Now Miller, in her page-turning debut novel The Song of Achilles, brings us the boyhoods of Patroclus and Achilles. The past year has seen an outpouring of such Homeric reimaginings and fillings-out, such as David Malouf's novel The Ransom, based on book 24 of the Iliad and Zachary Mason's Calvino-esque sequence of riffs on the Odyssey, imagining dozens of counter-fates for its central character. The in-the-moment brightness of the text, the direct swiftness of the narrative, the open-endedness, the spareness: there is space for the imaginative reader to fill with backstory and sequel. The poems have peculiar qualities that invite such expansions. Euripides's Troiades is a brutal sequel to the stories of the women Helen, Cassandra, Andromache and Hecuba, the four who receive Hector's slaughtered body at the end of the Iliad. Aeschylus's play Agamemnon, for example, is an expansion of the brief account in the Odyssey of the king's murderous homecoming after the war. Classical literature is full of the what-ifs and what-nexts of the Homeric stories. I n fleshing out the early history of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Madeline Miller is following a tradition almost as old as the Iliad itself.
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