Review by Booklist 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
British writer and scholar Cook offers up an inconsistently satisfying curiosity in this little slip of a debut novel retelling the story of Achilles' life. At times the author catches an effect that's just right-that vivifies, that is, or expands in new words the reader's impression-memories of the classics themselves, mainly the Homeric epics. What it's like for Achilles in the Afterworld, for example (this just before the still-living Odysseus visits him): "You know the living are up there, driving your horses, ploughing your fields, handling your bowls. Eating. The living are always eating; their tongues fossicking among the bones"). Less satisfying, though, is her unimaginative decision to adhere to a narrative view of the gods as "magic" beings, as in the story of Achilles' birth, when Thetis dips him in the Styx ("Immortality,' she said, I'm burning away [his] mortal parts in the fire of this river'"). One craves not such schoolroom retellings but descriptions instead of real people and of the actual human traits that gave rise to the myths. And yet, when she does try doing it this way, Cook often limps and loses her ear, as in her implying of Helen's beauty by berating the craven beastliness of the men who lust for her ("their cheers were in Paris' ears as he fucked her. He needed others to want her to want her"). Achilles' youthful sexual joining with Deidamia is more successfully told, as is his deadly encounter with Penthiseleia, the Amazon queen. Possibly most captivating is the chapter on Chiron, the wise centaur. The closing section-about Keats's aesthetic-emotional relatedness to antiquity-is quite beautifully done, though it remains more envoi than part of the whole-and even here one's sense of being in capable poetic hands is shaken by Cook's curious way elsewhere in the book of resorting to absurdly blunt effects like "AAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEE!!!" or "QUICK! / CLOSE THE GATE. ACHILLES IS COMING." A mix.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
