The Rage of Achilles [Paperback]

Terence Hawkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2009

Blood. Guts. Pride. Wrath. The ancient clash of armies outside the walls of Troy is a cornerstone of Western literature. In The Rage of Achilles, Terence Hawkins brilliantly reimagines that titanic encounter. His stunningly original telling captures the brutality of the battlefield, the glory and the gore, in language that never relents. Raw and compelling, The Rage of Achilles tells the story of Achilles, a monstrous hero, by turns vain and selfish, cruel and noble; of Paris, weak and consumed by lust for his stolen bride; of Agamemnon, driven nearly to insanity by the voices of the gods; and of Trojans and Achaeans, warriors and peasants, caught up in the conflict, their families torn apart by a decade-long war. The Rage of Achilles is an exhilarating story that has captured the imaginations of readers for thousands of years restored to immediacy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Hawkins] provides much new insight on the tale . . . and turns something ancient into a new read, worthy of a second viewing. "The Rage of Achilles" is a fine spin on Homer's classical tale, a highly recommended read. --MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

Hawkins' tale moves with the force of a cyclone. . . .   It will be impossible not to be entertained and moved by this rendering of the age old story. --Historical Novels Review, February 2011

This fascinating novel has a really simple concept at its core -- The Iliad as rewritten by Quentin Tarantino
-----In Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's Year's Best Experimental and Cutting-Edge

"The Rage of Achilles" is that rare thing--a genuinely fresh take on a classic text. Terence Hawkins' modern retelling of "The Iliad" has the paradoxical, invigorating effect of making Homer's epic feel oddly familiar, and of highlighting its deep strangeness at the same time. --Tom Perrotta, author of "Little Children"

In this masterful account by Terence Hawkins, the Trojan War is infused with all the immediacy of a current event. --Richard Selzer, author of "The Doctor Stories"

Not for the faint of heart, Hawkins' novel explores war with all its smells, terrors, and blood. It is the kind of heart-pumping, edge-of-your-seat book that readers long for and diligently seek. --The Historical Novel Review, 11/2/2009

With prose at once elegant and terse, Hawkins helps us taste the bloody fields of Troy, the sea on which those one thousand Achaeans sailed, and the bitter tinge of what it is to be divine and human alike. The fresh breath of modernity used to propagate this account earns "The Rage of Achilles" a seat next to "The Iliad" as both companion and commentary. --Andrew Bowen, Prick of the Spindle, 2009

[Hawkins] provides much new insight on the tale...and turns something ancient into a new read, worthy of a second viewing. "The Rage of Achilles" is a fine spin on Homer's classical tale, a highly recommended read. --Small Press Bookwatch, Midwest Book Review, Nov. 2009

From the Back Cover

"THE RAGE OF ACHILLES is that rare thing--a genuinely fresh take on a classic text. Terry Hawkins' modern retelling of THE ILIAD has the paradoxical, invigorating effect of making Homer's epic feel oddly familiar, and of highlighting its deep strangeness at the same time."

TOM PERROTTA, Author of Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher.

"The outcome of the Trojan War is a matter of history, but in this masterful account by Terence Hawkins it is infused it with all the immediacy of a current event. The action of the story never flags, and is kept at a furious pitch throughout. It is a book that can well be read at a single sitting, then re-read to savor the brilliance of the writing. As Hawkins reinvents the Trojan War, he does so at the limit of what the reader can bear. Blood is perpetually recreated as a brute fact. It has to be shed, for that is its destiny. The battles are depicted in the most graphic and shocking detail in which the bloodshed has an almost sacrificial implication without which it would be not nearly so moving. Read it and see for yourself."

RICHARD SELZER, Author of Confessions of a Knife and The Doctor Stories.

Product Details

• Paperback: 198 pages
• Publisher: Casperian Books LLC (November 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934081205
• ISBN-13: 978-1934081204
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #240,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, during an Eisenhower administration I'd rather not specify. I attended public schools until, through some fluke never explained and still the source of collegiate chagrin, I was permitted not only to attend but graduate from Yale. I went to law school at the University of Wisconsin and practiced law in Madison until 1985, when I returned to New Haven.

Guess I just like college towns.

Terrified by the obvious superiority of my classmates, I didn't write at Yale. In fact, equally afraid of the possibility that I had no talent whatever----jury's still out by the way----I didn't begin writing seriously until I attended the Yale Summer Writing Program, where I fell under the generous tutelage of Tom Perrotta, Richard Selzer, and Kate Walbert. After the discovery of the Internet, I began submitting occasional pieces to various online journals, including Poor Mojo's Almanac(k)---easily the finest publication ever featuring a squid on the masthead----Pindeldyboz, and Eclectica.

The Rage of Achilles is my first novel. I'm now revising my second, American Neolithic.

And through yet another karmic twist I am now the Director of the Yale Writers' Conference, set to kick off in June 2012. How's that for closing the circle?

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too ugly to be profound; so patronizing it becomes parody, October 31, 2010

By 

Jacob Fowler - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Rage of Achilles (Paperback)

To the extent that I enjoy seeing how authors handle adaptations of the Iliad, I approached The Rage of Achilles with significant interest. However, while it has its strong points, Hawkins makes significant miscalculations in his treatment of the story - and thus it falls far short of its potential.

First the positive: Hawkins has a tremendous gift for description. He takes great care to make his scenes feel vivid and real, drawing on nuanced details to help us experience what his characters see, feel, smell, and hear. His command over the battlefield is great. With a lot going on during battle scenes, he proves himself quite deft at choosing what to include and what to leave out, so that we experience the sights and sounds of the battle without losing the strategic and dramatic flow of events. In this regard, I was surprised to see such talent in an obscure book like this one.

The rest of the book more or less falls apart, however, mostly due to a single miscalculation on the part of the author. Hawkins sets out with the goal of de-glorifying the story. He wants to knock both the characters and the subject matter off their pedestals, strip the story of its polite veneer, and give us a gritty, no-holds-barred look at flawed humans in a harsh world. He rightly realizes that presenting us a sanitized Iliad, filled with perfectly noble heroes, would be a fatal oversimplification; however, his mistake is in his belief that the more violent, sexual, and nasty the story is, the more profound it is. While it's possible to make a story simplistic in its pure idealism, it's equally possible to, as a reaction, make a story simplistic in its pure depravity - and Hawkins does just that. Without discussing in gross detail, I'll say that he goes beyond taking an "unflinching" look at the story and presents us gratuitous scenes that are nothing but ugliness for the sake of ugliness.

Sex and gore aside, perhaps the ugliest thing about this book is its characters. Hawkins wants to show us an angry Achilles, so he thinks the thing to do is make Achilles as thoroughly nasty as possible. But the problem is that this doesn't make him any more human. Rather than being broadly painted as a one-dimensional paragon of virtue, he becomes a one-dimensional study in all the ways a person can be violent, arrogant, mean, and yes, stupid - and that's no better. Is it good to show a complex character who is full of flaws? Yes. But Achilles is nothing but flaws, and without a feeling for his underlying humanity, we have nothing but a name with a mess of horrid acts attributed to it.

The rest of the characters are no better. Hawkins' treatment of the Greek "heroes" is so patronizing that it descends to the level of parody. He goes to great lengths to pound into our heads the fact that Agamemnon is comically arrogant and that poor Menelaus lives in his shadow. Other than that, however, most of the others are lumped together into a homogeneous mass of middle-aged morons distinguishable only by their names. If they're not drunk or hung over, they're standing around like idiots waiting for the "penecostal fire" to fall while Agamemnon feels the "move of the spirit." Their moods turn on a dime, and they're so susceptible to manipulation that I found myself wondering how these guys managed to run an army. And since the Trojans are just as bad, we find that the story has only two half-intelligent characters. I won't give you their names, but I'll say that one is a Greek hero you'll identify within his first appearance or two, and the other is a made-up Trojan character who's not named Napolieono or Hindenibergo. They serve primarily as "voices of reason" by showing how men with 21st century sensibilities would interact with all the stupid people who lived in ancient times.

The dialogue in this book is a mixed bag. Hawkins often writes conversations in short, fast moving snippets that can be brisk and enjoyably glib at times, but that too often become choppy. Where it fails the most is at the end, where it is certainly not up to task at showing us that Hawkins' brutish Achilles had a plausible change of heart. His climactic decision is thus abrupt and unconvincing.

Other than that, there are a few inexplicable things that left me shaking my head as I read. I have no idea why Hawkins portrayed the Trojans as vastly outnumbering the Greeks; there's no reason for that reversal, and it makes the siege completely implausible. Equally inexplicable is his decision to show the Greeks winning in Achilles' absence. Why? It serves no purpose other than to force the author to contrive a half-hearted explanation for why Agamemnon would want to beg Achilles to return.

If the story as I described it appeals to you, then by all means buy this book. But don't use it as your tool for learning what the Iliad is about. Aside from the fact that it is dripping with irony from start to finish, Hawkins changes so much of the story that you'll walk away from his book with more misconceptions than knowledge. How much of this is deliberate on his part and how much is simple mistakes is hard to say (when I hear him talk about the Iliad in interviews, I squirm with embarrassment for his sake - so fundamentally lacking is his knowledge of the source material).

Either way, The Rage of Achilles is not the Iliad. And forget this notion that it's more complex or profound than its source. Homer's characters are far more rounded and fleshed out than the yahoos in this story... And the way the Iliad juggles the complexities of war is much more insightful than the blunt "war is bad/people are all jerks/the ancients are stupid" message presented in this novel.

I appreciate Hawkins as an aspiring writer, especially as one who decided to base a story (however loosely) on the Iliad. However, this one didn't work for me. I would advise readers to skip this and read a good modern translation of the Iliad.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modern twist on a old classic tale, November 29, 2009

By 

ReadtomeGrandma (Smock, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rage of Achilles (Paperback)

A very modern twist to the classic Iliad tale. This is usually not my genre of books, but I found it to be a page turner, finishing it in just over a day. The author paid great detail to the historical integrity of the tale, but wrote in a modern language that will entices readers into the characters lives and emotions. Definately an adult read. I can't wait to see what Terrence Hawkins comes up with for his next book writing adventure. 5 stars and many kudos!!!

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars the worst sort of soft porn, September 5, 2010

By 

Alison Daniel "vixen" (anywhere I damn well like) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Rage of Achilles (Paperback)

A wonderful timeless classic is trashed.

Achilles' temper is introduced by him killng a young girl as a result of a violent rape where he uses her mouth - not part of the origical story and added for reasons only the author would know. Moving along a few pages, there is Paris admiring his body, mentioning the beautiful Helen has a lisp (!), a gorgeous rack (described as I would expect in certain men's magazines) and on and on it goes about sex in the morning where Paris has a 'snake' - not a cock, not a penis, a snake! A few pages later, there is a group discussion about Helen and what a 'slut' she is. The writing is atrocious and travesty to the real story. Never mind the feeble excuse of making this story modern, it didn't. It made it petty, superficial, the language a combination of coy Mills and Boon variety (Paris' 'snake) to the type of words used when men really hate women - Helen is a 'slut'. Not any insight in this book. So badly written, it was placed where it is most suited - in my rubbish bin. AVOID this crappy novel.