The Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles is Madeline Miller's 2011 debut novel, the Orange Prize winner and the novel that defined the contemporary feminist mythic re-telling subgenre that has dominated the literary commercial market for the last decade. Miller, a classicist with an MA from Brown and a decade of secondary-school Latin and Greek teaching, retells the events of Homer's Iliad and the Achilles legend from the perspective of Patroclus, the exiled boyhood companion who becomes Achilles's lifelong love and the cause of his death at Troy. The novel covers Patroclus from his early childhood in Phthia through the Trojan War's tenth year, ending in the brief mythic afterlife the original mythic cycle assigns him.

Miller's structural method is the patient restoration of the textual evidence the standard Homeric tradition has been actively suppressing for two thousand years. The Patroclus-Achilles relationship that the Iliad obviously is about (and that the classical tradition spent millennia translating around) is rendered in the prose with the kind of patient discipline that the source material has earned. The Chiron tutorship sequence in the middle is one of the most carefully written pre-war mythic-realist sequences in contemporary American literary fiction. The Briseis subplot is treated with the kind of moral seriousness the original mythic cycle obviously does not. The novel's structural pivot in the back third (the moment Patroclus puts on the armor) earns the gut-punch the reader has been promised since page one.

Recommended as required contemporary literary fiction reading, as the right Miller entry point, and as the novel that opened the path for the contemporary mythic re-telling subgenre (Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls and Women of Troy, Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind, Jennifer Saint's Ariadne and Elektra). Read Circe (2018) next. The Frazer Douglas audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.