diomedes for instance, can be startlingly fresh.
This is particularly true of Thetis, Achilles’ mother, who here becomes a fearsome sea nymph (if that isn’t an oxymoron) of terrifying proportions. Her voice is like grinding rocks, her mouth “like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular”. In the absence of most of the rest of the gods, she towers over the action with her hatred for the man Achilles has chosen as his beloved and her cold, hard grief for her son himself.
Painstaking research
Miller read Classics at Brown University, and has clearly invested a great deal of painstaking research into this book. Where others might have fallen victim to pedantry, Miller uses her extensive knowledge of everything from the web of myth about each character to ancient ship building techniques to more brightly colour the picture she paints.
The novel assumes no prior knowledge of the story or Greek literature. (Although those who are familiar with the Iliad and its successors will be able to appreciate the subtle way in which she foreshadows the events of the war, as when Achilles learns that he will die only after Hector so must be careful not to kill him: “Well, why should I kill him? He’s done nothing to me.”) Perhaps it is because Miller is so comfortable with the material that she has the confidence to play around with it to such an extent and to write a story that even the high school students she teaches would read voraciously. Her work in the theatre focuses on adapting classical texts for a modern audience, and she is clearly skilled in this.
The Song of Achilles will not find favour with committed Homer-philes, but for them there are more serious books such as Alice Oswald’s Memorial , “an excavation of the Iliad”, which touches the reader almost as deeply as the epic itself. For the rest, Miller’s debut novel is as racy a read as any best-seller and many will be eagerly awaiting her next offering — and hoping it doesn’t take her the 10 years this one did. In the meantime, envy the 16-year-old who has her as a teacher; Classics doesn’t get much sexier than this.
The Song of Achilles , Madeline Miller, Bloomsbury 2012, $ 25.99.
