The Book that SHOULD Be Five Stars
A Review of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles
It was perhaps on a whim that I began to listen to The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller on Audiobook this week. I had spent the afternoon reading, and found that when I got up to do some work in the house and garden, I wanted to continue reading. A quick Spotify search for complete audiobooks offered up Song of Achilles at the top of the list, so I happily pulled on my headphones, pressed play, and began my work.
I’ll admit I’ve had curiosity for Miller’s work for years now, especially due to her prominence in the ‘dark academia’ crowd of readers and students. The dark academia aesthetic is one that both amuses and perplexes me. Its so-called followers revel in classical literature, gothic architecture, clothing reminiscent of school uniforms and typical professor wardrobes, and in classical music. These things are perhaps most amusing to me because they do not seem like an aesthetic but rather just elements of a thorough education, and love for them represents a transition from childhood to adulthood. The ‘aesthetic’ nature of the trend seems to come from the desire to preserve this feeling of learning, of ‘sitting at the foot of the greats’ into perpetuity, not just during one’s college years. And at the forefront of many of its followers is a love for Madeleine Miller’s retellings of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
As our magazine name implies, both Hannah and I are staunch lovers of the ancient epics. Their depictions of virtue throughout enticing story are close contenders for the best crafted works of literature ever written. In our family, there is an ongoing debate about which of the epics is the best. Although we love all three, Hannah and I have both struggled to appreciate Achilles’ character, full of pride and battle-lust, and this has tempered our passion for the Iliad.
Song of Achilles, from the very beginning, paints Achilles as a far more likable character. Miller’s Achilles is trusting, forgiving, and just. Even as a boy, he defends a stranger’s honor at his own expense, and is unwavering in his sense of what is right and wrong. He is respectful and obedient to both his father and his mother, and is compassionate to all the boys in the court who desire his affection and attention.
Miller’s Achilles does not lack in pride, however. He has been raised with the knowledge that he is prophesied to be the greatest warrior in history, and never once does he doubt his own abilities in battle throughout the novel. I have to applaud her decision to write Song of Achilles from Patroclus’s perspective, through the eyes of someone who loved and knew Achilles, because it allowed me to see Achilles in a way I had not yet considered him. Although I may have come to this same realization in a reread of the Iliad, I was struck here by how obvious it is why young men admire Achilles the most of all the Greek heroes.
Men admire greatness. When they can escape the knotty fingers of envy, there is no pastime men enjoy more than to marvel at great men. When Achilles first invites Patroclus to watch him fight, Patroclus’s awe at his skill with a spear was no longer foreign to me, as it was when I read the Iliad. It is the same awe that drives my brother to watch WWE matches, and to want to go watch a fight that includes his favorite fighter. It’s the same awe with which my brother-in-law retold his account of being in the same room as a world-renowned rock climber. It is the same awe that, at its core, drives men to any sporting event. It is an honor for them to simply be in the same room as such greatness, to be able to witness a feat of seemingly inhumane strength and ability. To befriend a man of such greatness, to be high in his regard, is a much higher honor.
Perhaps it is because the book is through Patroclus’s perspective that I saw this side of Achilles: the side of him worth admiring. To be so good with a spear that you can emerge from fight after fight unscathed, with a wealth of enemy dead around you is inhumane. It has a touch of the Divine. While we initially feel Patroclus’s envy, his envy falls aside as he cannot help but admire the just boy in front of him. Patroclus is a boy who has never known love or even simple kindness from anyone until he is shown it by Achilles, and it is this love and kindness that binds his loyalty to Achilles unwaveringly.
This loyalty toward a man worth being loyal to is one of the greatest aspects of this book, although I must also commend it for its prose. There was not a single sentence, or metaphor, or reference that I felt was poorly crafted or out of place. Miller weaves in foreshadowing beautifully, that leaves even an Iliad enthusiast unsure of how she will resolve her characters with their well-famed fate. On the basis of her prose alone, I will make a point to read her other novel, Circe, because I can trust in her skill at writing compelling characters and masterfully spinning plot. However, there is one mistake in Song of Achilles that took its seemingly immediate right to receive a five star review irreplaceably down to a 2.5 star review from me, and that is the central novelty of the book: its romance.
Scholars are no strangers to the theory that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, this fact having been widely debated for years, but Miller’s decision to retell the entire Iliad within the context of this relationship is a radical one. Not only does the book show us Achilles as he grows to become the greatest warrior of all time, but it does so through the eyes of the man Miller has made his lover, not his friend. This is where it all goes wrong.
I will not pretend that I am not biased: I have never read books for the sake of a romance, and it will never be my first choice of creative device. I also do not enjoy scenes that are seemingly meant just to indulge the senses and which revolve around characters’ physical gratification. They are always tasteless in a way that is unnecessary: many of the classics include intimacy in their pages, but they are done without reveling in graphic descriptions. However, this choice most importantly took away much of what the novel otherwise redeemed for me, namely Achilles’ character (and here, I must warn you, I will give you specific details, so if you dislike spoilers, be forewarned).
The grief of Achilles in the Iliad is famed, and is, I would wager, the reason scholars have loved to pull apart his relationship with Patroclus as something more than companionship. However, this grief and this rage in Miller’s retelling make Achilles less likable, rather than more. Less virtuous, rather than more. Throughout the book, we are awed by his trust, his kindness to others, his desire for peace. Even on the shores of Troy, Miller paints Achilles as benevolent, taking as many women as war prizes as he can, simply to protect them from insatiable Agamemnon and his men. But as the war wages on, and Agamemnon resents Achilles for his fame and success more and more, Achilles’ virtue seemingly slips away.
This is all aligned with Miller’s Achilles, who we meet for the first time as a ten year old boy, juggling figs and showing compassion for the exiled prince Patroclus who is banished into his kingdom. This is the Achilles Patroclus loves and clings to, who lied to his father to protect Patroclus and in doing so granted him the highest honor imaginable-the opportunity to be always at his side. Achilles unfailingly protects Patroclus. He stands up to his mother against her disapproval of their friendship, he brings Patroclus to study at the feet of Chiron with him. Whenever they are parted, both boys think of nothing but reuniting, and at all times, Achilles is portrayed as a man of great virtue, duty, and compassion. He obeys his parents and the gods. He takes joy in his studies. He defends Patroclus from every attack, verbal and physical, that comes their way from the age of ten onward.
However, by the time we reach Troy, this virtuous Achilles begins to fail. His virtuous actions are all done by the bidding of Patroclus, and his own decisions are often selfish. He envies the female slave that Patroclus rescues because she spends time with Patroclus, he envies the hours that Patroclus spends healing the wounded. He does not go out and bond with the other warriors the way he has done in every earlier situation, but simply comes back to his tent to claim Patroclus as his own.
Our narrator, Patroclus, mourns and cries for the Achilles he knew when he sees Achilles sacrifice his friend, the female slave, for the sake of his own pride. Patroclus mourns Achilles’ refusal to fight in the war, entirely without remorse as Patroclus is forced to watch all his friends and comrades die. At the last, he even refuses Patroclus himself, and will not sacrifice his pride for the man he supposedly loves. Patroclus begs for only one thing from Achilles, and Achilles will not grant it. This, of course, leads to Patroclus’s death.
Patroclus himself goes out, in selflessness, in Achilles’ armor, to protect Achilles’ reputation and rescue the men Patroclus has come to love. And when he dies in this way, Achilles still does not demonstrate virtue. He rages, and mourns, but he selfishly keeps Patroclus’ corpse to himself (which, in Greek belief, forbade Patroclus from passing on to the Underworld, instead trapping him in the spirit realm to watch Achilles fall apart), and kills with only the thought of revenge, and then of his own death. The woman he had sacrificed for his own pride accuses him of loving only himself, not Patroclus, and this sadly rings true. He did not love Patroclus selflessly for his own sake, but instead for the admiration and love he willingly gave to Achilles. He does not love his fellow soldier, but fights only for glory and acclaim.
The novel ends with Patroclus, a wandering spirit, begging Thetis to immortalize Achilles’ memory as more than a great warrior. He begs for Achilles to be seen as he knew him: a man who loved music, who loved peace, who was kind and benevolent to all those around him. But this is not who Achilles was, simply who he was to Patroclus. He loved Patroclus because Patroclus loved him, and gave him everything, worshipping the ground he walked on.
This is the irredeemable nature that arises from making theirs into a love story: without it, Achilles would rise a much more redeemable man. A man who loved his friend, from whom he received nothing, so greatly that he died to avenge his death. A man who had the capacity to love not just Patroclus, but all of them. A man who could have risen above his pride to be an honorable man. Instead, Miller’s Achilles ends his story with even less room for redemption than Homer’s, because every redeeming quality she gave him that was not in the Iliad is negated by the selfish reward he receives from Patroclus. Without romantic love, which includes a physical exchange of affection and attention, Achilles could be believed to die a heroic death, fated by the gods, without losing all the virtue Miller gives him, but with it as his only motivator, his fall from grace is far less enjoyable because it casts doubt on all that came before it.