Customer Reviews

All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad

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I've always been wary of people "reimaging" -- to use Hollywood's latest buzzword -- the classics but it's next to impossible to condemn Christopher Logue's work in reinterpreting Homer's Illiad. In All Day Permanent Red, Logue rewrites the first battles in the Illiad and the result is a fantastic updating of books 5 and 6. Mixing ancient and modern metaphors in his poetry, Logue brings home the juxtaposition in war both as horror and joy. I'm a traditionalist, I don't much care for people messing about with the books I love, but I have nothing but applause for Logue.

British poet Christopher Logue continues his decades-long rewriting of Homer's tale of war with this slim volume, which comprises books five and six of the Iliad. Since these books feature the first battles in the Iliad, this book is action-packed from first page to last. An online reviewer compared this book to the first twenty minutes of "Saving Private Ryan," and that's a very apt comparison. Like those twenty minutes of film, the fifty pages that make up All Day Permanent Red are a hectic, heart-pounding melee of bloodshed.

More importantly, this book marks the first appearance in action of my favorite character in the Iliad, Diomedes. Though here he is called Diomed, or the Child, as Logue occasionally refers to him. Diomedes is like a replacement Achilles; while that famous hero sulks in his ship, Diomedes takes up the mantle of "wartime hero" and destroys every Trojan in his path. Logue's handling of the character is excellent, especially in the way he is introduced. As Odysseus witnesses his Achaean fellows being slaughtered on the battlefield, he prays to the god Athena for help. What follows is the best line in the book:

Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly,
Emptying her blood-red mouth, set in her ice-white face,
Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:
"Kill! Kill for me!
Better to die than live without killing!"
Who says prayer does no good?

As you can see from this quote, Logue's is not a standard translation of the Iliad. As any reader of his earlier collection "War Music" knows, Logue re-writes and changes the Iliad to suit his tastes. In fact, the man can't even read Greek. But his version of the book is adored by Homer-ophiles. If you asked me, I'd rather read Logue's cinematic bursts of action-packed, freestyle verse over any of the more noted, straight-up translators, such as Fagles, Lattimore, and Fitzgerald.

This book is highly recommended to anyone who's read the Iliad, and wants to see a master writer at work. The only problem is that it's so short, and I fear that Logue won't be able to finish the whole of the Iliad itself. We can only hope.

I don't typically enjoy poetry. Maybe I'm too simple, but I usually need at least a modicum of a storyline and decent characterization in my literature. And most poetry I remember from school didn't have those aspects. Sure, lots of imagery and allusion, but not much on the storytelling.

That said, I was absolutely blown away by Logue's version of the Iliad. As another reviewer suggested, reimagining great works has a dubious past, but Logue is such a tremendous stylist his interpretation succeeds on every level. He maintains the emotion and power of the original, and he maintains plotline that has enthralled for thousands of years. But at the same time his English brings Homer directly to contemporary readers. For such a slim volume, it generated a lot of enjoyment.

My biggest disappointment is that so many of Logue's chapters of the Iliad are out-of-paint.

Though I admire the author's courage and vision to write this, in general it was too fragmented for me to enjoy. It reminded me of the lost tablets of Gilgamesh, the story seeming to skip around nonsensically at times. The narrative had Alzheimers and had trouble staying focused. The extended metaphors were silly and insular to the writer. The ending was anti-climatic and tried too hard to be revelatory. However, there are a few brilliant lines and images, but they are fleeting. I hated his interpretation of Diomedes, who I loved in E. V. Rieu's translation of Homer. The whole "Child" reference was off key here. I am a huge fan of the Iliad, but this book was very eccentric and seemed to unravel during the second half.