Oops, all Elden Ring 😔🤙🏽

I already answered a similar question a couple years ago (which was itself a couple years after I read it). I reread Song of Achilles today (not hard when the average paragraph is 2.5 sentences long) so I can have something solid to say, it will definitely end up retreading things I already said back them, but at least I’ll be doing so fresh instead of just going off spite-tinged memory.

The core reason I actively Hate this book is that I love the Iliad. I think it's a beautiful, devastating, fascinating piece of poetry that has so much humanity to it, and it's a shame to see it treated this way.

A lot of this is taste. I find the prose obnoxious for reasons I variably can and cannot justify beyond taste. I have the largely subjective opinion that mythological retellings, which I would never expect to be a straightforward 1:1 adaptation of the source text because what would be the point, should still be engaging with the source text in a serious manner. I want to see the same basic story transformed by new perspectives, new insight, not the same basic story rewritten to be nicer and prettier, because why bother? What are we saying when we retell the story of Medusa so that Athena actually changed her into a monster as a blessing so that she could protect herself after her rape? What are we saying when the minotaur only killed all those sacrificed kids by accident because he was so big and didn't know his own strength? What are we accomplishing by nervously edging around the parts that unsettle us or are inconvenient to us, and making these things comforting, empowering and easy to swallow? ETC. I also want to see a retelling that has an interest in the historical context it’s placed in, or else why bother setting it there? Why have a story taking place in bronze age Greece (at least the Homeric mythologized bronze age Greece) if you're not that interested in engaging with people from bronze age Greece?

I’m going to talk a lot about the differences between SOA and the Iliad, and when I do the point is not “MILLER CHANGED THINGS IN AN ADAPTATION, SO IT’S BAD!” but to comment on What changes were made for What reasons, or what changes take away things that were powerful in the source and Could be just as powerful in a novel, which is where my dislike of this book is centered.

First I'll get Technical Criticisms out of the way. I don't think this is Atrociously written, but it's middling at best and largely sloppy. It struck me as a competent author doing some stylistic experimentation that wasn't particularly successful.

The prose of this book was what made me start thinking about "quotability" when I first read it several years back. It's not the worst it gets by a LONG shot, the ability to Tell A Story is not outright sacrificed at the altar of beautiful sentences, but it comes close at times. There’s very little contrast, the prose varies from purple to purpler, we just have teeny tiny itty bitty little paragraphs that are so beautiful and evocative when you clip them into conveniently sized quotes, and form into this kinda indistinct sludge as a reader who doesn’t go through books looking for pretty little sentences that I can clip for a review or a webweaving post. The prose has two basic settings: 'scene where dialogue is happening', and 'everything else'. The latter breezes by in Patroclus' 1st person recollection, and so just about everything has the same floaty, weightless quality, just various events being broadly summarized with nice pretty words. A scene with Patroclus meandering around a battlefield in a daze with Achilles killing every man who threatens him (because of course that's how it is) is paced the same as a sex scene, or a scene where we're moving forward through years of time, or the scene where he's getting killed. Sometimes a sentence is short.

The book is paced weirdly overall too. We have a long, LONGGGGGG section in the beginning where Achilles/Patroclus relationship is established and lavished in and nothing happens besides hitting the basic marks of their backstory and having occasional romantic drama that gets immediately resolved, then the Trojan war goes by in a relative rush, and then Patroclus dies and it kinda falls apart into this alternating POV section where Achilles and Patroclus' shade will have 3 paragraphs apiece as we fucking STEAMROLL through the key events of the end of the war in a rushed summary form. It's very sloppy and most of that final act feels unnecessary because it's in service of the New conflict, which is whether Patroclus will be properly interred with Achilles or not, which was never a threat until we bring in new characters to make it so. Thetis gets a bit of a resolution and that's the only part of the first 80% of the book that still warrants any conclusion at this point.

This book, if it should ever have existed, would be least insulting to me as a vaguely Achilles/Patroclus inspired romantasy. That way Miller wouldn't have to awkwardly dance around the icky bits, or the whiplash between her characters and who they become whenever characterization needs to change to hit the Iliad's plot points. Achilles and Patroclus exist in this text as vapid tender yearning gay archetypes and romance tropes, which are then smeared on the empty carcasses of the figures in the Iliad.

In the Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship is very unique. Achilles sometimes takes on a distinctly fatherly role to him, in spite of being younger (he chidingly compares Patroclus to a little girl running to her mother when he comes to Achilles in tears over the Trojans reaching the Greek camp, an extended simile used while Achilles mourns compares him to a lion that lost its cubs), and Patroclus also vaguely takes on a domestic characteristics of a wife. They share a tent and he cooks for Achilles (in spite of Achilles having enslaved women to do it). When Achilles mourns Patroclus, he talks about his cooking, and refuses to eat or drink due to missing him. But they are also comrades and presented as nearly equals, Achilles is ‘best of the Greeks’ but Patroclus is honored along with him. Achilles fantasizes about all the Trojans and every other Greek dying so that he and Patroclus can have the glory of seizing Troy all to themselves. At the pinnacle of Achilles' grief, Patroclus is an extension of himself, "I loved him like my head, my life, myself".

We will never know if the Iliad's oral originators or Homeric recorders intended to imply sexual dimensions to their relationship that would be obvious or at least suspected by a reader/listener and didn’t need to be spelled out (some later Classical Greek and Roman era observers thought so, and were never at a consensus about whose role was whose, but they also were engaging with this story from their own cultural perspectives centuries after its recording). We don’t know if they were describing something that our cultural schema views as as romantic love. Their relationship and its purpose in the text is not About those things, if they’re present at all to begin with, but I don't think it can be fairly said that anything in the text outright precludes it. It's a serviceable choice for an adaptation. What is most important is that they love each other deeply.

Patroclus has his own unique characterization, as every focal figure in the Iliad does. He is passionate about his fellow soldiers and cares for the wounded on a few occasions, being deeply moved by their suffering. His domestic role to Achilles is does not undermine his role as a hero and a dealer of death. He is an extremely competent warrior and deadly in combat, not to the absurd degree of the demigod Achilles in his divine armor, but there’s lines upon lines of names of men he slays at his peak.

Miller takes this, hollows it out like a puppet, and makes the puppet into a soft yaoi boy, who is our first person POV character. This Patroclus is a HEALER. He’s actually BAD at fighting, he REJECTS learning soldiery, he HIDES IN HIS TENT through the various raids. He blunders aimlessly in terror through battlefields and Achilles has to protect him. He becomes a medic, stays off the battlefield, and kills no one at all in the entire war until the plot of the Iliad demands that he has to. This has the unintentional consequence of making Patroclus death like, stupiddddd. Instead of a frustrated, competent killer, distressed by imminent defeat and the sufferings of his men, taking Achilles’ place after Achilles is too stubborn to fully stop sulking in his tent, we have a tender bleeding hearted fragile gentle soul who abhors violence suddenly donning the Best Of The Greeks’ armor because Plot. Miller needs to have Achilles armor magically turn him into a competent warrior to get through that plot beat (this is implied, and then he turns into his usual quivering wreck when Apollo disarmors him). He can’t even have his backstory of exile for unintentionally killing another boy in a fight while upset over a game of dice, he’s a scrawny child who fought back against a bully trying to Take his dice. He is helpless and utterly harmless. We need to set up this beautiful dichotomy, you see... the doomed warrior who is the best fighter there is, the gentle tender souled healer that he loves....

Achilles is also a hollowed out shell, and in his case he’s been replaced with nothing in particular besides a new trait of 'trusting' that matters for about 1/3 of the book. His temper, emotional outbursts, pride, and ego (beyond a sort of bland, easy self-confidence) is absent, until we rush through the Trojan war at the end (it's not the romance novel half where we can have a million flowery scenes about how beautiful Achilles wrists and etc are and how in love they are, so we gotta knock out these plot beats fast), at which point his characterization becomes whatever the plot needs most at that moment. Achilles Suddenly can’t bear to grow old and die without renown when the prophecy is revealed to him. We don’t see him showing any particular interest in honor and fame beforehand, but now this is so utterly important to him that he chooses death and glory over long life and anonymity. We see him having an easy confidence, but never any sort of demigod self-righteousness that appears suddenly when he needs to begin butting heads with Agamemnon. This trait of his intensifies and/or comes into being every time he has to squabble with Agamemnon. When Briseis gets taken, he suddenly develops immense concern about being dishonored by the theft of his trophy (up until now Briseis was freed and has been part of his happy little family as an equal, more on that later) to the point of begging his mother to get Zeus to curse the Greeks to punish them by defeat without his help, because plot. He abruptly gets darker and angrier when he's needed to. Patroclus, who is helplessly in love with him and worships the ground he walks on, is only disturbed by this, where has his sweet tender Achilles gone? Never really angry (except in I think one moment where his POV says "I was almost angry but then wasn't)" until it's needed once for Plot.

(As a side note, Patroclus has zero meaningful relationships with any other of the men, and is often viewed by others like Achilles' servant and not particularly respected. We need this for tender yearning worship of his lover like a god and etc. It isn't tender and worshipful enough if their dynamic is more nuanced and Patroclus has emotional investment in his other comrades and is a respected figure in his own right).

It is repeatedly invoked that their society is homophobic, but it doesn't particularly affect either of them in any way. We don't get to see how that affects their self-image, or how they got to a point where it doesn't. Patroclus' POV blandly acknowledges that his role is considered unmanly, and waves it aside. It dimly implies that Achilles is too self-assured to feel anything about it. That's all we get. Taking the opportunity for your gay Achilles/Patroclus retelling to try and flesh out these men and how they relate to each other and the world around them, besides being in love and utterly devoted to each other, would take too much time out of yet another lavish description of how fawn soft Achilles' neck skin is whatever.

Thetis is eviscerated to make her into an overarching villain, until she changes her mind in the last few pages. The contrast between the poem's deity mother in continuous mourning of her doomed mortal son and the eerie fish bitch of the book is incredible. She HATES Patroclus and does everything she can to separate him from Achilles, causing the occasional 2-3 pages of weightless drama during the first half of the book (Achilles tutelage under Chiron is an attempt to separate them, and his hiding away on Scyros is that in part). She is homophobic, which I wouldn't be bothered by if this book bothered to examine how being gay impacted Achilles and Patroclus' self-perception at all, but it doesn't really, so she's mainly just homophobic to be the love story's villain. She makes him marry and have sex with Dedameia in a manner that vaguely invokes corrective rape (Deidameia is also a little bitch obstacle mostly, though there's a sort of a brief attempt at humanizing her and then she pushes herself on Patroclus and then she's gone). We never get to understand why her son loves her so much, or why/whether she loves him. Every gesture of love and anguish over her doomed mortal son is tinged by her being a Patroclus Hater. Her last exchange with Achilles is telling him how disappointed she is in him. In another book, I'd find it interesting for her to have a more complicated relationship with her mortal son/product of rape than "waiting just off shore to come see him whenever he starts crying or being pissed off" that she is in the poem, maybe even along similar Basic lines to SOA's approach (without the Patroclus Hater part probably). But that is not this book. In classic yaoi romance form, she fills one of the two main archetypes for female characters, which are "evil bitch who is an obstacle for the main romance" and "nonthreatening best friend".

Briseis is the 'nonthreatening best friend'. She has become a peasant girl instead of an aristocrat for whatever reason, I'm struggling to come up with why, beyond that she eventually goes on walks in the woods with Patroclus and helps him find native medicinal plants, so maybe that's it. She is a strong, bland concept of a young woman. Achilles claims her as his trophy to protect her from Agamemnon, and after some initial persuasion, she realizes she's safe with her captors, and they become the best of friends. She merrily goes on a walks with Patroclus and chats about Achilles with him, and later she gives exposition about Helen, and later she makes a pass at Patroclus and graciously accepts his rejection, she faces her captivity by Agamemnon bravely and doesn't blame Patroclus at all. She's vaguely Strong and Smart but never challenges them in any way, neither is her lack of challenge against the men from the army that slaughtered her family acknowledged as Meaningful. I don't Think her murdered husband or brothers are ever mentioned, she's just free-floating and happily has no attachments outside of her yaoi boy captors. Briseis is like a sister to Patroclus and they're all equals, and then she plays her Iliad plot role and then she gets an Empowered Girlboss Death instead of being sold off to one of Achilles' men after his demise. More on this in a moment.

Achilles and Patroclus appear to have more or less teleported in from the 21st century, at least except for the parts where Achilles has to participate in the Iliad's main plot beats, at which point he bears a fleeting resemblance to his Homeric counterpart. Patroclus blanches at the thought of the army engaging in siege warfare and killing farmers with their raid parties. It’s like he’s never even heard of the concept, it's alien to him. We are never given any particular reason why Achilles and Patroclus alone are hostile to the enslavement of female captives, which is utterly normal to everyone else. We don't even try for an excuse of something like, them developing empathy with an enslaved girl in their household as children and becoming unwilling to stomach it, or having exposure to people critical of the institution of chattel slavery. It's not even a question that they will be the saviors of their slaves, their gut impulse is to save Briseis from Agamemnon and then free (?) her (it's kinda unclear because she's still like, stuck with them and is still his 'trophy'). The reason that they are completely free of their slave society's social norms (until the plot demands otherwise from Achilles) seems to be that There Gay, which of course not only makes them unwilling to engage in any form of wartime sexual/other violence against their enemy's women, but also makes them unwilling to exploit their slave women for domestic labor.

So here's the absolute biggest single reason why I hate this book:

I am dead serious when I say that I find the Iliad, a text recorded by a strictly patriarchal slave society, humanizes its enslaved women more than Song of Achilles does. The bar is 6 feet below the fucking ground, to be clear, but the Song of Achilles manages to dig a tunnel under it. Sure, Briseis gets to be a character instead of the speaker for one passage, but she's just a prop for our main characters to look good and has no purpose or interests beyond them. Classic nonthreatening best friend to the more important yaoi romance stuff, made so much worse by the fact that she's a slave.

The section in the Iliad where Briseis has her only speaking role uses it to mourn Patroclus, and also to describe her own circumstances, the slaying of her husband and brothers as she was taken captive. She describes Patroclus as the kindest of her captors and notes that he intended to have her married to Achilles. For a woman in her position, being the free wife (for what little that means) of one of her captors is a lesser evil than other, much more likely circumstances. It is believable that this could be a tiny ray of hope to someone whose future is hopeless, either way she will be taken away from everything she knows and in the service of one of her captors, and this path is the one that would at least give her some semblance of dignity and PERSONHOOD. It actually feels like rich grounds for adaptation, in the way it implies this ugly dynamic in which she has clung onto the only one of her captors offering anything resembling a way out, she has found him kindest of all of them and that’s all the lifeline she has. (I think the handling of Briseis and Patroclus’ relationship in Silence of the Girls was one of its legit strengths and an aspect I really liked, but it’s been a while and my first reading of it was colored by having read SOA just before and finding literally anything to be a nuanced masterpiece by comparison. He IS 'kind' to her and reaches out with an attempt to empathize by being like 'yknow I'm kind of Achilles' captive too, in a way', and it's so absurd to say to a slave and utterly insufficient, and also strikes as entirely genuine and real for a man in his position. I believed that this is the Patroclus that Briseis of the Iliad fears for her future without).

There is one little line in the Iliad which describes Achilles and Patroclus’ other enslaved woman performing ritual lamentation. 'Using the lamentation for Patroclus, each of the women wept for their own troubles'. I think its an unsung heartrending moment in this text. The Iliad barely gives a shit about the enslaved women, to be clear, but the one time it does give you a little look into their condition, they are using the one outlet of emotional outpouring available to them to really cry, and this outlet is the funeral of one of their captors. You can imagine them thinking about their unmourned loved ones killed in the raids and sackings that lead to their captivity, or just taking the moment to mourn for themselves, for family who is dead or enslaved somewhere else, for the horror of it all. They have the opportunity to put on the ritual show of mourning, and this is the one thing they have right now and it’s almost nothing but they’re taking it. I wholly believe the way I receive this is intentional and would have meant something Basically similar to its Homeric Greek audience, it’s not there to say the women were selfishly mourning their own little problems instead of the great Patroclus, this was a patriarchal slaveowning society whose women experienced this same threat in warfare with other patriarchal slave owners. The women "wept for their own troubles" and the audience understands what this means.

So anyway, Song of Achilles would be better off as a weightless romantasy, but it’s an adaptation of the Iliad so there’s an issue- all those captured sex slaves that our heroes own! It’s easy enough to brush aside the slaves in Achilles household at the beginning, just bring them out to play their role of showing that Patroclus is gay because he doesn’t want to rape them, show that their circumstances are really sad, then let them fade into nothingness again. But the inciting incident of the Iliad is Achilles' human trophy Briseis being stolen from him! We can’t just ignore her so easily. But we obviously cannot have our soft yaoi boys be complicit in this nightmare, so instead they are actually going to be their slave’s Protectors. They take women to Protect them from the other men. Briseis and Patroclus become best friends, like brother and sister, even.

The enslaved girls are props to make the protagonists look good. And like, okay, I would never accept Achilles and Patroclus being made into the Benevolent Slave Owners who just want to protect the girls to begin with, but what makes it truly awful to me is that after that point, the girls are like. Fine. Happy and healthy. I could believe that some of these girls taken captive after the slaughter of their families, enslaved in an enemy camp, could warily trust captors who treated them with the most relative "kindness" that can be said of this situation. I can believe that some of them might eventually feel some friendship towards them, at least attachment, god knows someone in that situation would have very little else to cling to, and clinging to the men that have the power to stand between you and the fate of other girls and women around you is entirely believable. But they're in an enemy war camp, kidnapped and separated from their families after most likely watching their male relatives be slaughtered, seeing and hearing other captives be raped and humiliated and forced into labor. But the text doesn't acknowledge All This affecting them at all. There's also no hints of resentment from the girls that Achilles and Patroclus are foreign invaders who are waging a war against their people and are party to the massacre of their families and their enslavement. Once the girls initially coaxed into feeling safe with the benevolence of their gay slave owners, they're just chilling. There is not an INSTANT where the ongoing horror of the enslaved women's situation is presented as a possibility, no crying, no fear, no nightmares, no staring into space. Not even to make Patroclus look good by comforting them or something, because I guess that would still be too much acknowledgment that the benevolence of their captors means absolutely nothing in the big picture. They host dinners in Achilles' tent and it's kind of like a big family!! They Choose to get married to various Myrmidons and quietly disappear into nothingness again, that little inconvenience settled away. (again I Think they were supposed to have been immediately granted manumission, but then it's kind of unclear since Briseis still is functional as Achilles 'trophy' years after her capture and none of the women Leave or are entertained as wanting to, and there's no acknowledgment of what it means that they have nowhere to go and no better choice than stay in their enemy's war camp).

The enslaved women are absolutely nothing but props. It's fucking revolting and I hate this book.

FINAL JUDGMENT:

I think this page summarizes this book best

O Horn-deck’d beast, from higher sphere deliver’d.

Take root inside the tower’s sculpted keepers.

🏵️ Ceramic hummingbird hawk-moth sculpture 🏵️