Achilles

by Elizabeth Cook

Overview

Born of the sea-nymph Thetis by the mortal King Peleus, hidden as a girl on Skiros until Odysseus discovers him, Achilles becomes the Greek's greatest warrior at Troy. This text retells the legend of Achilles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780413771391
Publisher:	Methuen Publishing, Ltd.
Publication date:	02/07/2002
Edition description:	New
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.16(w) x 7.72(h) x 0.39(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Cook has published short fiction and poetry, as well as scholarly works on Renaissance literature. She has also written for television and the theater. She lives in London. Achilles is her first novel.

Table of Contents

	Two Rivers	1
	Gone	59
	Relay	93
	Glossary of Classical Names	109

Editorial Reviews

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-andeven 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.

Kirkus Reviews