Review of An Iliad, a story of war

Alessandro Baricco.

This was one of the books Dan Champion was offering free of charge to people who wanted to review them. I think I am like most people in that I can not resist something for nothing, so I dashed off a mail to him saying "I will have a copy, please."

Frankly, I should not have bothered.

I have to say firstly that I don't read Greek.... so of course, any attempt to read poetry in translation is flawed from the outset. However, when I was younger and thinner, I did read Mr Lattimore's translation because it was a set book for my Classical Civilization course. It was quite hard work, but enjoyable.

Signor Baricco has decided that we need a more modern version, to be read to an audience, and converted into the form of soliloquies from different speakers.... so we hear the accounts of Patroclus, Phoenix, Agamemnon etc.

Does this approach work? Well, not for me.

I thought we were going to get a spiced up version.... a racier account, as it would be reported in the Daily Sport eg ....Helen of Troy tells all, "Paris wasn't half the man that Menelaus was." Or perhaps... "Three in a bed, Patroclus confesses; debauched evening with Achilles and Briseis" or something along those lines.

Sadly no. We get a whole catalogue of "heroes", who in fact have the morals of Hell's Angels.... selfish, petulant, blood-thirsty pirates, who share out the captive women as part of the booty, and rape the unfortunate women of Troy, after it is captured via the deception of the famed wooden horse. Shockingly, Cassandra is raped by the "heroic" Ajax on the altar to Athena. These are war crimes comparable to the ones we heard about being committed in Viet-nam 30 years ago..... gratuitous, cruel, sacrilegious and violent.

A good proportion of the cast are unknowns... who are mentioned in one line and eliminated in the next...usually with an astonishing attention to the details of their wounds which would satisfy the modern Hollywood directors of war movies. So we hear for example, that Erylaus is struck between the eyes by a rock and dies with his head still inside his helmet, cleft in two. Or "with his sword he cut off Hippolochus' arms and then his head, and sent him rolling like a trunk through the dust...." One grim account follows another, described with macabre details.

Candidly, this becomes rather boring.

We know that these things are features of Homer's original work, but he had the excuse of singing for the warriors who wanted to hear their bravery extolled, and of being a product of Achaean society in approximately 1000 or 900 BC.

At the back of the book, Sr. Baricco has added a justification, in which he basically defends the work by arguing that we need to consider how horribly destructive and horrible war is, yet acknowledge its beauty. Not me.

All I can say about this book is that I am glad I did not pay for it. I don't think it contributes anything useful to modern society except to convince us that the warrior class in the Mycenaean age were an ignoble bunch who are best forgotten.

So, does this make me a philistine? Perhaps it does. Oh well....