#readagain

#1 The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

This is Miller's debut novel. She has a Masters in classics and was a Greek and was a Latin teacher for many years, so she knows a thing or two about the world she's creating in the book. It’s won the Orange Prize (now called Women's Prize for Fiction) for it in 2012, a prestigious achievement for a debutante.

The novel, despite its name, is not mainly about Achilles, the Greek hero, but about another little known character whose name was mostly lost in the rustle of the turning pages of Iliad, so to speak: Patroclus. He's portrayed in Iliad as Achilles' distant cousin. 

During the Trojan war, as the story goes, Achilles lays down his sword and refuses to fight owing to a perceived slight from Agamemnon, the Greek commander - and watches in supercilious amusement as the Greek army is routed by the Trojans, led by Hector, in his absence. Patroclus tries to persuade Achilles to fight and, failing, seeks permission to wear Achilles’ armor to the front lines of the Greek army - a trick to dissuade the Trojans from becoming too adventurous. Achilles reluctantly accedes, with the stern instruction that Patroclus will not fight. Patroclus succeeds in his ploy and rallies the Greek army, which beats back the Trojans - but then, he runs into Hector. He is killed.

Later, back in the Greek camp, Achilles goes berserk with fury when he hears the news of Patroclus' death. He finds Hector, kills him, drags the body behind his chariot back to Greek lines. He doesn't come to his senses until Priam, the Trojan king and Hector's father, comes to him to beg for the body. 

So much for Iliad. Achilles is the hero of Iliad, and Patroclus isn't much more than an excuse for setting the scene to showcase Achilles' valor. One could stop at that, and snap the ancient book shut, thoughts thrilling with the deeds of the warriors. But, as I like to imagine, this novelist took her woman's intuition to Iliad, and asked a question: Why would Achilles, the son of a goddess and already the hero of war songs of his day, go berserk at the death of one person? What drove him to the extreme cruelty that he displayed?

Hector in Iliad is no slouch, he's almost on par with Achilles in valor, but on the fateful day he meets Achilles for the final battle, he takes one look at the flaming face of Achilles and sees his nemesis. He then, contrary to all expectation, tells Achilles, 'I will make a pact with you - to pledge that the winner will allow the loser all the proper funeral rituals...', to which Achilles answers terribly, with words that have entered the cliché dictionary: 'There are no pacts between lions and men.' The actual words in Iliad are longer, though the movie Troy is more to the point. So the question the novelist asked was: Why would the death of Patroclus turn Achilles, a chivalrous hero, into a beast? And she answered: it wasn't just another person who got killed. Patroclus and Achilles were lovers.

This was a risky premise, not because it is not plausible - Miller in later interviews has quoted Plato, and other sources, to support this. It was risky because this premise would lead to a gay novel written by a woman.