Despite having won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, awarded for the best full-length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality, I’d never heard of this book. It was given to me by a friend who insisted that I read it. Having been disappointed by a stage version of the same story, featuring aerial performance and puppetry, at this year’s Sydney Festival, I did not feel enthusiastic. And the rave reviews, quoted not only on the back cover but also filling three pages at the beginning of the book, I dismissed as hyperbole, and left the book unread for several weeks.
How wrong I was. I found it hard to believe that this is the author’s debut novel. It’s a highly original retelling of Homer’s Iliad, and most beautifully written. I found myself agreeing with the reviews I’d so readily dismissed,.and I cannot do better than quote just a few of them.
“An exciting, sexy, violent Superman version of The Iliad.”
“Beautifully descriptive and heart-achingly lyrical. This is a love story as sensitive as any you will find.”
“Miller’s prose is more poetic than almost any translation of Homer.”
“Sexy, dangerous, mystical and not ashamed to explore human weakness and the mind-blowing power of same sex love.”
“A real page-turner. It’s a gripping narrative and vividly told.”
As a classicist at school, I studied the Iliad (in ancient Greek) but, after 60 years, my memories of it were vague at best. Miller not only revived those memories, but brought the story to life in a way I don’t recall appreciating as a student.
In brief, the Trojan prince Paris has seized a willing Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. Achilles leads the combined armies of Greek cities to reclaim Helen from Troy. In Miller’s version, the outcome is foretold by Achilles’ mother, the sea goddess Thetis.
According to Wikipedia, Homer only hinted at the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus – a hint of which, in the naivety of youth, I may well have been unaware; in Miller’s version it is explicit, but I found the suspense of its gradual evolution – in the face of extreme opposition by Thetis – almost painful.
Miller describes the Trojan War in graphic detail. And the fact that the story is told through the eyes and ears of Patroclus, as narrator, makes for vivid images. I normally eschew violence, but the language is so poetic that I cannot resist citing this one example: “[Achilles] needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable on to the vase of posterity.”
Indeed, so skilful is Miller’s writing that this book affected me in a manner no other has: I found it both intensely moving and, despite knowing how it would all end, full of suspense. Although I rationed myself to reading a few chapters at a time, to prolong the pleasure, I can understand why some reviewers said they couldn’t put it down. Without hesitation I give it five stars.
Tony Barnett
