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A Review by Elizabeth Judd

Elizabeth Cook's reinterpretation of the Iliad demonstrates that epic verse has yet to exhaust its ability to assume new and surprising shapes. This poetic masterpiece, a psychologically acute portrait of the Homeric hero Achilles, begins by depicting him in Hell, jealously yearning for the physical satisfactions that the living take for granted.

This is what happens when you are dead:

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.

A trendy and unimaginative approach to the Iliad would be to resurrect Achilles in a contemporary setting, perhaps as an inner-city cop seeking vengeance for his partner's death. Cook is more innovative; she preserves the otherworldly preoccupations of the Homeric world — mortals resent the tedium of Hades and make love to sea nymphs, while a goddess wrestles with her desire for solitude — but imbues this antiquated material with a post-Freudian emotional sensibility, focusing more on the nuances of individual motivation than on the grandeur of the action. Thus her warriors are remarkably sensitive souls, attuned to the exquisiteness of human feeling. Patroclus, she suggests, "loves Achilles but not so much as he is loved" and is humbled by the knowledge "that he is less than Achilles even in this." Stylistically, Achilles is also unfailingly modern: swift, cinematic, sexually explicit, and ravishingly beautiful. Cook, a former university lecturer and Renaissance scholar, intensifies the lyrical weirdness of Greek mythology by emphasizing the ironic. Apples on Mount Pelion are so delectable that "no human there would choose a gold one," and Achilles' "sumptuous" hatred for Hector spreads "slowly, luxuriously, like cream."

A daring author — and Cook borders on the swashbuckling — is bound to hit the occasional false note. When Achilles lets out a loud war whoop, she jarringly writes that "the Trojans shit themselves." And her postmodern final chapter reads like an extended non sequitur, a lengthy meditation on John Keats's indebtedness to Achilles that is supposed to illustrate the Iliad's inspirational reach. The academic window dressing is unnecessary; Cook's stunning tale is proof enough that Achilles' story resonates through the ages.

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