Achilles: A Novel [Paperback]

Elizabeth Cook (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2003

Born of god and king and hidden as a girl until Odysseus discovers him, Achilles becomes the Greeks’ greatest warrior at Troy. Into his story comes a cast of fascinating characters—among them Hector, Helen, Penthiselaia the Amazon Queen, and the centaur Chiron; and finally John Keats, whose writings form the basis of a meditation on the nature of identity and shared experience. Achilles is an affirmation of the story’s enduring power to reach across centuries and cultures to the core of our imagination.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With this brilliantly conceived retelling of the plight of one of Homer's heroes, British writer Cook demonstrates the same skill that has made her poetry and examinations of Renaissance literature so wonderfully memorable. Cleaving closely to the Odyssey but embellishing her tale with sharply imagined creative flourishes, Cook navigates the rise and fall of the powerful Greek warrior Achilles, tragic hero of the Trojan War. Voluptuously chronicling the warrior's youth, Cook tells how he is dipped in the immortalizing waters of the river Styx (except for the legendary heel) and spends his youth cloaked as a girl. As he rises to power, Achilles encounters a bevy of gods and mystical figures, each imparting ruminations on fate, mortality and the tragic eventualities of love and war. Death the slaying of Troy's champion soldier, Hector; the 12 gruesome days spent parading his corpse via chariot; and Achilles' own demise is the work's central theme, but Cook also brilliantly narrates a series of passionate encounters, describing, for example, the exquisitely athletic fusion of King Peleus and Achilles' sea-nymph mother, Thetis. Cook's text is more lush prose poem than traditional narrative, its concentrated, intense verbiage exhibiting agony and beauty simultaneously. The heady brew is made even richer by Cook's brave incorporation of an episode from the life of poet John Keats in the surprising final chapter, which suggests a curious affinity between the prophetic writer and the slain hero. At 128 pages, Cook's tale is tightly woven, and this brevity makes for an extreme reading experience. The genre of retellings of classical epics will surely be reinvigorated by this slim, exceptional interpretation of the heroic fable of Achilles. (Feb.)Forecast: Rave reviews in Britain heralded the appearance of this potent work, and curiosity on these shores should be whetted by the book's haunting jacket, which features a massive ancient wooden gate in stark black and white.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* With all the backstory and ongoing action in the Iliad, it is easy to forget the opening lines' pronouncement that the epic is about one man, Achilles, who, scorned by the Greek leader Agamemnon, is sitting out the war. But only Achilles can ensure Greek victory, only he can vanquish the Trojan champion Hector. Of course, after Hector slays Achilles' boon companion, Patroclus, the great hero does destroy Hector, only to be killed soon after by a divinely guided arrow. The matter of Troy continues without him. Cook opens her inspired retelling of Achilles' story with a proem on the conjunction of Styx, the underworld river of death, and a surface river, possibly Troy's Scamander but conceivably any stream that fosters life. She flashes forward to homebound Odysseus' encounter with Achilles in Hades, then unfurls his story, from his birth as the offspring of a goddess and a man, to his mother's vain attempt to hide him from his fate by dressing him as a girl, to the nine years he grew to manhood on the plain before Troy, to the events reported in the Iliad. In language more chaste and essential than prose fiction normally employs, Cook points up the primal quality of Achilles' story, so that we see its tragedy--that the supremely gifted, too, must die--as utterly universal. An Achilles or a Keats, as Cook argues by means of a coda about the great young hero of Romantic poetry, comes but once in an epoch to make us grasp our immortal glory and our mortal ignominy securely enough to celebrate as well as despair. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Picador (February 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312311109
• ISBN-13: 978-0312311100
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #877,394 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An imperfectly realized vision., May 5, 2003

By 

Graham Henderson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Achilles: A Novel (Paperback)

I would most certainly not describe this book as a historical novel as other reviewers have. It is a kind of short story  actually more like a sequence of episodes cast with a poetic hand. And it is not strictly a retelling of Achilles story  Cook offers us a highly selective and even eccentric conception of Achilles. She gives us an Achilles who will be unfamiliar to many readers of the poem, for Cooks Achilles is sapped of much of the mettle and psychological consistency with which Homer endowed him.

If you believe like me that the Iliad is all about the education of Achilles, then you may have trouble with Cooks interpretation. She seems to miss the entire point of the story. And dont just take my word for this. When Priam begs Acilles for the return of Hectors body, Cook has Achilles respond as follows: Its Zeus wish that I give you the body and thats why youll get it.

If you believe this, then you have to believe that Homer wrote a story about nothing. This meeting is the crux of the Iliad. It constitutes one of the most poignant moments in the entire corpus of western literature. Yet here Achilles decision to return Hectors body is reduced to a reflex action dictated by a god. In truth, Achilles returns the body (and disdains the gifts of Priam, though bizarrely Cooks has him pawing through them and picking out the softest robe) because he ALONE among the Greeks has finally come to an understanding of the cost of war, and the meaningless of trophies. It took the death of his friend to do it (a death that he comes to see was a direct consequence of his own pride). Achilles grew as a person -- a fact Cook seems to have missed altogether.

There are false notes here as well which undermine Cooks credibility with the reader. For example, at one point she refers to Hera as Juno -- this is the Roman name for Hera. This isnt poetic license, this is an error of the first magnitude and there are more where this came from.

Cook is also wilfully crude; one of the other reviewers euphemistically characterised these elements as adult. The appearance of these terms is so crude and so repugnant that it has the effect of wrenching the reader from the narrative flow. The point is that Cook perhaps wants to give her writing an edge. Well, there are better ways.

However, this is not a bad book; it is filled with beautiful, poetic passages. Such as this one:

Hectors feet are sure.As he runs he remembers each part of his life: the bushes and rocks of his boyhood hideoutsthe routes of his huntingthe waterfall he led Asytanax first bathing.the shallow rock pools where the women did the laundry before the war. He remembers, his life spread out before him like a giant sheet in the sun..

I was very moved by this. And you wont find anything like this in Homer. But you know what? You wont find it for a reason. Have you EVER been scared? I mean scared for your life? Terrified that you were about to die? I have. I spent years rock climbing and got into some very compromising situations. And let me tell you, in moments like these you are not dreamily recalling episodes from your past. Every fibre of your being is striving to keep you alive. Your higher intellectual functions shut down, your autonomic nervous functions take over, you become animalistic. Homer knew that. Hector had a killer bearing down on him -- Achilles was never more than a few footsteps behind him. Hector would have probably heard his laboured breath and felt his presence. He would have known the certainty of his approaching death. Believe me, he wasnt thinking of women doing laundry or Asytanax first bath.

And so this leads to my final judgement on this book. You may enjoy it. You may be touched from time to time. Impressed here and there by a particularly well turned phrase. However, at its bottom, the problem with this book is that it is an imperfectly realised conceit. Men, particularly men at war, simply do not act or think the way Cook imagines that they do. But if you are a fanatic like I am, you will want this book in your collection.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What It Means To Be Mortal, April 27, 2002

By 

"krchicago" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Achilles: A Novel (Hardcover)

Although the dust jacket identifies "Achilles" as a novel, make no mistake about it -- this is poetry, even if it happens to look like prose on the page. (Interestingly, "A Novel" does not appear on the title page or anywhere else -- perhaps this was just wishful thinking by a publisher scared of marketing the book as poetry.) The spare, concentrated language, the interwoven images of water, fire and blood, the recurring themes of mortality and immortality -- life, death and something in between -- all are masterfully handled in this brief but deep book.

Although Achilles' life and death provide the framework for much of the book, in some ways he remains always apart from us. In the underworld he is different from the other dead, just as in life he was different from other mortals. Perhaps his choice, to die young but with a name that will live forever, sets him apart (undying, like the figures on Keats' Grecian urn). We know Achilles' actions, but we seldom see into him in the way that we see into the other characters -- Peleus, Thetis, Priam, Helen, Chiron. Cook is nothing short of brilliant in taking us into the hearts and minds of these "subsidiary" characters. Thetis' grief at the funeral of Achilles and Helen's lonely life are particularly harrowingly drawn.

As others have noted, the concluding transition to Keats is initially disconcerting, but as I ponder on it, I see more layers on which it works for me. As demonstrated by the subject-matter of many of his poems, Keats was drawn to the classical past, and to the question of immortality -- what is it that endures? Truth, beauty, art, a life that embodies those qualities -- whatever you call it, this book is one that will endure in my mind.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Idea Weakly Executed, September 14, 2004

By 

Gulliver Foyle (Stars My Destination) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Achilles: A Novel (Paperback)

I gave it three stars for ambition, but, unfortunately, the language doesn't live up to the ambition. Also, structurally it's weak, with Achilles dying in the middle and the remainder coming across as padding. The Keats section in particular is attached by paperclips to the prior passages. (They both had red hair--so what? I'm dirty blond, does that make me the same as Brad Pitt? {answer: No})The Keats section came across as, "Look how much I know about Keats."

Indeed, the contrast between the actual Keats quotations, with all their power, and the fluttering efforts of the author to reach for majestic language is quite telling.

As noted in other reviews, there are a few moving or innovative passages, and, ok, I liked the rough sex. But for a truly great modern re-telling of the Iliad, check out Christopher Logue's works.