Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs…
So begins The Iliad, by the blind poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.), and so, more or less, begins Western literature, with the story of the Greek and Trojan war. For centuries, readers have found this blood-soaked epic mesmerizing, even somehow contemporary, in its appeal. The bravery of Hector, the cunning of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), the beauty of Helen, the strength of Achilles (except for his heel!), the sleaziness of Pandaros, the wisdom of Nestor: for centuries, these, and more, characters from Homer’s epic have inspired readers, writers and artists (not to mention hucksters: the Honda Odyssey or “Use Ajax, the foaming cleanser…”
This week I thought of The Iliad while reading Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes (right), perhaps the best American war novel since The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s graphic account about the Pacific campaign in World War II.
Matterhorn — a cross between Mailer’s book and The Bridge Over the River Kwai — tells the story of a Marine platoon during the Vietnam War, trying valiantly and senselessly to take, hold and retake a useless hill, Matterhorn. Like Mailer, Marlantes wrote from experience: Mailer fought in the Philippines, and Marlantes was a much-decorated Marine — including two Purple Hearts — in the Vietnam struggle. Unlike Mailer, who’d already written a play called The Naked and the Dead and volunteered to fight in the South Pacific in order to write about it, Marlantes, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, took 30 years to finish his gripping saga (Mailer wrote his in two years, in Paris). Both, at 600+ pages, are serious tomes.
This article appears in Oct 7-13, 2010.