Love is a Journey... Wider Reading 6: Song of Achilles

Greece - in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfil his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.

Despite its fame, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is one that has puzzled scholars and readers for hundreds of years. It is hard to make a character like Achilles, who drags his enemy's body around the beseiged Troy several times a day sympathetic - especially to modern eyes. This is the writers challenge in this novel, and for the most part she succeeds convincingly by taking his story back to its roots, and imagining the development of Achilles' relationship with his beloved Patroclus. Using the latter's gentle narrative voice, Miller deftly paints the picture of a boy, and later a man, in love, and the way in which he is stunned and grateful for that love being returned.

Although not explicitly stated in Homer's epic "The Iliad," some accounts have placed the two men, always depicted at least as close friends, in a homosexual relationship and it is on this that the novel rests. Its strengths lie not so much in evoking the passionate love story, although the writer does so elegantly, but in creating an almost distressingly real setting in the 'age of Heroes' - despite the matter-of-fact intervention of gods and the lauding of values that seem alien to modern eyes. The argument between Achilles and Agamemnon evolves from a petty spat between raging warlords into an inevitable clash of personalities driven by prophecy, love and loss.