The Song of Achilles (P.S.) [Versión Kindle]

Within the first ten pages, Madeline Miller's "Song of Achilles" jumped into my favorite books list.

She retells the Trojan War, using Patroclus as the narrator. As when the film "Troy" came out, we know how sadly this story is going to end. But in Miller's hands, the "Song of Achilles" is fresh, new, exciting, and still heartbreaking.

The early chapters give us a chance to know the insecurities of Patroclus, who feels he is not worthy to be a prince. When he is sent into exile, he meets Achilles. They are just boys. Achilles is already at the top of the pack in looks and natural leadership. When Patroclus follows Achilles to the tutoring of Chiron, the centaur, their training draws them closer. Their adolescence draws them closer. They begin to understand the nature of love between them.

Miller makes good use of our preconceived notions about the Greek and Trojan heroes, and then adds new details to set them apart. Odysseus loves his wife, Penelope, in a way none of the other men understand. Hector, the Trojan hero, is stalwart and good, placing family first. Paris, the pretty boy, gets less of the blame for stealing Helen, than the mischievous Greek gods do.

The Iliad begins with the invocation to the Muse:
"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation,. . . "

In "Song of Achilles," Achilles is not simply an angry, pouting, spoiled brat. He is a fully rounded figure, someone interested in music, his army, and even the conditions under which the slave girls are kept.

Which brings us to the point of contention between Achilles and Agamemnon, Briseis. She is more than a captured sex slave in Miller's telling. She is smart, funny, warm, willing to love the right man. That she falls in love with the wrong man, with all the hurt that entails, is wistfully told.

Madeline Miller says on the back jacket, "It has been the deepest privilege and pleasure to spend the last ten years sailing Homer's wine-dark waters." It was certainly my privilege to read this new and compelling interpretation of the heroes of the Trojan War. Miller's style is spare, clear, innovative, and vivid. This is a book not to be missed, especially for those readers for whom the myths are the cornerstone of all storytelling.

I care a lot about Achilles and Patroclus. My honors thesis topic, which I've been working on for the past seven months, is "Representations of Achilles and Patroclus in Post-Homeric Literature." So I'm pretty heavily invested here.

I hate this book.

I wanted to like it, I really did. But I can't, because it fails in every possible way to live up to its source material. And maybe it's not fair to blame someone for failing to be as good as Homer, but hey, I think you're asking for it if you write a novel based on the Iliad. Now, obviously when someone adapts a story, it's not going to turn out like the original. Details will be changed, different things will be emphasized, perspectives will shift. This is fine. This is how literature works. But that doesn't mean all adaptations are created equal.

Madeleine Miller has made several choices in this novel that I don't like. I feel that it was unnecessary to turn Thetis into a psychotic bitch, and that to portray Patroclus as an incompetent warrior does a disservice to a character whose charge at the walls of Troy was only stopped when Apollo came down onto the battlefield and punched him the head. No, Patroclus is not as skilled as Achilles, but then NO ONE IS. That's what "Best of the Achaeans" means. Menoetius' utter lack of likable characteristics was similarly unwarranted.

But the worst thing about this book is the characterization of Achilles.

Homer's Achilles is a deeply flawed hero. He's a brilliant fighter, but he's arrogant, petulant, violent, and selfish. He would be completely unsympathetic, except for the fact that he is also capable of extraordinary tenderness and compassion. His tragedy is that all of his emotions, his rage, his love, his pain, are larger than life and impossible for him to control. He is caught between his half-divine nature and his mortality, and it torments him.

Madeleine Miller's Achilles is a cardboard cutout. He's beautiful and brilliant, but it's all glitter and no substance. The complexity of his agony is absent. None of his actions seem to have sufficient motivation, because he is completely two-dimensional. His love for Patroclus is therefore unconvincing, and the emotional arc of the book fails to deliver its catharsis.

To cap my irritation, large chunks of the last quarter of this novel consist of paraphrased scenes from the Iliad that have been watered down and simplified. The rendition of the embassy scene in Book 9 was particularly egregious. Gone is the intricate thematic interplay, the questioning of the heroic code, the search for the truth of human nature. What's left over is...really not worth remarking upon.

I think the love story of Achilles and Patroclus is beautiful, but this is not that story.

In THE SONG OF ACHILLES, Madeline Miller tells the story of Patroclus, Achilles' friend and companion from THE ILIAD, in spare, eloquent language reminiscent of Mary Renault's THE KING MUST DIE and BULL FROM THE SEA. This is an age when gods and their offspring walk among men, although young Patroclus --undersized and not much good at any of the manly activities his royal father values -- has little hope of any sort of glorious future. That changes when he accidentally kills another boy and is exiled to Phthia, where he becomes one of the many wards of King Peleus. Peleus's youthful son, the impossibly magnificent Achilles, is drawn to awkward young Patroclus who unlike the other boys won't kowtow to him. Miller gives us Patroclus's view of their education by the centaur Chiron, the disapproval of Achilles' terrifying mother (the sea-nymph Thetis), Spartan king Menelaus's call to recapture his runaway wife Helen from the Trojans, and of course the Trojan War itself. Hanging over Achilles' and Patroclus's heads is a prophecy that Achilles will die young, but only after the death of the bravest of the Trojans, Hector. The sequence of events that lead to this prophecy's fulfillment is heroic, horrible, and heartbreaking, and makes THE SONG OF ACHILLES one of the most moving love stories ever. When I closed the book, I was as dazed as if I had been part of the story myself, and I could not sleep for hours afterward.

If Homer had been a woman, this is the way he'd have told the story.