The beginning: Patroclus (the beloved of Achilles, you’ll remember) tells the story of his early life, how he is exiled from his home and send to live in Phthia (which is in Thessaly, ugh), where he meets Achilles. They soon become inseparable friends, for reasons Miller isn’t great at making clear, and after they hit puberty they become lovers.  It’s all very sweet and PG-rated (PG-13 maybe), with kisses being trailed down stomachs, but you know where things are going from here.

The major failure of this section of the book, to my mind, is that Achilles needs to be set up to be angrier sooner. When you know the story of the Iliad, and you know the story is heading in the direction of the wrath of Achilles giving rise to woes unnumbered, Achilles has to be angry and prideful fast. And in this he’s not. He’s very innocent in a lot of ways, which — it is possible to mix implacability and innocence in the correct proportions, but it’s hard to get right. I don’t think Madeleine Miller is succeeding.

(Mary Renault did though when she wrote about Alexander and y’all should read Fire from Heaven and you should especially read The Persian Boy okay that’s all about Mary Renault sorry but she is just so awesome the end)

The end: Around the start of the Trojan War, I peeked at the end to see how Madeleine Miller was going to continue the story after Patroclus dies. And oh dear, it seems Patroclus’s spirit is wandering the world unburied, observing everything that’s going down. I initially felt like this was a cheat, but, no, actually, maybe it’s not. If Madeleine Miller does an adequate job of setting up that piece of the Greek belief system before the end of the book, then I will accept this as a clever way of telling a story in which your narrator dies in the middle.

The whole: I was right. The angry Achilles set-up needed to happen sooner. He’s too innocent for the sudden intense anger that comes up when Agamemnon takes back Briseis. It helps a little, but not enough, that Patroclus finds it jarring also.

Okay, look.

If you decide to retell one of the greatest and most enduring stories in all of Western history, you better have a compelling — more importantly, a new — reason to do it. The Song of Achilles is best when Miller plays around at the fringes of the Iliad story, and weakest when she’s retreading familiar ground. Unfortunately she does the latter more often than the former: this is a very, very straight retelling of the stories. A notable exception is the character of Briseis and the friendship she develops with Patroclus, and the sort of den mother position she assumes among the women of the camp. Thetis, Achilles’s sea-nymph mother, is also a good part of the story, and virtually the only part of it that feels like Homer.

More often, though, Miller is painstakingly walking us through the familiar Homer story, and she has a disastrous tendency to smooth out the fierce, destined quality that’s so crucial to the Iliad. (To the Greeks generally, I guess.) You can see she knows it should be there, but she doesn’t manage to convey it, maybe because she’s too focused on the angelically trouble-free love between Achilles and Patroclus. It would have been much more interesting — since she’s focusing on that relationship — if the conflicts that arise at the end between Achilles and Patroclus had always been there. If Patroclus’s love for Achilles had become tinged with fear and weariness, that would have been better, I think. It would have been a good parallel for the way the Greeks began to feel about the Trojan War.

I feel I have reined in my feelings admirably while writing this review, by the way. My notes for the post say, “all feelings feelings feelings with this book and NOT ENOUGH MURDER AND SODOMY why is all this missish timidity WHERE ARE ALL THE MURDERINGS?”

But seriously. Too many feelings. Not enough murderings.

The post The Song of Achilles, Madeleine Miller appeared first on Reading the End.

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove–
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will – sing for our time too.

“Man of twists and turns” – Fagles, you sexy bastard.

My only problem is that I took Latin for eight years, Latin I took, not Greek. My visceral reactions are not perhaps along the exact lines that Homer intends. So when Athena says “I will send [Telemachus] off to Sparta and sandy Pylos”, I’m all, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Telemachus, no! Run! Don’t go where she sends you! Menelaus is in Sparta! Menelaus is the bad guy! Run away, run away! You can’t trust Athena! Don’t you remember how she made the snakes come out of her temple and eat up poor Laocoon and his two sons, all because he feared the Greeks et dona ferentes?”

And then Athena is all, “Hi, Telemachus. Here is a helpful sign from the gods. Here are some ideas for you of how to find your father again,” and Menelaus is all, “Hi, Telemachus. You have grown up so handsome. Your father was such a great guy. Can I interest you in some free stuff for your journey?”

I am #teamtrojans and have always been #teamtrojans and I will never be anything other than #teamtrojans. It is hard for me to remember that Homer, as a Greek, and Telemachus, as the son of Odysseus, are going to be #teamgreeks. I wish I could explain to them that, with one major exception either way (Odysseus is great; Paris is terrible), the Trojans are just better. Athena seems to think that we should be sorry that Agamemnon got killed, and okay, fair play to Homer and Fagles, the scene where Menelaus finds out his brother’s dead is rather affecting:

So Proteus said, and his story crushed my heart.
I knelt down in the sand and wept. I’d no desire
to go on living and see the rising light of day.
But once I’d had my fill of tears and writhing there,
the Old Man of the Sea who never lies continued,
“No more now, Menelaus. How long must you weep?
Withering tears, what good can come of tears?
None I know of. Strive instead to return
to your native country – hurry home at once!
Either you’ll find the murderer still alive
or Orestes will have beaten you to the kill.
You’ll be in time to share the funeral feast.”

But TOO BAD. Too bad for you, Menelaus! Too bad for you, Agamemnon! Agamemnon, if you will recall, killed his daughter in order to gain favorable weather conditions to go a-sailing off to plunder Troy, and then he pissed off his best warrior by stealing his girl, and then he put himself completely beyond the pale by taking my girl Cassandra home with him. Where she got killed, more or less in the crossfire, by Agamemnon’s justifiably angry wife. Ugh, I can’t stand Agamemnon.

(This passage was also the point at which I noticed that reading Homer was putting me in that special Greek ‘n’ Roman headspace that bears no relation at all to my normal morality. My sublessor, whose copy of the book I’m reading, wrote in the margin “Beaten you to the kill? What an odd way of working”, and when I read that, I scoffed and sneered and thought about how my sublessor plainly didn’t know how to please the gods, and how Odysseus would kick his sissy ass at an archery contest.)

But I love Odysseus. When Odysseus comes on screen (as it were) (or on an actual screen comme Sean Bean in Troy, and not to be critical, but why wasn’t that whole film about Sean Bean being Odysseus, when he was plainly the best thing about it?), I am suffused with feelings of joy and love. I trace this back to the Latin class I took as a high school freshman, the translations for which were all Hercules stories first semester, and all Odysseus stories second semester. Do you know how tedious it gets reading Hercules stories three days a week for eighteen weeks?

World: Here is an obstacle.
Hercules: I will punch it with my fists.

When we got to the second half of the book I was so relieved to be done with Hercules I embraced Odysseus with my whole heart. And so it is to this day. I know he didn’t have to sleep with Calypso (and there’s Penelope waiting at home), and I know he’s #teamgreeks and is directly responsible for the fall of Troy with all its contingent miseries (Andromache’s kid getting chucked off a mountain, Cassandra being sent home with Agamemnon, etc.), but what can I say? He’s better than Hercules.

(Better than Aeneas too. Don’t tell Virgil I said so.)

Check it out. He’s just washed up from being shipwrecked and tempest-tossed; he’s naked and “all crusted, caked with brine”, and he’s still a silver-tongued devil.

Here I am at your mercy, princess–
are you a goddess or a mortal? If one of the gods
who rules the skies up there, you’re Artemis to the life,
the daughter of mighty Zeus — I see her now — just look
at your build, your bearing, your lithe flowing grace…
But if you’re one of the mortals living here on earth,
three times blest are your father, your queenly mother,
three times over your brothers too. How often their hearts
must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances–
such a bloom of beauty. True, but he is the one
more blest than all other men alive, that man
who sways you with gifts and leads you home, his bride!
I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.

I am so taken with Fagles’s translation that it’s got me genuinely wondering if I read it before. I thought I had, but maybe I was thinking of someone else, someone not as good. Like Lattimore. If you have not read Homer, may I suggest you acquire Fagles’s translation and get on that right away?

Meanwhile, are you #teamtrojans or #teamgreeks, and why? I particularly want to know why if you are #teamgreeks, what with the Trojans being better and all.

The post Fagles’s Odyssey: Divided loyalties in the first quarter appeared first on Reading the End.

True story.

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