Drawn In

The last time I posted about The Song of Achilles I'd reached Chapter 7 and was hoping to be drawn in. Well, I'm now at Chapter 26 and most assuredly gripped by a very fine novel. Once the world occupied by Patroclus and his mate (in several senses) Achilles opened out into the wider Aegean - basically when they found themselves under the tutelage of Chiron - I found myself feeling for them, for want of a better term. Indeed, that whole world came to life for me.

Miller is astonishingly good at conjuring the pain attendant upon a culture obsessed by male notions of honour without explicitly criticising such notions. Indeed, at times she seems to validate that culture, to some degree recognising its virtues, and seemingly accepting it as the way things are. But then you realise how much she undercuts what I suppose would now be seen as toxic masculinity in vignettes like that of the pitiful Deidameia, so ruthlessly abandoned by Achilles - and, yet, rightly so, somehow.

The only aspect of the novel that doesn't quite work for me (so far, at least) is the blending of down-to-earth naturalism in the 'ordinariness' of the characters and their daily lives with the mechanisms of the supernatural. The moments when we get a sense of Achilles as genuinely godlike and fated are wonderfully done, but they take me to a place I can't quite accept.

I might just change my mind, though. Again.