Spoiler alerts for a Bronze Age epic poem, I guess, also content note for discussion of sex in this review.
I liked this but I didn’t love it. Homer’s Iliad is about blood and fire and gods and fate, about a war that made heroes and villains into legends that echoed through the ages (and sometimes switched their positions). The Song of Achilles is about one of these heroes, the titular Achilles, he of the heel, and his lover Patroclus, and it’s…sweet? And (rather surprisingly) a little bloodless? Punctuated by wistful gazes rather than thundering pulses?
I grew up reading classical myths and histories, and studied a little archaeology during my liberal arts undergrad years. I’m currently–slowly–reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad, which brings verve and sharpness to verses calcified through repetition. The Song of Achilles, though, seems like a high school romance between a jock and a geek, with the Trojan War as the Big Game, and the sexual tension and gore of an episode of Glee. I genuinely don’t know if this is an attempt to show the characters’ naivety and add poignance to the homey little life that Achilles and Patroclus carve out for themselves amid the carnage, but it doesn’t really fit the milieu–I’m not saying that every book based on Greek myth needs to be heaving with sex and violence, especially if it’s for kids or young adults, or that sweetness is incompatible with f*cking, but the smoothing out and euphemising of desire and bloodlust, in a novel set in classical Greece of all places, and aimed, as far as I can tell, at adults, is a choice that doesn’t fully make sense to me. I would wonder if this discretion is because historical romance between men might be more palatable for the heteronormative consumer if it’s kisses and allusion rather than graphic sexual acts, but I remember thinking this when reading Miller’s later novel Circe (2018), about Circe the enchantress and Odysseus, as well.
I think another issue for me is the timeline–the ten years of the war are skipped through pretty fast, and Achilles and Patroclus are basically frozen as teenaged characters from the moment the first spear is hurled–and again, this might be intentional, the fact that they are not able to grow up and develop their relationship within this extreme and violent environment. Their main crisis is Patroclus coming to terms with the fact that Achilles was born and bred to be a killer, and that passes pretty quickly. Their devotion to each other is never really in question, although Miller does throw in a couple of potential distractions their way. Also it bothers me that there are phrases in Greek in the text but she uses the Latinised versions of Pátroklos and Akhileús.
Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh; there are some lovely moments between Achilles and Patroclus, especially when they’re up on a mountain with the centaur Chiron and first discovering each other, and the initial moment of the arrival on the shores of Troy does have some epic grandeur. I read the book in a couple of sittings, which is rare for me these days. I think I just wanted to be overwhelmed, but ended up…whelmed. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for “sweet”.
Title quote from “Sunburn” by Muse, with gender amended.