The Song of Achilles: A Novel by Madeline Miller --- 378 pages
This is Miller's first novel, and shows great promise as an exciting new voice in historical fiction. With solid scholarship in the classics combined with a background in theater, Miller retells one of the great mythic tales of ancient Greece, the Iliad of Homer, and most particularly, the iconic tale of the hero Achilles --- "best of the Greeks" --- and his beloved companion, Patroclus.
At least one reviewer has already invoked a comparison with Mary Renault. While it is too early to make such an assertion, on the basis of a single novel, this is certainly a writer of enormous potential.
Miller takes Patroclus as her narrator, giving a new perspective on the old tale, and recreates with deft details both the brutality and the beauty of the ancient world. Because western civilization prides itself on its Greek and Roman heritage, we assume we know this world and these people, but Miller shows us a world at once familiar and alien to our modern sensibilities. Most hauntingly she shows us the fatalism of that world, where men struggle mightily to outwit their doom yet know they cannot escape it in the end. Still, it is the struggle that defines them as human, and in the end, even the unforgiving gods acknowledge that persistence.
An absorbing story, beautifully written, with characters that live and breathe on every page.
