The Song of Achilles
I don’t know if you were awake during high school English class when they covered the Iliad. I know I wasn’t. Well, actually, I think we focused far more on the Odyssey, since I was uncooly awake and alert through all of my English classes. But the point I’m making is that I’ve never read the Iliad. I know the story, and a few highlights, but I’ve never read it. Or really wanted to (not even when I had my obsessed-with-Greek-myths phase).
I still haven’t read it.
But now I have read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which is probably pretty close to the same thing. I spent a lot of time around Classics majors in college, and took a few classes in that department (yeah, liberal art education!), so I heard a lot of the talk about how things are changed and watered down, and…uh…ungayified for modern audiences (or slightly pre-modern ones, and we’re still trying to live it down).
The Song of Achilles, however, is a gay retelling of the Iliad, and it felt very…right. I’m sure a lot of that can be attributed to the writing style, which was very appropriate–which in this case means slow with plenty of fancy old words and slightly archaic sentence structures. But it was also apparent that the author knew what she was talking about with the time period (or I know naught about it), and the way everything built together…
It was amazing. Just, here’s the old culture, and why this would have affected the characters this way, and what it meant to everyone when they did thus or such, or whatever, and if it’s not authentic, it’s some damn good world-building.
Certainly it was better than any Hollywood adaptation I’ve ever seen (*coughTroycough*).
And it was a tragedy! I hate sad stories. But it wasn’t sad. I mean, it was, I was all asniffle when I finished, but it also wasn’t. Touching, maybe. I did take some extra time to read it, though, knowing that it would end tragically.
Oh shit, did I just spoil it for you, saying it was a tragedy? Or is this something like the Titanic, where I can just go ahead and assume everyone knows everyone dies?
Anyway, The Song of Achilles was a great book, and you should read it, but keep a box of tissues on hand near the end. Just in case.
