The Song of Achilles

This probably isn't a book I would've read on my own but my queer/fantasy book club was reading it so I gave it a whirl and found it enjoyable. It was a quick read and, having not been assigned The Illiad for required reading in school (we read The Odyssey), I realized I wasn't actually that familiar with the source material beyond flashback to the atrocious film Troy.

The love story is the root of everything and it's handled very well. I'm particularly fond of the subtleties in how the characters change over time from their youth into young adulthood and how the main character has to reckon with his love for Achilles even as watches him become someone he probably wouldn't be in love with if he wasn't already.

The sticky wicket for me is, as with any historical story that hews to the brutality of the times, especially one that forefronts cis-masc characters, is having to power through all the violence done to women. It certainly helps that the narrator shows a lot of sympathy and empathy to the women that become pawns in the both the war games of men and the manipulations of gods, but no amount of kind thoughts can make it easy to digest every human female character being raped, enslaved, murdered or, at best, used horribly by the men in the story (when the woman that get impregnated, abandoned and then has her child taken from her has the best fate of any lady in the story, you know things are really bleak). I think the character of Thetis is meant to offset this a bit, but the fact that she is so very inhuman and serves largely as an antagonist, doesn't really balance the scales.

My wife reads a lot of romance novels and I, never having read one, had been casting about for a prime example of the genre. And then this hit the list for the 2013 Tournament of Books - a pre-bodice bodice ripper! A tunic ripper?

I did a couple of things I try never to do. I read a review or two in the middle of the book and I also did just a touch of research in halfway through to see how much foundation there was to Miller's version of the romantic elements of the book. (I hadn't encountered the Iliad since high school.) I think it validated why I try not to do either of these things. The reviews that complain about deviations from the Iliad were silly. (One even called it 'derivative' which is precisely and exactly true but not valid as a criticism. Hope they took those hacks Shakespeare and James Joyce to task for the same!) And while there is a heck of a lot of invention on Miller's part, I believe this is both a good thing and not in conflict with the mythology she drew upon.

But, none of that really matters. I believed in the characters and their romantic attachment. It's a great story with a classic tragic hook that is pretty timeless. I'd have given a full complement of stars if it had hit my heart a little harder than it did. Most of my connection to the story was more intellectual than emotional.