Achilles by Elizabeth Cook

 Achilles by Elizabeth Cook - good

Begins with Odysseus visiting the underworld - then Chiron advising Peleus how to mate with Thetis, the sea nymph. She turns to fire, then water, then a lion, then snake, then cuttlefish - releases sticky balck ink. Then woman. 

Achilles is taught by Chiron, he has the red haro of a fox, then sent to live as a girl, Pyrrha, amongst girls. Mates with Deidamia. Odysseus finds him with a trick and takes him to Troy. Agamemnon tricks Iphanigia. Patroclus. The Scamander incident.  Athene as ‘grey-eyed brainchild’ of Zeus. Briseis: She creeps around like an unowned kitten, fending for herself as best she can. Penthesilea. Following Polyxena into Apollo's temple. Cutting hair as a funeral contribution. The wailing of Thetis and the sea nymphs.

P 64 ‘The sound is the sound that would happen if every fish in a silver shoal had its own fine note. An intricacy of sound, a close-stitched cloth. Each fish a needle darting over and under, under and over, till the cloth is tight. Each needle a note, taking its place in the vast canopy of sound that spreads itself out over their heads. This plant, seam-free cloth of shot silk which encloses them unfurls, interposing itself between them and the sky’  

…

‘As they arrive on the beach the song thickens. Soon they are all here: Thetis, her sisters, and those nine daughters of Zues and mnemosyne, the Muses. They stand together on the shore and sing and their song burns in the veins of all who hear it. It is stronger than unmixed wine.’

Helen - as child - alone in egg, brothers twin in another egg. Thesus rapes her at ten. First of  a series of men trying to mark her. ‘I am the loneliest person on earth’  

Chiron made the ash spear from a tree he nurtured. ‘When he saw that it was ready he took an axe (whose handles he’d made from an ancestor of the ther tree) and felled it. ‘Making the bow form animal sinew. The best tendon is the Achilles. 

RELAY: Keats - red headed, on heath finds a lock of red hair. Takes it home. 

P104 The most intimate continuity between cell and cell. The part that’s born has touched the part that dies and the dying body is parent to the living....

Like a relay. The baton passed from hand to hand. 

Or like a chain of fire. The beacons proclaiming that Tory has fallen - the news carried from high point to high point, swift as thought, till it reaches the heart of Achaea and the remotest islands; till Clytemnestra knows, and Penelope, and Peleus. 

If continuity between cell and cell, between my hand now and my hand then, so also between man and man. This hand that clasped your hand that clasped his hand and so on. As if the warmth in my veins were passed back to run in his who lived so long ago.

My father, me thinkes I see my father.   

Is it the same song - though sung by another nightingale - that I hear now as Ruth heard, sick for home? Different lungs and larynxes to be sure. Different ears too. But is there enough the same?

A game of Chinese whispers. A hot word thrown into the next lap before it burns. It has not been allowed to set.. Each hand that momentarily holds it, weighs it, before depositing it with a neighbour also, inadvertently, moulds it, communicates its own heat. 

From cheep to chirp.

From woof to warp. 

…

The relics of a saint are not moved by those acquisitive of their virtues. They are translated: carried across. A chain of hands across the waters, across the mountains, across time. Conveying the precious changed and changing thing.

...  

Keats read Patrolcus’ funeral. Achilles cuts his hair.

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