Prizewinner Review: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

You can tell a lot about a culture by the way it responds to the story of Achilles and Patroclus. The ultimate were they/weren't they? of Greek mythology, the evidence is so vague and the sources are so contradictory that readers find themselves in the pleasant position of being able to pick and choose the hints that suit their own moral universe.

In the roughly one frillion translations and adaptations of the Iliad there have been over the years, Achilles and Patroclus have been reimagined as (with varying degrees of offensiveness) asexual warriors, manly manly impregnation machines, just good friends, good friends with benefits, each other's One True Love and card-carrying members of NAMBLA. What they really were - well, that's anyone's guess.

I'm of the school of thought that says that they probably did sleep together, but also slept with other people - and who cares, anyway? It's incredibly anachronistic and slightly dull-witted to assume that people have always been gay, straight or bisexual in the way we understand those concepts in 2012. I suppose making Achilles and Patroclus unambiguously gay might come closer to the original state of affairs than making them rampagingly homophobic lady-pleasurers, but it's important to remember that neither of those artistic choices is right.

It's also important to remember that how writers choose to represent the boys from Troy is due in large part to the atmosphere they're writing in, and so it's both inevitable and pleasant that, when gay marriage is legal in six US states (and getting close to legal in many more) and the President himself has decided to publically declare it A Good Thing, a book by an American writer all about the True and Very Sexy Love Story of Achilles and Patroclus has just won the 2012 Orange Prize.

The Song of Achilles is the first novel from writer Madeline Miller, who read Classics at university and then taught it, and how to adapt it for modern-day audiences, for ten years (TEN YEARS!) while writing her magnum opus on the side. With that background, and that time-scale, I was expecting serious literary fireworks, an entirely new interpretation of the old story to match what Zachary Mason managed last year with his brilliant take on the Odyssey. Add to that the fact that I'd just finished Fire from Heaven, the first in Mary Renault's trilogy of books about Alexander the Great (hands down the best thing I've read all year, but more on that later) and it's not entirely surprising that the reality of The Song of Achilles failed to match up to my hopes for it.

I do have to give Miller points for some of her storytelling choices. There's been a recent trend towards grittifying Classical myth, crossing out all those troublesome Baroque gods in order to tell the 'real', unvarnished story underneath (this usually boils down to a lot of men rolling about in the dirt and bleeding). Miller's Achilles, though, has a full complement of gods, godlings and miscellaneous others (Thetis, Apollo, Aphrodite and Scamander all represent), and ancient Greek magical beliefs run riot through it. If someone says they're a child of a god, they literally are; sacrifices actually work; plagues really are brought on by deitic displeasure and there's a centaur who lives in a pink cave in the mountains. It's nice to see someone going back to the unreality of the original texts, and in this respect the book works. Possibly as the inevitable consequence of this, though, the result feels like nothing more than a fairly straight-up rehash of the familiar story, told in Patroclus' voice and with the (arguably already present) homosexual subtext pumped up into a fully tricked-out plot.

One Million Moms would disapprove

Ah yes, that love story. Well. If you desire even vague ambiguity in your romance, you will not find it here. After a decent period of adolescent soul-searching on both sides, Achilles and Patroclus leap into bed together with wild abandon and proceed, with one brief exception, to remain pure and true to each other for ever and ever, amen. And who am I to question Miller's choices in the matter? As interpretations go, it's no more or less silly than many of the others I've read. What it isn't, though, is new, in any way, shape or form - and that, for me, is problematic in a book that's been marketed as a completely groundbreaking take on the old myth. Not only have scholars been entertaining this possibility for years, but even the most cursory trawl of the internet will reveal hundreds of works, of varying degrees of explicitness, all dedicated to exploring the concept of how the story of the Iliad would go if Achilles and Patroclus had actually been sleeping together.

Maybe it was unfortunate that I made that link, because The Song of Achilles started to feel to me like nothing more than a piece of well-crafted but unexceptional fanfiction. It has that fanfiction air of earnest world-bending emotional wish-fulfillment, where likelihood is sacrificed on the altar of the beautiful idea. There's a moment, for example, when Achilles claims Briseis as his prize (because Patroclus wants her to be Achilles' beard - the situation is ALREADY getting silly), and to reassure her that her chastity will not be in any doubt Patroclus and Achilles make out in front of her. Really. This happens.

I'm not sure I actually have the right to be annoyed by this. After all, Miller has two Classics degrees more than I have, so she surely must know what she is talking about. But The Song of Achilles doesn't often feel like a book written by someone with any kind of special scholarly insight into its world. While at least it doesn't suffer from godawful over-description of authentic pottery and medicines and so on, I think it almost goes too far the other way. The book is all about plot (and EMOTION) rather than local colour, and I realise I sort of miss historical geekery when it's gone.

Greeks baring hips

In fact, I don't think this is a book for Classics geeks at all. It's Iliad 101, a perfectly accessible and competently-written introduction to the story and its characters, but without either depth or fireworks. With one or two exceptions (most notably, the casual aside which mentions that Achilles is older than Patroclus, which is unfortunately just COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY WRONG), Miller does have a good handle on her material, and I think The Song of Achilles will make the story of the Trojan War interesting to a large new group of people. You can't really argue with that as an achievement, but - couldn't there have been something more?

I came to The Song of Achilles expecting to be overwhelmed. In the event, I'm not sure I could even describe myself as whelmed. A perfectly sweet if somewhat unrealistically presented romance plot and a capable retelling of a favourite story, overall this felt... unexceptional. After such a score with the choice of The Tiger's Wife last year, surely the Orange Prize judges could have done better this time around?

3 stars.

Review - Pure

So! In the last few weeks:

- I went to see The Woman in Black. You probably... shouldn't. Just read the book.

- I wrote about how romance in fiction is exactly like stalking.

- I also read something that wasn't non fiction! Pure by Andrew Miller just won the Costa book of the year, and since it has been on my radar since mid-2011, when my ex-colleague-with-impeccable taste read the proof and told me it was good, I decided that now I really had to see what all the fuss was about. So I did.

And now I'm going to review it.

I've got to say, I've missed fiction. It's so loose, so free, so unconstrained by things like facts and reality. When you write fiction you can totally fill your book with mysterious violet-eyed miners and extraordinarily tall, good-hearted prostitutes who ply their trade in exchange for fancy copies of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Or maybe that's just this particular novel. Yes, Pure contains both of the above characters, plus a mentally unhinged priest and an inexplicable elephant, and everyone (apart from the elephant) spends their time running around in a lavishly disgusting cemetary that is the literal representation of all that is rotten in the state of France in 1785. As far as plot goes, engineer Jean-Baptiste is called in to clean up Paris's Les Innocents graveyard, which is beginning to, er, overflow its contents into neighbouring houses and streets, spreading decay and disgustingness into everyday life - much, in fact, like a certain Ancien Regime I could mention. Yes, Jean-Baptiste (which is, meaningfully, French for John the Baptist) must clear away the old, stop the rot and sweep in a new age of purity. Do you see where this is going yet?

Just from the back cover, you can tell that Pure is going to be a novel with serious underlying concepts. The blurb (actually a quote from the book's final chapter) promises

A year of bones, of grave-dirt. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year of rape, suicide, sudden death.

Setting aside the problems I have with the concept of a year of rape, do you see the THEMES that are emerging here? There's DECAY, there's DEATH and more DECAY and yet (as you discover when you read the book) in the midst of the DEATH and DECAY there's the possibility of finding PURITY. But only with an effort. A few chapters of Pure and I was seeing decay everywhere. I started to feel the kind of mental paranoia that I usually get from reading too much Freud, except instead of penises everything was rotting.

Pure's definitely not one for delicate stomachs. Actually, one of my favourite things about it is its complete commitment to the atmosphere it wants to produce. Things drip, things leak, there are yellow puddles, rotting teeth and cracking plaster, and everyone's clothing is covered in suspicious stains. It's firmly in the 'goitres, missing fingers and syphilitic children' sub-genre of historical fiction that's become so popular recently (the best example of which is the absolutely brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber. You should all read it if you haven't already). Miller's got a clear, vivid writing style that's a (slightly gross) pleasure to read, and it lends itself well to his choice of subject.

But while the atmosphere's good, sometimes the content is a little more iffy. I ended up being unexpectedly bothered by Pure's presentation of women. Now, I'm not someone who demands that all female characters should be strong and consistently awesome. I've met just as many idiotic women as I have men. But what I do require is that female characters should behave with intent and agency and some sort of acknowledgement that they too are reasonable human beings. I believe it has been scientifically established by now that a the inside of a woman's brain cannot be compared to what would happen if a troop of vervets took over a spaceship.

And yet, when I think about Miller's female characters, I struggle to explain a single one of their actions in a way that's more meaningful than 'she did it because she is a woman'. I mean, one character actually goes mad at exactly the same time that she gets her first period. I really hope that's a coincidence, but I strongly suspect it's not. It's meant to mean something. Women in Pure are like sexy, insane pinball machines operated by rodents, as leaky and in need of fixing as the cemetary Jean-Baptiste works in. It's a worldview that I'm not impressed by, and I'm not sure why Miller thinks he can get away with it. It's not deal-breakingly bad, but it's there, and it bothered me. That's the problem with having THEMES - your readers become so very attuned to what you're doing that they may notice things you didn't entirely intend to show.

This is exacerbated by the fact that there's just not very much body to the story Miller's trying to tell. It's all drum-roll and no payoff, all heave and (to use a metaphor Miller would be thoroughly in favour of) no puke. We're meant to read Pure and immediately understand that this is 1785 and the French Revolution is looming up just around the historical corner, but, apart from characters discussing The Party of the Future and going to splash some slightly lame anti-monarchical graffiti near the Bastille, nothing particularly revolutionary actually happens. A guy gets asked to clear out a graveyard; he clears out the graveyard; end of story. True, Doctor Guillotin pops up to poke at the bones that get unearthed and the miners hired to help Jean-Baptiste are discontented (don't worry, though, they'll still be discontented 100 years later, in time for Zola to write Germinal about their plight), but it's all oddly coy. I suppose there's so much meaning crammed into Pure that there's not much room left for a plot.

Talking of Zola, Pure definitely gives off whiffs of his style. In Pure, people are feral and oddly shaped, and prone to having sex in public places. There are also strong flavours of Perfume, in that there's a definite sense that a murder may occur at any moment, and a smattering of the kind of weirdness you find in a good Jeanette Winterson novel. All of these are novelists I like, and I think on the whole I did like Pure, but it was so conscious of itself, so intent on what it was doing thematically, that sometimes it was difficult to just read the story without being bludgeoned over the head with meaning.

So, did I enjoy Pure? Broadly, yes I did. It's dark, dirty, fun and easy to read. But does it have a lot of flaws? Definitely. Does it deserve to be Costa Book of the Year? I'm not so sure about that. And could Tea Obreht and The Tiger's Wife wipe the floor with Andew Miller and Pure? Absolutely they could.

3.5 stars.