I first encountered The Iliad through
Roger Lancelyn Green’s accessible retelling for children, The Tale of Troy, and
graduated as a teenager to Adele Geras’s excellent young adult novel, Troy, which
focuses on the experiences of the Trojans rather than the Greeks. Perhaps this
could be seen as the adult counterpart to those retellings, the third of the
trilogy; it certainly illuminated aspects of the story I hadn’t considered or
heard about before, despite my reservations before beginning this novel that I
would find the siege of Troy over-familiar.
Unlike Homer, Madeline Miller starts her story
long before Troy is besieged, when Helen is still unmarried and being courted
by a number of suitors, amongst them Patroclus, who narrates the story, then a
nine-year-old boy who has been forced to join the group by his forbidding
father. The courting of Helen was the first of the scenes that I had never seen
played out fully in a retelling, and it forms an elegant beginning to this
book, which opens almost in folktale mode. ‘My father was a king and a son
of kings’, Patroclus tells us, and the formal procession of suitors, and
Odysseus’s ruse to allow Helen to choose for herself, reminded me of a
traditional tale-structure; one expects the setting of three tasks, a search
for a golden apple, rather than the simple awarding of Helen to Menelaus. The
closing of this scene makes the first of Miller’s frequent, and seamless,
switches between different modes of storytelling. As Patroclus grows up, we
embark upon a more naturalistic apprenticeship narrative, as he is exiled from
his own kingdom and befriends the young Achilles, and they both go to train
under the centaur, Chiron – although the ever-present threat of Achilles’
mother, the sea goddess Thetis, adds a supernatural element that occasionally
seems jarring when Miller is focused on the more mundane growing pains of two
boys.
And after Achilles and Patroclus fall in love,
the story frequently foregrounds the lyric, the style that Miller has said that
she sought for Patroclus’s voice throughout the tale, rather than writing an
epic Homeric pastiche. There is, indeed, very little of the epic in this story,
primarily because of Patroclus’s intense human sympathy and fellow-feeling for
those suffering. In his world, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, for example, is no
longer a voluntary act, but coercive: ‘She choked, tried to speak, could
not. Her body thrashed and writhed, but the hands of the king pinned her
down... Iphigenia had known, [Agamemnon] said, had agreed to do it. Most men
had not been close enough to see the startled panic in her eyes. Gratefully,
they believed their general’s lie.’ This softening of the harsh
classical belief systems of honour and sacrifice is also evident in a scene
much later in the novel, when Achilles refuses to fight for the Greeks, and
Patroclus puts on his armour and goes in his place. In The Iliad, Achilles
is worried that Patroclus will take the honour that should be his, but in The
Song of Achilles, he’s simply concerned for the safety of his lover: ‘You
cannot fight... it is too dangerous... Swear to me. Swear to me that if you go
you will not fight them.’ Patroclus’s humane retelling also casts new light
on Briseis, Achilles’ captured slave-girl; he explains that Achilles only took
her as part of his division of the spoils because Patroclus wanted to save her
from rape by another soldier.
I wasn’t sure what I felt about Miller’s
decision to reinterpret the classical tale in this way. On one hand, as
Victoria noted in her excellent review at Eve’s Alexandria, the
story must be re-interpreted for a modern audience, or there is no point in
retelling it at all; we no longer understand stories in the way the Ancient
Greeks did, and Miller is enormously successful in recreating a gripping epic
in a very modern voice. On the other hand, I would have liked to see her face
head-on the importance of honour and sacrifice in this culture, and made
Achilles and Patroclus sympathetic in spite of this, rather than simply
removing the obstacles to our identification with them. She shows that she is
capable of this in an earlier scene, when Achilles wrestles between his very
human love for Patroclus, and his godlike destiny. He has been told that if he
goes to fight at Troy, he will die there, but if he does not go: ‘“... your
godhead will wither in you, unused. Your strength will diminish. At best, you
will be like Lycomedes here, mouldering on a forgotten island... He can live
out his years in some corner eating the bread they soften for him, senile and
alone. When he dies, people will say, who?” The words filled the room,
thinning the air until we could not breathe. Such a life was a horror.’ And
we believe that it is; and we understand Achilles’ choice to go to Troy, even
when he might live a long life with his lover.
My objections here are not because I think that
this retelling is historically inaccurate – what does that mean, in this
context? – but because I felt that Miller could have made this story even more
interesting than it already is. Patroclus’s modern values make Achilles and
Patroclus feel sundered, set apart from the rest of the classical-minded
Greeks, and I wanted to feel that they were part of that culture, even if their
homosexual relationship differentiated them from the other men. But to say this
is not to imply that this novel is a failure. I enjoyed it immensely. Miller
has a wonderful command of the pace, letting the story lull and loiter, at
certain points, only to engage the reader’s interest more strongly when the
next part of the tale kicks into action. There are several mini-stories told
throughout the novel; Patroclus’s childhood; training with Chiron; journey to
Troy; the saga of Briseis; Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon; and Miller unites
them beautifully, but lets each tale complete itself before going onto the
next. The most resonant scene in the novel, for me, was the well-known sequence
where King Priam comes to beg Achilles for his son’s body; a scene that is
powerful because it has equal resonance for a modern and classical audience, I
imagine. ‘It is right to seek peace for the dead,’ Priam tells the
bereaved Achilles. ‘You and I both know there is no peace for those who live
after.’
This book is a worthy contender for the Orange
Prize, and the only reason it isn’t my instant favourite to win is because I
loved State of Wonder even more. Nevertheless, I’ve heard Miller is
working on a retelling of The Odyssey, and I’m very excited, not least
because Odysseus is fantastic in this. Highly recommended.
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