I’m writing a letter. The letter is addressed to someone. We’ve had a dysfunctional relationship. There have been highs and lows, peaks and troughs, warmth and resentment. The letter asks one question, “Have we ever really understood each other?”
Maybe we almost did when I was lying on that hospital bed, and all I wanted was to go back home. You wanted the same too. We showed good progress and were discharged within a week.
Or maybe it was after Dad’s funeral when I tried my best to fight back the tears so that I could be a shoulder on whom yours flowed freely.
There are many instances worth noting. Many where we have both understood and misunderstood each other. Sometimes within the span of the same second.
This letter is addressed to my mother.
A parent-child relationship is both a pillar and a boulder. A pillar to lean on when we are exhausted to our bones but also a boulder we get crushed under at the most inopportune moment. It’s a blanket we wrap ourselves in but also a cross whose weight our shoulders could barely develop a callous against.
Death and the Maiden by Egon Schiele (1915)
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth is about one such dysfunctional parent-child relationship. It is about a daughter trying to understand her mother and a mother trying to reconcile with scars whose depth goes beyond generations. It is a painfully visceral first-person account of both generational trauma and survivor’s guilt.
An example is the plot thread when the protagonist contemplates about feeling betrayed by her mother because, after her father’s death, her mother appears to have moved on while the protagonist feels left behind. It is especially in this instance when the title “Is Mother Dead” invites contemplation in the reader’s mind. The “mother being dead” is the mother who was once grieving. The mother, who has moved on, feels like a separate person to the protagonist. There are many such “deaths” the mother falls prey to in the daughter’s mind throughout the course of the novel. This is in tandem with the daughter trying to connect with her mother in her “current” self while reconciling with the fact that the mothers she has lost over the course of her life are never coming back.
The mother, on the other hand, is exorcising demons of her own. From concealing her left arm, a bearer of the scars of her multiple suicide attempts, from her daughter to being the victim of generational trauma, which inevitably gets carried on in her parenting.
Is Mother Dead is a scalding examination of the fatalistic dichotomy of a parent-child relationship where the thorns are as prevalent as the caresses.
Cigarette smoke wafting, the coffee grows tepid. This one’s taking longer to finish than usual. The coffee lays in the wake of the flicked ash while a trail of smoke envelopes it. The butler, Alfred Merryweathers, arrives at my table and asks, “Shall I get you another cup fresh from the pot, sir?” To which I reply, “The lukewarm the cup, the bitter the coffee. Complements my smoke in a manner only my palette can explain.” A book lies beside my cup.
It is a book I wrote years back. The book was born out of a dialogue I had with a peer. It had something to do with once-inhabited spaces. Inevitably about where and how we grew up. It was a building the color of cement. It wasn’t exactly sturdy. It had started flicking its crumbs barely a few years after construction. But what didn’t set this building apart from the others was its housing of stories, or rather, it in itself being a plot point in many a subplot.
One of them was a poet. The poet was a war veteran. His poetry was born out of the delirium-inducing hallucinations his brain was prone to. The poetry that flowed echoed the gradual crashing of two cars, each car being a realm of existence and the resulting collision being ink on the paper. This poet was felicitated with an award for his recent collection of poetry, a collection born out of the collected trauma of seeing his peers reduced to literal rubble.
There was another poet. This poet had been part of a “revolution” in his youth. Some business about overthrowing some government somewhere. His business was the usual. Write poetry in favor of the revolution. Nobody knew he did it merely to save up for cigarettes and contraband back then.
There was a movie star. She had been part of an acclaimed film about one of the world wars, or was it the War of the Roses or was it the Cold War? She is now a poet too. Her poetry stems from how the movie set wasn’t too divorced from a battlefield. Almost everyone was at loggerheads, food was rationed, every scene was a battle between the dichotomy of who she lived as and who she was made to become. She did this to pay for the whiskey. The movie business. The poetry flowed after the fourth glass of whiskey.
The Coffee Mill by Juan Gris (1916)
And then came my room. And no, I’m not a poet, at least not until now. I write novels. Well, something that almost resembles a novel. I am a grave robber. I steal stories from where they are inhabited. This building is where my mind goes on its nocturnal prowl. From the bits and snatches heard, I write fragments. No, I have never asked for permission. Hence I hesitate to mention names and places. Alfred is in on the secret and has given me his consent to be mentioned voluntarily.
I wouldn’t call my book a collection of stories, though. Stories have a beginning-middle-end. Could I be pretentious enough to call it snapshots of lives? Yes, life has a beginning-middle-end loop as well, but closure, more often than not, is not par for the course.
The above is an excerpt from a book I was working on for the past few years. Just like all my other projects, this book, too, went nowhere, and the manuscript probably is languishing in some nondescript folder of a computer I probably don’t even own anymore.
An eerie coincidence of this year’s Booker International longlist is that almost every title I have read so far is reminding me of some or the other of my unfinished work. Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi is no different.
What the book is about is something that is easily available to read online, hence, I didn’t feel the need to mention it here. What I instead want to say is that, in spite of being barely a few pages longer than a novella, the novel packs quite a literary punch.
A beach. An endless beach. An ever-receding horizon. Beings of the same species stranded on its shores. Some from the dawn of time, some from its oblivion. All stranded like a row of beached whales, except, they can’t be mined for oil and they are mobile.
A walk commences. A walk towards the horizon. This walk is scored by Johann Johannson. The composition is funereal. Mothers reunite with sons they lost in the war, and bands separated by the gulf of space and time are reunited again. John Lennon resumes his position as the leading man. But something has changed. Instead of all his troubles seeming far away, the first line he sings is “Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be”. As they say, the devil is in the detail. A bullet has grazed through his face. A bullet meant for him but missed by a split second intervention.
Snowflakes glide from the endless skies and melt upon contact with the surface. One of them is the fabricated skin of Officer K. Lying on the shore with a bullet wound on his chest, blood trickles out of him and coalesces into a puddle of which even some of the snow is now a part. He stares ahead, his vision gradually blurring, at Rick reunited with his daughter and the two of them walking with the others. K’s vision, at the sight of this, fades to black. The bullet was meant for Lennon.
Bowie searches for Mercury in this throng. Once they finally find each other, the remaining members of Queen follow suit. The guitar strings, piano notes, and drums start swelling up with both Bowie and Mercury in unison incessantly crooning ” This is our last dance!”
Jetty and Wharf at Trouville by Eugène Boudin (1863)
Kiarostami, a creature of habit, is rolling his camera and documenting the walk while subconsciously splicing it into a verite-narrative. One of his creations, the down-on-his-morale cab driver Mr. Badii, looks at the sand on the shore and finds it reminiscent of the golden dust in the mine all those evenings back. Kiarostami strikes up a conversation “Mr. Badii, where is your taxi?” To which Mr. Badii replies, “Must be buried somewhere! Also, tell the doctor that I don’t need the sleeping pill prescription anymore!” Kiarostami replies, “Has someone finally accepted your macabre job offer?” Mr. Badii keeps on walking ahead and Kiarostami sifts through the crowd for a new subject, the camera still rolling.
For Godard, everyone appears to be dressed in red and the crowd has frozen or rather the crowd is walking while appearing to be frozen while they strike conversations with each other without moving their lips and what Michel said to Patricia still remains an erroneously translated mystery.
This beach is a bomb shelter that humankind has bunkered down in as the clock strikes twelve for them as a species. The collective human experience disintegrating into crumbs as the moment passes. This bomb shelter is probably a last straw. The bombs are being rained by time itself. Hence, this bomb shelter is a time shelter.
At a birthday party. The room is filled to the brim with cranky toddlers. One of them is crying because the choice of cake is not to a flavour of his liking. The cake in question is a store-bought sponge with bland vanilla frosting.
A clown barges in. He is tonight’s entertainment. Another kid starts crying. He has a phobia of clowns. The clown tries to console the kid. His smile. That spine-chilling smile with a smirk smeared with red that looks dangerously close to blood. The wailing continues, the clown gives up.
The person typing this has a phobia of clowns as well. But, he wonders, is he too old to cry? He can just walk out, right? But, the door is bolted. The rancid odour of the stale cake engulfs the room. He spots something. The clown has a gun.
It doesn’t take too long for the clown to pull out the gun and make the child stare down its barrel. The clown feels insulted. The clown looks at the person typing this and immediately rushes to him. Gun to the forehead, the clown threatens “you fucking rat!”
The host is trying to open the door. The bolted door. This is a house without any windows. This is a house situated in the remotest part of a rural settlement. The wailing and shouting barely permeate the walls and what’s audible is nothing more than a hum.
The person tries to continue typing. The clown snatches his phone and looks at what is written. He starts laughing and exclaims, “You’re trying to cash in on us? As typical as a writer can get?”. The clown throws the phone against a wall and it shatters to pieces.
The host hears a thud. She walks up to a neighbor. Nobody’s home. The host walks back to her door.
The clown tells everyone to lie on the floor. The person who just lost his phone spots that the gun is not loaded. He sneaks up to the clown and steals the cartridge from his pocket. The clown fishes in his pocket for the cartridge and that’s when the person says, “Looking for this?”.
The person and the clown get into a fistfight and the person manages to disarm the clown. He then loads the gun and points it at the clown. He uses the landline in the house to call the cops.
As soon as he hears the sirens wailing, he opens the door, gun in his hand, he leads the clown to the cops. The host stands stunned! The cops arrest the clown who turns out to be a fugitive on the run.
The Clown by Georges Rouault (1907)
Nobody is in the mood for stale cake. The host asks “I have a couple of beers in the fridge, let’s have those instead?”. The person who is wondering about which phone should he get next answers, “But what about the kids?”. The host replies, “Who else will gorge on that cake?”. The person replies “Is it fit for human consumption?”. The host replies, “You have not lost your sense of humor even after being at the receiving end of a 9mm barrel!”.
I haven’t figured out what happens next. After watching a hostage drama on television a few years back, I wanted to write a novel that spans a single, drawn-out day where it is more about the atmospheric claustrophobia that a situation like this entails than merely a protagonist-antagonist thriller. I wanted to write something closer to what I would call domestic noir. Mauvignier’s novel reminded me of the book I wanted to write.
The Birthday Party is a hostage drama where, for a change, it is the drama that takes center stage. It’s as much about the characters as flesh and blood people as it is about the peril they are in. Laurent Mauvignier writes in long, serpent-like sentences that coil around the reader’s mind and gradually, through increasing tension, squeeze it to a pulp. As each sentence goes on, the claustrophobia builds to an almost unbearable crescendo and before long, there is barely room for even a sigh.
A sigh is the closest one could manage to a gasp of air, especially when the book is intent on drowning its reader in a sea of claustrophobia.
At a whopping 500+ page length, it could have ended up being a bloated affair, but the book is anything but that. On the contrary, in spite of spanning a single claustrophobically atmospheric day, this is a read that flies by, in spite of its deliberately slow pacing, giving the reader time and space to soak in each and every detail. Or maybe it flew by for me because I love slow pacing.
I’m aboard a ship. A rust bucket to be more precise. A vessel that creaks to high glory. Down here in the ship’s dimly lit dining hall, a Madonna crooning from the lonely speaker nudged in a crevice, her tunes remind me of a while bygone. Dinner is served, and the meal is a lonely affair. Some mashed potatoes and a sauce whose colour and name I can’t discern to save my life.
A few moments later, the sous-chef joins me. She asks “How is the food?” and before I could answer, she says “You can be honest about it. I only blanched the vegetables and the head chef has already snoozed off in the throes of his extra glass of rum.” Since honesty is the order of the hour, I say “The potatoes are bland, but in a comforting manner. I’m not much of a spice person anyway.” Quickly she replies “That’s why you have barely touched the gravy!” We both laugh at this and she brings out, to my surprise, a bottle of Merlot. A few glasses later, she starts telling me something.
She doesn’t have a name. Or rather, the closest to a name she has is a nickname called “Boulder”. No, it wasn’t either of her parents. It was her girlfriend. Her name is Samsa. And before I attempt to draw any conclusions, she clears the air by saying “My story isn’t Kafka-esque even in the remotest manner!”. The girlfriend is almost an ex. They have been together for decades. Then one fine day, she wants to have a baby. A few arguments later, Boulder caves in and ten months later, the baby is born. Her name is Tinna.
Once Tinna is born, the grammar of their relationship changes. Tinna consumes Samsa’s existence and while the physical transformation has been endured by Samsa, the Gregor of our story in a way is the relationship between Boulder and Samsa.
At this juncture, Boulder asks me “What do you think? Should we have become parents or should I have put up a stronger force of resistance?” As someone who has only been a child and never a parent, I felt like I was in no position to answer. But, I had to bring something to the table, if nothing then at least for an extra glass of that delicious Merlot.
So, fishing for answers I went. My choice of pond was my parents’ marriage. It was arranged and like most arranged marriages, both barely knew what they were getting into. The marriage was undoubtedly a disaster. While surviving for twenty years under the roof with two children in tow, every alternate conversation was an argument. The classic case. One parent being present while one being absent. The absent parent trying their best to shun any responsibility pertaining to the children while the present parent striking arguments about why the absent parent is being so… absent.
Mother and Child by Mary Cassatt (1890)
Returning back to the conversation at hand, with something resembling an answer in my tow, I say “I had a present parent and an absent parent. But in my eyes, both were not ready to become parents. But in my parents’ case, even after twenty years, they barely knew each other. So, this answer in turn provokes a question, how and why does a person have a child with someone they barely know?”
Boulder replies in a stern manner “Instead of answering my question, you are bringing quandaries of your own to the table!”
My reply being “That’s what stories do. They spark quandaries that until then laid dormant in the darkest recesses of one’s mind.”
The ship with Boulder in it was in a book I was reading and my conversation with Boulder was my reading between the lines. That’s what great literature does. It compels you to read between “your” lines, have a dialogue with the characters while drawing parallels with your own existence. Boulder by Eva Baltasar, in a lean span of 112 pages, achieves that and much more.
The love affair between cricket and this reader began early on. The roots were watered and tended to by a father who loved few things as much as he loved the sport. Victories in anything, you see, are tiny miracles that have fate, talent, and timing conspiring together to make something extraordinary. It was one such night of victory that I, the reader, fell in love with the sport, a certain final that India won.
But there was an older love affair the reader has had, one with the quiet books in a library, and the colorful comics in a bookstall. And naturally, he wanted something more. He long desired to read a cricket novel where cricket is not some subplot relegated to the corners like some frivolous tea party you wouldn’t really mind missing out on. He wanted to read something that gave the same thrill as reading the live commentary of a game hanging on the threads of fate. He wanted something extraordinary. He wanted a victory, one that he found in the pages of this book.
Credit: AFP via Getty Images
And when Karunatilaka describes the finale between Sri Lanka and Australia in the 1996-97 World Cup, he felt the same euphoric thrill that makes you love life a bit more, the kind of thrill that gives you second thoughts about the impossibility of what you experienced right now.
Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air.
shehan karunatilaka, chinaman: The legend of pradeep mathew
Why the Need for a Cricket Novel?
Cricket in literature isn’t a new phenomenon. Not quite common, sure, but not new either. What’s been lacking, however, and something a cricket lover can’t help but desire too, is the sport being a critical part of the overarching narrative, the Atlas to bear the weight of the globe if you may. This particular lacking is generously compensated through this vivacious, sprawling piece of literature.
But why this desire in the first place, one might wonder? Is cricket as important as politics or societal hierarchies or interpersonal relationships or one’s identity? Arguably yes. Sometimes even more.
Sports can unite worlds, tear down walls and transcend race, the past, and all probability. Unlike life, sport matters.
shehan karunatilaka, chinaman: the legend of pradeep mathew
Onto the Story…
It’s the story of an aging sports writer, Karunasena, to seek out a mysterious spinner who is, for all practical purposes, dead. There are no records of him, no trail to find where he might be now, nothing. All that exists is memory. Memory of watching him bowl some of the greatest spells in the history of cricket. It’s this chasing the invisible that forms the center of this mad frenzy of a novel.
But the story is also Karunasena’s. It’s his flaws, his addiction to alcohol, his philosophy that switches from nihilism to optimism in the blink of an eye, his commentary on those around him, his obsession with the sport he devoted his life to, and most of all, his humane unreliability that makes this novel what it is.
If all this is scaring you, don’t worry, for even if you’re someone new to the world of cricket and only thinks the word to mean that little chirpy insect, you wouldn’t be lost here. While you’ll certainly enjoy Karunasena’s ramblings more if you’re a lover of the sport, Shehan keeps an eye out for the newbies to the game as well.
Credit: Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka
In a section at the very beginning of the novel, rather wittily titled “Sales Pitch”, he goes so far as to say that if you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you. Apt.
The Birth of a Cricketing Nation
All of this is well and nice, but what truly makes this novel a chef-d’œuvre in the world of cricket literature is the parallel metaphor of Sri Lanka.
It’s a country that’s faced one adversity after another. To then equate the Sri Lankan cricket team to the country they represent, to extrapolate the struggles within the cricketing world to give a commentary on the racial and caste divides that permeate the country, is nothing short of genius. It’s a country you’d be hard pressed to dismiss like some stray pebble on a rocky terrain, and yet it’s a country that would surprise you time and time again.
But the metaphors for Sri Lanka don’t stop there. Oh no, not even close! This is something you’ll notice often in Shehan’s stories. Even when Sri Lanka is not the opening batsman, it’s always there in the stadium, if only as a viewer. And, in a way, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is, in a way, the legend of Sri Lanka too.
Like the elusive mystery spinner (I wonder if that description harks back to the supposed mythical greatness Lankan politicians have often talked about in the past), the country too has lofty ambitions but is often stuck up in conflicts within itself. Like Pradeep, the country has a lot of promise and talent, but due to numerous factors, it never quite reached all the places it could’ve gone. Like him, the nation has a diverse ethnic background, something that has painted the country red too often. And yet, like him, the country has survived, persevered in the face of impossible conditions.
A Cricket Autobiography
Credit: Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka
Outside of Chinaman, every other book on cricket adorning my shelves is non-fictional, most of them autobiographical. Biographies are to cricket what awards are to movies, there are simply too many of them. Keeping this in mind, it’s hard not to wonder if Shehan’s work in an indirect ode to the numerous biographies that have been written over the years. After all, from the first-person narration to photographs and sketches that populate the pages of this book, it would come across as an autobiography to someone just glancing through its pages.
It’s not just a stylistic choice, however. It serves to lend the book an air of authenticity, what with the narrative mired with real events and characters, that’s hard to shake off. You’re not reading yet another fictional narrative, you’re reading the history and life of a nation and its people. And all of that: it’s very much real. Therefore, by appealing to a sense of factuality in us, Shehan adds more life, more reality into his already phenomenal work.
Wrapping Up…
Coming back to the age-old question, why should you read this text clocking over 500 pages? Let’s try and give a pointless answer to this pointless question, shall we?
You love politics? Read this book.
You find intergenerational conflicts interesting? Read this book.
You find the unreliability of fictional narratives compelling? Read this book.
You want to know more about Sri Lanka (and its literature)? Read this book.
You enjoy cricket (the sport, not the insect)? Read. This. Book.
Song of Achilles, the beloved “retelling” of Greek mythology or more specifically Homer’s Iliad, and the seemingly modern take on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is not what it seems. If you’re one of those who are yet to travel through its pages, let this piece serve as a warning (?). Okay, so, where shall we begin? Do I begin talking about how the original myths are more modern than anything that Miller writes here or do we look at the heteronormative themes present everywhere, or do we talk about the gorgeous irrationality that drips through these pages?
Let me make something clear right away. This is not an attack on Miller as a writer (or maybe it is?). I quite enjoyed reading Circe (the author has since changed their mind; Circe, too, was an abomination), a book that stays true to the original myths while adding a new perspective of its own, something I believe is the very purpose of a retelling. However, when it comes to Song of Achilles, tsk tsk tsk.
The Death of Patroclus
Patroclus By Jacques-Louis David (1780)
The Patroclus in Miller’s story is a direct contrast to the warrior in the pages of the Greek myths. This is Patroclus we’re talking about. The same Patroclus who had a higher death count than most of his counterparts. The same Patroclus who goes through the Trojan army like nothing. The same Patroclus who has to be stopped by a god (freaking Apollo himself!) because he decided to scale the walls of Troy by himself.
Come Miller’s Patroclus and he’s almost like a loyal follower of Achilles. He’ll follow him wherever he goes, and battlefields are a strict no-no. By changing this very basic fact about Patroclus, Miller changes everything about him. Retellings are supposed to change some elements, but here it’s almost as if she kills Patroclus and blabbers about some dead zombie (serving a socio-political agenda).
But Amritesh, I hear you ask, isn’t she changing the idea of what a hero can be? That a hero can be someone existing outside the stereotypes of masculinity?
Dear oh dear, you’ve got no clue, do you?
The Death of Rationality
I did not kill anyone, or even attempt to. At the end of the morning, hours and hours of nauseating chaos, my eyes were sun blind, and my hand ached with gripping my spear—though I had used it more often to lean on than threaten. My helmet was a boulder crushing my ears slowly into my skull.
It felt like I had run for miles, though when I looked down I saw that my feet had beaten the same circle over and over again, flattening the same dry grass as if preparing a dancing field. Constant terror had siphoned and drained me, even though somehow I always seemed to be in a lull, a strange pocket of emptiness into which no men came, and I was never threatened.
song of achilles, chapter twenty-two
This scene is set right in the middle of a battle. A live, actual battle. Even if we close our eyes and manage to ignore the way she reduces Patroclus to this pittance and how it’s disingenuous to the character yada yada, there remains another issue. It just does not make sense. At all. A soldier standing and dancing around on a battlefield? What is this, the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
And for the sake of justifying her “version” of Patroclus, Miller would cross seas and fight dolphins if she has to. She’ll change Iliad, she’ll change how these epic stories unfold, she’ll change what the characters represent and symbolize, she’ll murder nuance, and she’ll do other unspeakable literary atrocities too scandalous to deserve a mention here.
If I had to read stupidity, the masterpiece that is Fifty Shades of Grey is always out there. Why bother reading a Greek retelling?
But wait, there’s more. The climactic scene sees Patroclus crusading through the Trojan army by fluke. No, I didn’t make a mistake there. A guy who can’t fight, who’s always avoided battlefields breaks through the mighty Trojan army by fluke. It just happens. Somehow. Magically. Make it make sense to me, someone?
Heteronormativity: A Common Occurrence in Popular Gay Fiction
Achilles tending to Patroclus by Sosias (500 BC) CCA-ArchaiOptix
Heteronormativity in a relationship can be broadly referred to as partners exhibiting different behavior. It’s the popular seme-uke dynamic all over again, wherein a partner is dominant and the leader (seme) and the other is submissive and simply follows the other (uke). This aligns with the commonly asked (and homophobic) question: What are you, a top or a bottom?
Why is this problematic? It’s an attempt at converting homosexual and queer relationships into quasi-heterosexual ones. As if everything makes sense only when they exist in binaries, in extremities, in blacks and whites. Which is, I’m very sorry to say, not how the world functions. And certainly not queer relationships.
This doesn’t just end with this book, unfortunately. Almost like an extension of the popular straight man’s fantasy of watching two lesbians kiss and fuck, there’s a rise in “gay romance novels” by straight women in the market. As if the best friend trope wasn’t humiliating enough, now the authors want to use them to enact their personal fantasies on the page. Never for a second think that these books were written for queer audiences, for the target audience remains, by and large, straight women. This isn’t representation, this isn’t making things better, but only preserving the pre-existing dynamics. Miller’s book further adds to that.
Coming back to our book, the beauty of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in The Iliad is that they have an equal dynamic. Consider Achilles on one hand. The greatest warrior, a demigod, a hero, second to none. The Aristos Achaion. On the other hand is Patroclus, born to mere mortals, yet no less than Achilles on the battlefield. The man who single-handedly inspired the defeated and demoralized Achean army to battle again.
To take this equal dynamic and reduce it to whatever it is that exists in the Song of Achilles in order to make everything more palatable to audiences (or perhaps Miller herself?) is as regressive as they go. She goes so far in her process of creating this quasi-heterosexual relationship that Achilles barely shows any reaction to Patroclus’ death here. When in The Iliad, he cried with such intensity and for such a length that his mother had to come scampering to find out what was going on.
At this point, you might ask, but hey, doesn’t she make their close friendship a homoerotic one? Isn’t that a somewhat modern take on their story? Ummmmm…
Queerphobia, Regressivity, and Whitewashing
Someone not very familiar with Greek mythology might think that homosexuality wasn’t prevalent or observed in public spheres in those times. Barely so. While it wasn’t outright celebrated, the sexual and romantic dynamics used to be more ambiguous and complex than a lot of purveyors would have you believe.
And here’s where queerphobia creeps into Miller’s story. Instead of both Achilles and Patroclus having relationships with other women while also having a relationship with each other, effectively insinuating that they’re not “pure gays”, she creates this relationship that fits the Victorian idea of how a relationship ought to be. Taking something complex and nuanced and layered and turning it into something narrow and linear?
Part of what makes the story of Achilles and Patroclus so fascinating to historians and literary enthusiasts over the years is how it subverts expectations and categorization. This was a relationship that completely flipped the idea of how a homosexual relationship ought to be.
Someone remind me why this one’s considered to be a modern retelling, again?
Achilles and Patroclus by Philippe-Auguste Hennequin (1784/1789)
The matter of her trying to fit our dear protagonists into her Victorian moralities is present in repeated incidences. Achilles doesn’t sleep with women, of course, because he’s such a noble at heart and because you can only love one person at one time. He might be arrogant and can dream of glory in all its vanity, but sexual infidelity? That’s where the lines must be drawn, sire. To fit these characters into this worldview, she alters the characters and the relationships of/with Briseis and Deidameia as well. To dump away these wonderful, complex characters away in order to enforce these traditional and regressive tropes over and over again: whitewashing in all its glory!
Look, part of what makes Achilles so compelling a character are his flaws. He’s a deeply flawed character in The Iliad, someone who decided to skip a war because a woman he “won” was taken away from him, someone whose anger knows no bounds. Not his charisma, not his bravery, not his strength, as this book will have you believe.
The Greek world of The Iliad is a far cry from a just and equal society in a lot of things. From societal injustices ranging from social and economic equality to the prevalence of patriarchy, there’s much that can be played with there. But the perspective that Miller tries to change here, it’s already more advanced and nuanced than her book can ever strive to be.
Thetis
Peleus and Thetis in the cave by F. Foppens (1677)
You’d think all this would be enough. But no, what’s a story without some good old misogyny? If only she got satisfied after ruining the protagonists, it might be a tolerable book. But no, she makes sure she butchers everyone in the worst possible way. And when I say worst, I mean the worst possible way out there.
We’ll only look at Thetis here, for the sake of brevity. This is a woman who was raped by the person she was later forced to marry, by the gods. Oh, and the same person would keep on raping her for the rest of the next year. Let’s see what’s Miller got to say about the two of them:
An ordinary wife would have counted herself lucky to find a husband with Peleus’ mildness, his smile-lined face. But for the sea-nymph Thetis nothing could ever eclipse the stain of his dirty, mortal mediocrity.
song of achilles, chapter three
Yep.
Mind you, Thetis is one of the best characters (although a minor one) in The Iliad, a woman who was raped over and over and who left her husband at the first chance she got, yet a woman who loved her son madly and would go to any lengths to protect him (the legend of Thetis dipping Achilles in the river Styx to make him immortal is one of the most popular non-Homerian Greek stories), a woman who comes forth to aid Achilles over and over again during the Trojan war.
Thetis dipping the infant Achilles into the river Styx by Peter Paul Rubens (1630)
Miller transforms that woman into an evil, scheming, manipulative mother who can’t see Achilles happy. Her treatment of this character is hollow and cruel and even manages to outshine her butchering of Patroclus somehow. It’s misogynistic, and patriarchal, and makes you think if her sole intention behind this was to create the evil parent trope so common in heterosexual romances.
A Disservice to The Iliad
I pity those whose only contact with the Greek myths is this book. Not only does it sanitize and force a certain outlook on its readers, but it does injustice to, what essentially is, an artifact of history. Because, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, that’s what great literature is. A historical artifact, that gives a glimpse into a world gone by, like nothing else.
It’s a book that ditches all character growth and complexity for the sake of yet another heteronormative romance novel. It forsakes all the intricacy and beauty of the original myths, creating a regressive and bland story in the process. There are no two ways about the fact that the Song of Achilles is an absolute disservice to The Iliad.
To conclude…
It’s a book that rehashes and changes every single thing good about The Iliad and if that wasn’t enough, those very “changes” are hailed as “modern” to top it all off. If this is modernity, someone please throw me to the dark ages please.
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