The Song of Achilles

It is so very easy to fright a mind from enjoying this work of flightful fiction. A scathing review, pointing out the many inaccuracies against its sources or some (and may you have better days ahead if you watch those, truly) video essay to hammer on the tenses or its style of telling. For the easily influenced, the difference between love and dislike is a whim of opinion. I have, by now, read many reviews telling me why I should abhor this, and I think some make fair points. Still, I liked it. I was moved by the great and bitter satisfaction of the ending, and I liked all passages in which there was simultaneously so very much and nothing at all going on. To all burgeoning classicists, I would recommend Emily Wilson's Iliad and to listen to some of her many talks and lectures. But! I digress. I liked it, with all its little, binary imperfections. We can have it, as a treat. Which it is.

One of the rare cases that I absolutely loved a book that I have seen heavily recommended on social medias. This was a fantastic read. I never read The Iliad (and obviously really should, reading more book revolving around the gods would be a fun challenge for next year), so I cannot speak on how it holds up against that. But from my understanding, this is a retelling of the tale from Patroclus' perspective.

The wording was beautiful and there were no wasted moments that were plugged in to elongate the book. Truthfully there was a lot of time that was skipped over to be able to stick to the major moments. I also very much appreciated that the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was not watered down or skirted around. It was the driving factor behind this book and the story would not have worked without it.

Overall very glad I read it, would recommend, plan to read the original, and really want to delve into other stories that involve Greek mythology.

I know it's not important in the scheme of things, but this book changes from past tense to present tense and then back again a couple of time MID PARAGRAPH and I am angry with all the editors and readers and judges to allow such an abomination against the gods to go unnoticed.
I liked some some of the writing and the evocation of the world - esp with Chiron - and thought the Thetis characterisation was interesting. Patroclus was someone to care a bit about in the last quarter, when in the first half I would have abandoned the book as Do Not Care At All About These Boring Horrible People if I hadn't known the story gets good... the idealised Briseis relationship pissed me off so now I'm reading Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls to cleanse from that... But Odysseuss is great - perfect, actually, just like the version of him in my head I've had for twenty years. The Iphigenia episode was really well done - I ended up wanting to read Miller's versions of all the characters except Achilles, who was just this flat absence. It's hard to rate this book, as it has reawakened my late-teens obsession with Greek mythology, which feels like a vast, complex, fucked up but beautiful home to return to. And reasons enough to look forward to reading Circe - but I wouldn't be recommending this one.

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.

It was a strange time. Over us, every second, hung the terror of Achilles' destiny, while the murmurs of war among the gods grew louder. But even I could not fill each minute with fear. I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it. In such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom. The days passed, and he lived. The months passed, and I could go a whole day without looking over the precipice of his death. The miracle of a year, then two.

This is some of the most aloof and distant prose I've read in a while, I don't know how else to describe it. I felt like I was getting the story second- or third-hand, which is kind of impressive in its own way considering it's told entirely in first person narration. Just very detached descriptions of the passage of time and entire chapters where there were maybe one or two lines of dialogue. And truthfully, I struggled through the first two thirds of this book because of a lack of interest, but I'm glad I powered through because the ending was satisfying enough that I don't regret giving this book my time.

I picked this one up as a genre palate cleanser to take a break from horror and because it has near-universal praise from my mutuals on here, although I'm left here scratching my head and thinking, "I mean, it was okay." This is definitely more of a retelling of an existing story than an all-out romance, and I don't begrudge the author for not wanting to stray too far from the source material; it'd be stranger if she did. I just did not connect with any of these characters and I didn't even get the sense they connected with each other until very late in the book.

I have a passing interest in Greek mythology so I knew the main story beats to expect going into it. The concept on focusing on a minor character in the Illiad rather than Achilles was interesting in concept, but I felt like Patroclus wasn't given enough agency here to be interesting. It's difficult me to get behind such a passive protagonist, and I'm also not a fan of themes of destiny and fate and honor and glory; there were so many massive egos to navigate around in this book that it was hard to root for anyone. Again, not ragging on the author because that's what Homer told us was happening on those plains in front of Troy, but maybe I'm just too used to modern fiction to get much enjoyment out of this kind of story.

Glad I finally got around to seeing what all the fuss was about, but this would not be a book that would immediately spring to mind if I were asked for historical gay fiction recommendations.