I don’t typically enjoy ancient mythologies. I tend to find them hard to read in the way a dry history textbook can be difficult. I’m a creative person, but not necessarily an imaginative one. At least, not in terms of story. (Give me Steinbeckian pages of landscape description all day long over a fantasy novel.) Reminiscent of the Old Testament with its plodding “begats” (check out 1 Corinthians), the Greek and Roman pantheon and their stories feel like long lists to me of “and then, and then, and then.”

All this to say, I came to The Song of Achilles with some low expectations for the relationship. If it were a Tinder date, I’d swiped but we were meeting for coffee-no-dinner and my prepared excuse friend was calling in fifteen minutes not thirty.

Then we fell in love and got married. ~The End.~

I joke. But if putting a book down, immediately finding and borrowing the writer’s next book in my Libby app, then gazing out the window for most of the morning does not count as the reading equivalent of a literary happily-ever-after… it’s at least a dramatically charged meet-cute.

This book made me forget I was reading Greek myths while never letting me forget I was reading Greek myths. Madeline Miller brings dynamic story into the lists of names and kingdoms and timelines that can be so dusty. She does it with beautiful writing as well. The novel that she creates out of these legends is human and believable. It has taste and smell and juicy description of the human experience as well as the human side of the half-god experience. Many of us know the “story of Achilles” but we fall in love with his person in this book. I know I did.

The glossary of characters (both mortal and immortal) is at the back of the book rather than the beginning. I’m glad. I read every word of it. It’s unlikely I’d have done that if I hadn’t just finished and was desperate to keep it going. In the glossary, I learned the character of Patroclus, whom I’d assumed she’d made up or taken great liberties with to make the novel good, was really a character in Achilles’ legend. Not only was he there, but the major plot points of his story in Miller’s book are in the Iliad. Her writing of Patroclus makes him so good and so reachable that you very much want him to be a “real” part of the pantheon, and I felt joy for him when she confirms he is. She had me thinking like an ancient Greek, rooting for a character’s fame and honor. That is some good writing.

Reading the final quarter or so of the book was a profound experience for me. I knew most of what happens, especially because Miller stays so true to the legends. Literary fiction can be transformative though, and she uses it masterfully. I felt the grandeur and horror of this story at scale. The massive, writhing chaos of war, of time, and of individual actions—she made me feel the vastness of all of it, big and small embroiled. As I was reading, with a tight grip on my eReader, and a racing feeling, I thought, “So this is what makes these stories survive.” She flipped on the context I couldn’t see.

If you’ve not found a way into the Greek stories. This book might be it. I will be reading her newer book, Circe, once I’ve grieved this first novel and the characters she made me love. (I’ll also probably call my childhood friend who teaches Latin and Greek and a course on mythology to tell her that “I get it now!”)

I loved The Song of Achilles. I’ll be gushing about it beyond this blog post. Big thanks to Madeline Miller for dressing the immortal skeletons of Greek mythology with fleshy context that they might walk, illuminating my mortal imagination with the luster of the gods!

(Read this book and just try not to talk like that. Ha!)

-HR

Purchase links:

I read the digital edition for free through the Libby app.

You can purchase through the author’s site here: Madeline Miller – Buy the Books

Or paperback and digital: The Song of Achilles a book by Madeline Miller – Bookshop.org US