Book Review: The Song of Achilles

BY Madeline Miller

(Bloomsbury, 352pp, £18.99)

Review by Allan Massie

How do you deal with the gods? This is the first question anyone making a novel today out of The Iliad or The Odyssey has to address. Even though Christianity itself is founded on the belief that a God – or the Son of God – walked the earth of Palestine, performing miracles and even restoring the dead to life, we are today uncomfortable with the idea of gods interfering in human affairs, demanding sacrifices, taking sides in a battle, and even intervening to protect their favourite mortals or, alternatively, to load the dice against those who have offended them. We are uneasy too with the notion of half-divinity, of a hero whose father is a mortal and his mother a goddess. But Homer was at ease with all this, and the Greek hero, Achilles, whose “wrath”is the subject of the poem, was the son of Peleus, King of Phthia, and the sea-goddess Thetis, a daughter of Zeus. Madeline Miller’s answer to the question is simply to accept that this was how things were in those days, and to treat the relationships between gods and mortals as unremarkable. In short she domesticates the divine, and makes a very human story of the Trojan war and the wrath of Achilles.

Her narrator is Patroclus, Achilles’ chosen companion and closest friend. A shy and awkward prince, exiled from his father’s court for having killed a boy, this timid and unwarlike youth is taken up by the brilliant Achilles - a choice which arouses the resentment, even hatred, of Thetis. When they go off to the hills to be educated in isolation by the wise centaur (half-man, half-horse) Chiron – a nicely and convincingly drawn character – they become lovers, joined in an erotic idyll. Miller handles the gay love scenes with a charming delicacy. One sees why Patroclus adores Achilles, and also why Achilles finds in him the only person with whom he need not play his allotted role of hero.

He cannot escape his destiny, but in the company of his lover he can lay his consciousness of it aside. Presenting Achilles to us through Patroclus’ eyes, Miller makes him sympathetic, likeable and comprehensible. Even the pride, which is the pride of a spoiled boy in Homer, and which leads to so much death and misery, invites our compassion. In short, she makes good sense of Achilles.

Miller follows Homer faithfully for the most part. The scenes in Scyros where Thetis has hidden her son among women in order that he should not have to go to the war – an attempt on the goddess’s part to cheat destiny – are beautifully done. Agamemnon’s sacrifice in Aulis of his daughter Iphigenia to appease the gods who have denied him the wind to carry the fleet to Troy is chilling. Her mother Clytemnestra had agreed to send her there on the promise that she should be married to Achilles, and his horror contributes to the contempt and hatred he feels for Agamemnon, making the later quarrel over the slave-girl Briseus seem the more justified. As for the war itself, Miller does the battle scenes very well, and the episode in which the aged Priam comes to Achilles’ tent to plead for the return of Hector’s body is as moving as it should be. However, it is in the depiction of the characters of the Greek leaders that Miller excels. Her Odysseus is excellent, true to Homer and a recognisable modern type – a devious politician, but one worthy of respect.

Choosing Patroclus as narrator sets Miller another problem, since he is dead before the Iliad reaches its climax. She skates over it with a sublime confidence, allowing his shade to continue the narrative. This is quite acceptable because there has never been any pretence that Patroclus is writing the story; it all goes on in his head, and, given that this is a novel in which the gods act and speak, having the last chapters spoken to us by a dead man or his ghost is no bar to credulity.

Over the centuries Homer’s two epics have been a store from which countless writers have drawn plays, poems, novels and, in our time, films. Probably they will never cease being pillages – so much European literature has grown out of them. When Alexander Pope translated The Iliad into elegant heroic couplets, the great classical scholar Richard Bentley told him: “it is a very pretty poem, Mr Pope. Only you must not call it Homer.” Well, I suppose Madeline Miller’s novel is not Homer either, not perhaps even Homer for the 21st century, but it is a faithful and delightfully written approximation of Homer, and if there are moments when her lovers Achilles and Patroclus seem to belong to California rather than ancient Greece, she makes their love moving and convincing. It may not be Homer; yet it reads well.

Her novel is a fine exercise of sympathetic imagination, and often beautifully written.