The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
378 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 17 to September 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The obvious point of comparison here, in my (limited) reading experience, is Maria McCann's excellent As Meat Loves Salt, another historical romance with a gay couple at its heart. McCann's masterwork is more ambitious, couched in marvelously fluent prose suggestive of (but not overwhelmed by) the English usage of its time, its narrator a tragic and violent antihero who nonetheless remains sympathetic throughout most of his self-destructive arc. Miller's debut is "safe" in comparison, built around one of the classical romances of antiquity (regardless of how Homer may have intended their relationship to be understood), and her narrator Patroclus, though caught in a love doomed by fate and prophecy as well as Achilles' tragic nature, is himself a model of a sympathetic romantic lead, made an outsider by upbringing and circumstance but fundamentally a relatable reader proxy. Miller's prose never quite reaches the exquisite heartbreak pitch of McCann at her best, but is satisfyingly sensuous and moving as needed. Certain episodes can feel less than fully fleshed out; Miller breezes through the instruction of Chiron as if it were a brief woodsy idyll rather than suggesting the ancient strangeness of Chiron's existence and identity, and while she attempts to portray Thetis as an uncanny, other-than-human being, none of the mythological elements really clicked for me, spoiled as I am by a wealth of excellent otherworldly fantasy. Nonetheless, this was a novel of above-average competence, even if it doesn't quite aspire to (or reach) the heights of my rather arbitrary point of comparison.
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