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.

THE SONG OF ACHILLES is the story of Achilles’s boyhood and (most of) the Trojan War, as told by his lover, Patroclus. Patroclus’ focus is ever on Achilles, for Achilles is Patroclus’ love and it’s so moving to tell this story through the warm glow of that adoration and desire. 

I like how it handles the very high number of sexual assaults and consent violations which are, in many ways, the backbone of Greek mythology (or at least the family trees). Just giving proper context to this story and to events in Patroclus' and Achilles' lives requires some discussion of these themes, and I think it did as well as it could without feeling very anachronistic. This is a beautiful retelling of a tragic story, it makes me wish that Achilles, Patroclus, and Breisis could have been happy together, but it wasn't meant to be.

This retelling takes the stance that Achilles was definitely gay, with zero interest in women, and it seems to heavily imply that maybe Patroclus could have been happy with a woman but he has eyes only for Achilles. That does however lead to some interesting story decisions which have to be resolved, given the source material. It keeps one very notable instance of Achilles sleeping with a woman, and artfully dodges another that would be assumed to have happened but technically could be worked around. It did give it a kind of biphobic air to this retelling, like it's working so hard to show the love and devotion between Achilles and Patroclus that it shoves away any hint of intimacy or connection with women on Achilles' part. I'm not a Classics scholar and I don't know if the rejection is part of the myth, it just felt kind of bad in a few places because of it. It ends up working as part of Achilles' slow transformation from a kid who didn't want to hurt anyone into a stubborn asshole who let a lot of people die for his pride, but it did make me dislike him by the end. Patroclus' has a consistently rosy view of Achilles and mourns this change rather than rejecting him for it, which definitely helped me keep caring about the story even as I liked Achilles himself less and less. 

I liked it overall and I'm glad I read it, anything that manages to make Achilles feel like slightly less of an asshole than most portrayals of him is doing a great job, and this manages that without stripping away the abrasive parts of his character.