Neohomeridae Reviews

Title: Achilles
Author: Elizabeth Cook

I'll be brutally honest. I hated this book. It burned my eyes. My holy flesh withered when I touched its cursed pages. However, this may be an extremely localised phenomena: after all, I am the greatest fan of all time of our hero, AGAMEMNON, the king of kings. Actually, perhaps it would be best to start with my first and fortunately only encounter with this book.

My local bookstore had a tremendous sale going on--everything was 50% off. It was, in effect, knuckling under the pressure exerted by huge bookselling corporations like Chapters, !ndigo, and other truly villanous commercial beasts. I came in late, however, and all the books were cleaned out except for assorted reading material on early Canadian history. Then my eyes latched on to this little truffle of a book: Achilles. I will admit that it had an impressive cover--a grey wasteland with twisted metal which I assume represented the post-sack Troy. I was intrigued. If this was actually about Achilles, and not some bizarre postmodernist metaphor like SOME books using Greek mythological figures, I could possibly write a review and post it up on O MUSE! So, being the cheapo that I am, I flipped surreptitiously through the pages, hiding from the bookseller.

Yes, the book is actually about Achilles. It's mostly written in first person, which is frightening--the idea of being inside Achilles' head is frankly unwelcome, given his psychopathic mindset. It's written in the present tense, which bothers me slightly (the present tense is for online RPGs, not epics: it distracts and draws attention to itself in a formal setting). Worse, its pages are laced with modern colloquialisms: for example, when Achilles lets loose his famous loud war-cry, "the Trojans shit themselves." Okay, I don't really mind those--look at my own Iliad fanfic, The Iliad Musical--but it should be consistant. If you're going to make both narrative and character speech modern, some of that should be reflected in the subject matter. Nonetheless, I was more than willing to forgive all these if the story is worth reading... and at the time I thought that it would be hard to ruin Homer's fantastic plot.

To be truthful, she was pretty faithful to the mythology, although this wasn't so much a retelling of the Iliad (a la The Firebrand) but a biography of Achilles written in brief, chopped up little paragraphs with lots of hard returns to make it appear longer. (Such spaces would be a natural part of poetry, but it's hard for me to determine if this is poetry. It could easily be prose. I suppose in the end it's some unstable hybrid of the two.) She fills in the legends' gaps with her own speculations, a practice which I greatly encourage. Unfortunately, the situations she throws in are completely implausible. I'm sure readers of the Neohomeridae will be familiar with Achilles' late childhood, but a reminder: at one point, he was dressed as a girl and placed on an island which operated as, essentially, a girl's boarding school. There he meets Pyrrha, and at a distrubingly young age fathers a child. @_@ That's all canon; if it grosses me out, what can I say? But Miss Elizabeth Cook plays with this. In fact, she has a long and disturbing build-up to the kiddies' off-stage but nonetheless clear sex scene. During this build-up Pyrrha coaxes Achilles-as-girl into the water to wash. Achilles knows this will blow his cover, and states it frequently. But for some reason, HE STILL GOES IN! Okay, let's blame this on Achilles' blockheadedness. Fine. Then Pyrrha dives under the water and INSTANTLY LOOKS UNDER HIS SKIRT. By accident. My suspension of disbelief is really being put to the test by this point, but there's more to come. Instead of acting like a real girl her age (eg, screaming, exclaiming "That's gross!" etc), she laughs and gives him a very professional smooch. And shags him.

I don't want to dwell on this for obvious reasons, but I can't believe anyone would actually think children 13-14 years old would DO that. The whole scene sounds like it was written by one of those macho guys who believes that the Manliness (TM) of Achilles would instantly seduce anyone, no matter how... disturbingly young. For crying out loud, this is the sort of pacing and plot-quality you'd expect in a bad Star Trek slashfic. But I think I've proved my point. Let's move on, and quickly, to the next major snag in the book.

All right, it's not a snag most people would necessarily find annoying. It's just that the author puts down AGAMEMNON (ra ra ra!) every chance she gets (booooo). Now, I'll admit it: Agamemnon is far from a perfect character. Homer is constantly poking fun at him; he's a dunderhead when it comes to morale and handling his troops, and generally pretty foolish. So he's a bit of a joke. That doesn't mean he's a bad man (although like all Homeric characters he is, to be sure, a product of his cruel times). However, Elizabeth Cook paints him into a plastic, braindead supervillain. And she doesn't only make him incompetant when it comes to people--she must make him incompetant at EVERYTHING, because she can't have her hero facing the interesting and dynamic character Agamemnon really is. Oh, and by the way, y'know, everyone hates him: "Agamemnon pulls rank--the only way he pulls anything." Why don't we just tattoo "Bad Guy" on his head and be done with it? Then, this comes when Achilles is wandering about in Hades...

"The shade of Agamemnon pushes past. A bit too eager. Reign yourself in you greedy fool. You always liked blood that was shed at no risk to yourself. Still hiding behind your title of King. Everything you had was on account of that."

It flows like. Something from. A William Shatner. Quotation book, but that's not my problem with the passage. What's quite simply wrong is the way Agamemnon "flinches from Achilles' gaze," crying and shrinking.

That's when my poor suspended disbelief came crashing down. No. Quite simply, no. Agamemnon is hardly the standard of virtue, but compared to Achilles he's a regular saint. This is one time when I agree with Marion Zimmer Bradley: Achilles' identity as a monster should be inescapable. Yes, he's heroic and bloody strong, but he's a literal psychopath. His motivation for the loud, nearly obnoxious mourning of Patroclus is shaky and questionable, especially when he starts demanding free gifts for "the shade of Patroclus." Not to mention his human sacrifices on Patroclus' grave/altar, something the gentle hero would have never wanted. In fact, he misses the whole point of Patroclus' death, which was to show Achilles that compassion for one's fellow human beings should be the foundation for action. In case you missed that, ACHILLES SACRIFICED A YOUNG GIRL. Several, in fact. Yup, that's right. He murdered twelve (if I can remember right) civilians because he FELT MAD. Then let's not forget his treatment of old King Priam, or for that matter, his treatment of Patroclus when he was alive. He consistantly takes delight in demeaning and belittling others, enjoys killing qua killing, and for 5/6 of the Iliad refuses to aid the dying Achaians because Agamemnon took his slavegirl, Breseis (of course this was his motive. I mean, Agamemnon repeatedly offered him Breseis BACK, but...). On the battlefield his behaviour is scarcely more admirable. In Quintus' famed sequel to the Iliad, after he defeats Penthesilea, he suddenly feels a quaintly-put intense love for her. Bradley interprets this to be a euphemism for raping the corpse, and I wouldn't be surprised.

And Agamemnon is supposed to flinch from Achilles' righteous gaze.

I'm going to leave this book with one and a half silver studs in Menelaus' sword. One for getting a nuance of the Patroclus/Achilles relationship right (that Patroclus loves Achilles, but not so much vice versa), and the other for tackling a project like expanding on a Hhomeric character, the likes of which are sadly neglected. Half is taken off for taking the easy way out by picking an obvious one like Achilles, then refusing to acknowledge the one thing which made him a complex character: his cruelness and utter villainy which should contrast with the fact that more moral characters are forced to rely on his assistance. I recommend this book to Thrasymachus and anyone else who, like the author of this book, obviously follows the "might is right" doctrine.