Book review: A final act of war for Christopher Logue’s retelling of the Iliad

The last instalment of an ambitious reimagining of Homer's Iliad is a gripping work that speaks to the problems of today as much as the past.

Christopher Logue blends the Homeric setting and heroes of the Trojan War with modern language and today’s cultures of warfare and violence. Leemage / Corbis

At long last, after decades of revisions and piecemeal publications, readers now have the final instalment of Christopher Logue's War Music, his astonishing reimagining of Homer's Iliad.

This is a happy occasion in the book world and also of course a sad one. Logue died in 2011 without ever finishing his masterpiece.

The completed work is something Logue's friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid, in his preface, calls "a poetic achievement of the highest order". This book, which Reid has edited, contains all of the separate volumes of War Music that Logue issued since classicist Donald Carne-Ross first invited him to do an adaptation of Homer for the BBC in 1959. These are Kings (1991), War Music (2001), All Day Permanent Red (2003) and Cold Calls (2005), to which Reid has added his best reconstruction of what might have been Logue's conclusion to his work, Big Men Falling a Long Way.

The present volume thus comes as an intake of breath, a kind of pause to look at this work that's reaped such praise. Since Logue had no Greek, Reid is the first to admit his friend wasn't attempting a translation in the conventional sense of the term. "The given material – setting, principal characters, plot – are recognisably Homeric but so much had to be changed if this was to become a work fit to address, however obliquely, the realities of our own bellicose era," Reid writes. The covers of Logue's various editions have always addressed that era (much as did Stanley Lombardo's Iliad, which showed a blurry black-and-white frame from the Normandy landing of D-Day), foregoing the standard Greek statues of Homer translations in favour of African boy-warriors, snipers and attack-helicopters.

Logue was no classicist but his reverence for the elemental power of Homer was perhaps all the greater for that fact; his "accounts" of the Iliad happily excise huge chunks of their template, rearrange encounters and recast dialogue to suit modern ears – but there's scarcely a page where the ethos, logic and, most of all, the gorgeous brutality of Homer are not fully in control. This is a large part of what makes this present book so strange and so compelling: for all its 20th-century slang, we get the strong sense that Homer's original audiences would have known things at once.

Homer’s epic begins not with war but with plague: in response to the prayers of a wronged priest, the god Apollo rains down disease on the camp of the Greek invaders of Troy. Logue paints a typically visceral portrait of the plague’s effects (the soldiers’ “budded tongues crystallized with green fur”) and in his description of the plague’s origins, he replaces the Homeric image of Apollo firing arrows of illness with something more direct: “Taking a corner of the sky/Between his finger and his thumb/Out of its blue, as boys do towels, he snapped,/Then zephyr-ferried in among the hulls/A generation of infected mice.” It’s both innovation and classic acknowledgement, since in Homer the wronged priest invokes the wrath of “Smintheus” – Apollo in his role as god of mice. It’s an effective little nod that most modern translators don’t bother to make.

There’s also an air of ghastly verisimilitude in Logue’s depictions of the gore and violence that are such prominent parts of Homer’s battle scenes. In such scenes the tense telegraphy of Logue’s lines twangs like a plucked bowstring; a translator sticking mostly to the dactylic hexameters of the original would be hard-pressed to match the gruesome momentum that Logue can achieve, as in the “Patrocleia” section in which Arkafact, the charioteer of the mighty Sarpedon, meets his very Homeric end: “As Akafact fell back, back arched,/God blew the javelin straight; and thus/Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank/Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain/Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull./His dead jaw gaped. His soul/Crawled off his tongue and vanished into sunlight.”

Logue smartly reflects Homer's own implicit doubts about the glories of war, a necessarily complicated subject in the "bellicose era" Reid mentioned. Homer makes bardic mention of the glories of combat, but he also shows combat's seedy, panicked underside (the Achilles that Odysseus meets in Hades in the Odyssey is a grim commentary on the point).

With Homer’s main characters, neither Logue nor any other adaptor or translator needs to do much; it’s in his pitch-perfect human observations that Homer is and always will be supreme. The childishly spoiled Achilles, the emotionally torn Patroclus, the savage but noble Hector, the wily Odysseus – all are only heightened rather than remade. For instance, Logue catches perfectly the preening bully Homer makes of Agamemnon, here lecturing troops braver than himself: “Never forget that we are born to kill./We keep the bloodshed to the maximum./Be confident that I shall plant my spear/Deep in the back of any hero who mistakes/His shieldstrap for a safety belt; his feet/For running shoes.”

Amid all the yelling and violence, Logue is also, delightfully, sensitive to the moments of beauty that are scattered throughout the Iliad. Even people who've never read Homer are familiar with his mentions of the "wine-dark sea", for instance, or "the rosy-fingered dawn" whose advent over the carnage in Cold Calls Logue expands into a lovely moment: "And now the light of evening has begun/To shawl across the plain: Blue gray, gold gray, blue gold,/Translucent nothingnesses/Readying our space,/Within the deep, unchanging sea of space,/For Hesper's entrance, and the silver wrap."

Presented with this precious volume at last, it would be griping to complain that there isn't more of it, and this is a question that hovers around the whole project, a question Logue was asked directly a quarter-century ago – "Why has it taken you so long?" – to which he had no response other than an admitted tendency to self-pity. But while poetic inspiration might be beyond the reach of readerly impatience (after all, how can you really ask a poet "why has it taken you so long?"), surely the same can't be said for the custodial end of the arrangement? Everyone who knew Logue – including the wife who's now his widow and literary executor and the friend who's now his editor – was in agreement that War Music was a great work. It's at the very least confusing, then, that this final compilation finds Reid beetling through scribbled notebooks and trying to make sense of post-it notes. Logue died of a moderately lengthy illness, not a drop down an open elevator shaft; might he not have been asked – even pressed – to help put his greatest artistic legacy in more careful order?

But what we have in this final recitative of War Music is the Trojan War of our time – loud, fast and a bit ragged and eloquently, unsettlingly, memorably beautiful, fit to share a shelf with George Chapman and Alexander Pope.

Steve Donoghue is managing editor of Open Letters Monthly.