A Review by Neha Raj, III BA English

First things first, this is going to be a highly subjective review of a novel called The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Disclaimer: All the things said are based on personal reading experience and freedom of speech is to be valued. Also, there are major spoilers ahead. So if you are planning to read it, just stop right here. 

When my friends were all waterfalls about Looking for Alaska and The Fault in our Stars, my eyes were, to be honest, mostly dry; the perpetual mourning following Matthias’ death in Six of Crows could barely wet the surface of my eyeballs; and Murakami, perhaps, came close in making me feel depressed with his ‘Toru’s, frequently disappearing cats, weird sex and with that whole sinister magic realism blended with umpteen images of loneliness. I might possibly strike you all as a murderous, cold human turned to stone by Medusa for good, but the truth is that I have a heart of a fruit fly – strength-wise. I believe the only feather in my cap is that I am a dangerous fan of Murakami, Plath, Salinger and people like Hosseini for that matter. Their books are monumentally depressing and faithful manifestations of how vile and dismal life can be at times. They offer us these unfortunate and unfavorable landscapes that we would never want to trek or acknowledge in our own lives but still would want to read, know and understand. Death, madness, fate, agony and heartache are some of the things that we would all love to see in a Netflix series or read in a Nicholas Sparks novel, but not so much in real life. Or so I used to think until I read The Song of Achilles, which, if I had to put it in one word– shattered me. The book, along with that, did three other things, out of which – two I will be eternally grateful, and one – not so much. First, Patroclus’ story was something that I wanted to be my own, from the excruciating restricted love-story to the horrendous Trojan gore. I understood what Miller meant, in its all forms, when she wrote, “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.” Second, as novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid puts it effortlessly, “I threw myself into ancient Greece” after reading her books. Third, I unfortunately cannot see the movie Troy anymore with Brad Pitt as Achilles and Patroclus as some sort of cousin of his or any retellings that claim Achilles and Patroclus were not lovers but rather ‘cousins’ or ‘close-companions’.

Not that this is relevant in any way or has anything to do with the review of the book, but I also somehow started to hate the fact that I am actually straight. Ah, talk about the perks of a good modern young adult version of an ancient epic.

Enough with the drama, let’s dive straight into the song sung. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a retelling of The Iliad by Homer in the age of heroes. Written from the perspective of an exiled ‘awkward’ prince Patroclus, an important yet shadowy character in The Iliad, it is a devastating love story between him and the mighty Achilles. Miller started writing this novel in her early twenties when she was still doing her undergraduate degree in Latin and Ancient Greek at Brown University, Rhode Island. It almost took her ten years to complete the novel, same as the Trojan War – from which she intelligibly and beautifully draws her story. It was the bestselling novel of 2011 and won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2012, making her the fourth debut novelist to win the prize. She said in an interview that she had completed the final draft of the novel in the fifth year, but later discarded it and started it from scratch. You have to give it to her since it is some risky move for a writer. The story breathes life when Patroclus, son of King Menoitius, is exiled from his own palace for killing a boy accidentally over an argument. He is sent to King Peleus’ court to be raised and trained as a soldier:

I discovered that I was not the only foster child of Peleus. The modest king turned out to be rich in cast-off sons…Afterwards we were led into the dusty sun of the practice yards for training in spear and sword. Here is where I tasted the full truth of Peleus’ kindness: well-trained and indebted, we would one day make him a fine army.

Peleus’ son Achilles, the demigod, the blessed and the cursed, befriends the sulking and shamed prince, who in turn falls in love with him.  Much to his surprise, Achilles returns his affection and the two boys move against all odds that try to keep them apart, which is mostly Achilles’ mother – Thetis, a lesser goddess and a sea-nymph. Throughout the novel Achilles remains a figure of worship, beauty and mystery to Patroclus: “Then I turned to look at him. He was on his side, watching me. I had not heard him turn. I never hear him […] All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet”. But surprisingly at the same time it is Patroclus himself who reminds us that they were after all, two boys in love and Achilles – just another pawn in the dirty game played by the Greek Gods and Goddesses: “I tried to imagine him bloodied and murderous after his first raid tomorrow. ‘Are you frightened?’ I asked. ‘No’ he answered. ‘This is what I was born for’”. Another weapon merely born to kill and suffer a profane prophecy like all Greek heroes. Word spreads quickly about Helen of Sparta being abducted by Paris, son of King Priam and Prince of Troy. Both, Patroclus and Achilles are fated to go, live and die in the war that follows. Thetis sends Achilles away to a kingdom called Sycros where she marries him off secretly to Deidameia, daughter of Lycomedes , in hopes of saving her son from the prophecy of his death and partly to separate him from Patroclus as well, the mortal whom she despises more than her own mortal husband. He is forced to dress as a girl to remain hidden, but sadly for her, not from Patroclus’ eyes: “I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”

We all know Patroclus must die in disguise as Achilles in order to drive him mad to the edge of the world and slaughter Hector and his pitiful Trojans like pricking a water balloon. Being obviously unaware of this, Patroclus dreads for Achilles’ life since he knows he will never return from Troy. The novel employs Patroclus as a posthumous onlooker of events after his own death, one of two things that I was extremely satisfied and emotional about. I couldn’t have imagined the rest of the story coming from someone else other than him. One of my friends suggested it should have been Odysseus, little does she know that I detest that trickster more than Dolores Umbridge. The second thing? The ending. Satisfaction of the highest order. Breathtaking and absolutely just. That sums it up right.

The portrayal of Aristos Achaion or Achilles is subverted from a grenade in Homer’s Iliad to a more or less humane hero. Madeline Miller says in her interview with Judith Starkson:

Here is a character who is the fiercest killing-machine the Greeks have. But he is also a beautiful singer, an artist of the highest order. I wanted to capture that depth in his personality: if he had not been Achilles, he might have been another Orpheus. Perhaps as an extension of that, I discovered as I wrote that there is a real innocence to Achilles. At least in my novel, he has a native generosity. This is set against his divine, self-absorbed nature, and it doesn’t always win out. But it does exist; he is never purposely cruel, and the cruelty of others often shocks him.

There are also sources which claim that Achilles is actually no better than his merciless, brutal son Neoptolemus aka Pyrrhus, if not for his lover Patroclus. I think she revealed to us an affectionate lover beneath that barbarianism and body-numbing ferity. Retellings are all about giving voice to characters who never had any, to make us see things from a different angle. Miller as a child was profoundly curious over the character of Patroclus as well; she says, the more she thought about the character of Patroclus:

the more intensely moved I was. He’s referred to in ‘The Iliad’ as gentle, and that really jumped out at me, because gentleness was not a common quality of these ancient Greek heroes. And then I thought, we’re in this culture of intense excellence, where being the best was so important, and he was OK with Achilles being the best, and being his companion and being in his shadow. That doesn’t bother him, so again, that made him extraordinary. I really thought: I want to give this amazing man his voice.

And that is precisely what she does. Patroclus’ love for Achilles is matchless. Some critics argue that the title of the novel is slightly misleading since it is The Song of Achilles and the idea of the whole novel was to represent a previously non-represented character Patroclus. But it is through his eyes we get to understand how teenage and helpless even a half-God can be. It is who Patroclus was and meant to Achilles that unleashes his fury and becomes the burning core of the knife-sharp words to dying Hector. Hector pleads to give his body back to his family when Achilles has killed him, to which he replies: “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw”. It is indeed the song sung by Patroclus that makes his dearest and other characters in the original epic appear like actual people. The novel clearly paints a picture of The Iliad of not being synonymous only with the legend of Achilles, through the point of view Patroclus, his life and his relation with warriors and other ostracized characters.

The novel intricately weaves the tale of intensity between them, and I assure you without any room for doubt, this is one of the best romance novels that I have ever read. There is this anti-war theme running throughout the novel if one chooses to see it, along with the evident exploration and celebration of one’s sexuality. There also comes, like in all Greek stories and its retellings, the dilemma of free will and destiny. The choice between war, bloodshed and peace is very conspicuous in the novel: it is peace and the power of love. We understand how Achilles and Patroclus wanted nothing to do with the war until fate demanded them to do so. What better way to acknowledge that than reading the lines uttered by Patroclus and Achilles when they learn that the latter is fated to die after Hector is killed by him. Patroclus rationally concludes after hearing the prophecy: “You must not kill Hector”. To which Achilles asks, tearing up the readers, again and again, “What has Hector ever done to me?”. Even in the end, it is not Aristos Achaion’s brave, heroic moments that serve justice to his memory but rather the lingering moments of love and life remembered by his most beloved ‘Pa-tro-clus’, the best of Myrmidons. Thetis finally realizes who her son really was: a gentle soul capable of love and warmth and not a just tool for savagery. The novel also sheds light on difficulties of single parenting and parental love, a recurring theme in Miller’s novels and novellas. Thetis, the goddess mother of Achilles,  who would go to any extent to protect her son (parenting abilities can be called into questioning though, as she turns Achilles’ and Deidameia’s son Pyrrhus into an uncanny twin of Joffrey from Game of Thrones); Priam, father of Hector and King of Troy, who risks his life by entering the camp of the enemy to beg for  his son’s corpse (perhaps one of the most emotional, delicate and honorable scenes in the history literature); Lycomedes, father of Deidameia, who is helpless in all ways; Chiron, the centaur, who becomes a father figure to Patroclus so much so that he uses the name Chironides, son of Chiron, to disguise himself in the court of Lycomedes. All the papa birds and mama birds trying to protect their young ones from a dreadful present or an afterlife without peace.

Miller’s prose is magnificently poetic in nature. It is simplistic and has smart usage of language which can appease readers of all age groups. The crafting of different sets of characters and the tales associated with them is quick and crisp. She has proved herself as a master storyteller who can churn out a modern text of ‘feel’ and elegancy from an ancient myth. I was introduced to her with her much awaited novel Circe last year by a friend, which is actually a retelling of The Odyssey from the point of view of the enchantress and goddess Circe. I instantly fell in love with the narrative style which has a divine quality to it. It flows like clear water lit silver by sunlight among cool rocks and gravel. I know, I am a Homer myself. The lyric quality of her work is made evident from Briseis’ initial words being described as “new leather, still and precise, not yet run together with use”. And perhaps even more by these lines which KILLED ME:

I have done it,” she says. At first, I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.
“Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”
In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

As you might guess, I am a little obsessed with this book. I recommend it to everyone who is into Greek mythology, because Madeline Miller is certainly not an author to be missed if you are. It is actually quite difficult to put into words how I feel about this book. When I try, it comes out as juicy and cliché, which is why I would like to keep it to myself and ask you folks to read it yourself. I loved it so much that I engulfed the whole novel in a couple of hours and then mourned like a child. The book sure has invited divided opinions regarding its themes, deviation from the mother text and the language employed, but I believe Miller’s ten years spent for the making of this novel turned out to be a work of tremendous success.  It is a work of finesse and pure beauty, one would absolutely not regret reading it.