The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

This is a great book and a fantastic take on the Iliad. Miller focuses on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. It tells of the growth of their relationship, of their time together far from the eyes of the rest of the Greeks and how they come to war for a woman they don't care about and her lover's brother who neither of them wish any harm to.

Miller writes of male sexual love from her vantage point as a woman. I can't decide if this is a good thing and I think she avoids the obvious traps of trying to write the internal life of a male soldier by elevating Achilles' divine ancestry, his relationship with his (is it too cliched to mention this?) overbearing mother and his sense of kingship. Yet there's no escaping the sense that the core aspects of maleness elude her sense of masculinity. It's extremely hard to put my finger on but both Patroclus and Achilles are more feminine than seems plausible to me as someone looking on and thinking "do I identify with that sense of identity they have been given?"

She also chooses to make Patroclus a man out of sorts with war. This is a crucial decision and one which makes the most sense thematically but also is one of the most difficult aspects from my point of view. It helps cover over the sense that men can be in love without sex (even writing that seems strange) and that in war (and other adversity) are forged bonds that are deeper than any other form of relationship - that are so deeply physical that describing them as physical and mental is meaningless. I've seen relationships like these and I've glimpsed at it in my own friendships but the single unifying feature is the sense of bone deep kinship. As a comparison I think it was what Tolkien was trying to capture in his relationship between Frodo and Sam - that sense of men who have been to was together and have lived each other's deaths a thousand times. It's not simply a sense of surviving death but of mortality ongoing. That is missing here. Each of the famous characters, Agememnon, Odysseus, Menelaus - they are all cyphers (which isn't far from their appearance in the heroic poem which inspired this book) but they stand at odds with the humanisation of Achilles and Patroclus who hold the centre stage.

This is a fantastic book - bravely tackling a subject that even in this day and age can find it hard to be talked about or held up as proper love. It's wonderfully well written and something I think suggests there's much more to be enjoyed from Miller in the years to come.