The Greatest Love Story Ever Told: Madeline Miller’s ‘The Song of Achilles’
“I listened, and did not speak. Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark, or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.”
And so finally, after nigh on 24 years of existence, I have found the perfect book.
I feel like Seven of Nine in Star Trek Voyager caught on the cusp of apocalypse as she watches the Omega molecules stabilising, for 3.2 seconds glimpsing “true perfection”, the Borg holy grail, with the Captain remarking in da Vinci’s workshop later that if she didn’t know her better, she’d think she’d had her first spiritual experience…
There is not one word in this book I would change. Not one word.
The Song of Achilles reading experience can only be described as standing barefoot on the edge of a winter’s dawn, bundled up in warm blankets, a steaming mug of tea in hand, listening to Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending and gazing at the leafless branches tracing patterns across the horizon. Soft, melancholic, meandering exploration. Light hooves on crumpled leaves, velvet noses on crisp dawn air, shafts of sunlight slicing frost. Possibility, potential, pain. Light so bright it burns, cold so sharp it stings. Raw, naked, free.
MM has taken one of the most infamous battles in all of history and framed it instead around the life of the gentle physician who became nothing more than a footnote, straightwashed and sidelined for millennia, and his love for the boy who saw him as anything but.
Is it the greatest love story ever written?
Yes. Yes, it is.
Speaking of incandescent perfection, I will never get over this woman’s writing. Everything from the sweeping narrative structure to the specific metaphors she selects are so exquisitely Greek.
“When he smiled the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like a leaf held to flame.”
“There was a quality to the silence like a held breath. Like the rabbit beneath the hawk’s shadow.”
“Her eyes narrowed, and her voice hissed like water poured on coals.”
“The words were snapped off, like an owl biting through a bone.”
“The writhing field is like a gorgon’s face, turning him slowly to stone. The snakes twist and twist before him, gathering into a dark knot at the base of Troy.”
“His trailing spear-tip clicks against the stones, writing in the dust with its bronze fingernail.”
“Zeus’ thunderbolts still smell of singed flesh and patricide.” (mood)
“The fire light made the bones of his face look significant, Delphic, something that augurs might try to read.”
“‘I know you are mortal,’ she says. She places each cold word as a tile in a mosaic.”
And the list goes on and on (in that it literally does, I marked like a hundred of these). “The fragile ice-crust of fame”, “the golden stitch of their happiness like a fretted border around our own”, armour “flashing like the bright wings of cicadas”, like “fish-scale beneath the sun”. And perhaps my favourite:
“Thetis stood at the edge of the clearing, her bone-white skin and black hair bright as slashes of lightning.”
It’s so inspired because it riffs beautifully on the quintessentially ancient propensity to describe colour by its intensity rather than its hue. Things weren’t red, blue, green, black they were light, dark, bright, shining e.g. the wine-dark sea of the Odyssey. (Fun etymological note: this bled its way into Old English, hence why blæc initially meant “shining” and only became associated with the colour black over the centuries due to its recurrence as a descriptor for ink).
There are also few things I’m more obsessed with in any medium of art than a refrain, like an ostinato threaded through a symphony, and there were three that absolutely floored me. I was sitting calmly reading, then I was splayed on the floor, yelling.
“I feel like I could eat the world raw” in the wake of possibly the happiest moment in Achilles’s life becoming “I will kill you and eat you raw” after the most devastating.
Achilles proclaiming that he will not let the other Greeks take his love for Patroclus from him, that they will never be separated, and then after years of war, having those same words used instead to refer to his honour.
“This and this and this.”
Twill forever blaze in my holy trinity of soul books alongside The Secret History and Wuthering Heights, all of which are stories penned on the precipice of excess, every page dialled to the extreme, thrumming with the greatest possible intensity of raw unfettered emotion. In the first chapter of TSH, the eccentric Classics professor Julian Morrow muses to his students on the “very Greek, very profound” correlation between beauty and terror and how there’s “nothing more beautiful or terrifying than losing control completely, throwing off the chains of our mortal selves” like Euripides speaking of the Maenads, heads thrown back, throats to the stars, all bellowing bulls and springs of honey, and the strength of ripping the veil from our souls and “letting god consume us, devour us, unstring our bones and spit us out reborn”. That’s what this book is: “that fire of pure being”.
My sister and I spent 3 hours the night after I finished poring over every page, yelling about how the words are more than words, more than dreams, they’re pure sensory feeling rising from the rain-wet earth (to use Patroclus’s descriptor of the memories he relates to Thetis). I doubt the grand parallels and pirouettes of narrative, linguistic, and thematic perfection will ever be surpassed for either of us.
It seems I’ll be returning to this story again and again until shuffling off this mortal coil. Books like this are why we read, consume art, exist i.e. why it’s literally tolerable to be here at all.
I wouldn’t change a single word.
So really no more needs to be said, save for this. I was reminded throughout of CP Cavafy’s 1896 poem The Horses of Achilles (the prolific Greek poet EM Forster famously described as a man who stood at a “slight angle to the universe”), which an English teacher pointed me towards a thousand years ago, and which I’ve always been obsessed with (along with his poem Ithaca)… And now it’s become infinitely more devastating for the sheer poignancy of this terribly personal human death (rendered in gold filigree by MM) suffered amidst a brutal decade-long war Cavafy immortalised forever in the image of Achilles’s divine horses weeping for the tragedy of mortality (as per Book 17 lines 426–47 of the Iliad).
He shifts the focus of the tears away from Zeus’s derisive pity at the lamentable wretchedness of human pain towards their inconsolable sorrow for the so innately human calamity of that transience. Two immortal creatures, insulated forever from the fate they’ve just witnessed, unable to stop weeping for those who aren’t.
When they saw Patroclus had been killed,
[Translation by Daniel Mendelsohn]
he who’d been so brave, and strong, and young,
the horses of Achilles began to weep:
their immortal nature was indignant
at this work of death, which it now beheld.
They’d shake their heads and toss their flowing manes,
and with their feet they’d stamp the ground and grieve
for Patroclus who they knew was lifeless—undone—
shabby flesh by now—his spirit vanished—
left without defenses—without breath—
returned from life unto the great Nothing.
Zeus beheld the tears of the immortal
horses and grieved. “At Peleus’s marriage,”
he said, “I should never have committed such great folly.
Better never to have given you away, my
unhappy horses! What business have you down here
with wretched humanity, the plaything of fate.
You, for whom neither death nor old age lie in wait,
are oppressed by passing misfortunes. Men have snared you
in their afflictions.”—And yet their tears,
for the everlasting calamity
of death, the noble creatures kept on shedding.
