The Bloodstained Rise

National Review, Nov 10, 2003 by Andrew Stuttaford

All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten, by Christopher Logue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 64 pp., $18)

Christopher Logue has been a dealer in stolen property (briefly), a prisoner in a Crusader castle (16 months), a pornographer (the book Lust), and, probably no less discreditably, an actor, a poet, and a writer of screenplays. As if this weren't enough, for over four decades this versatile Englishman has been engaged in a "reworking" of the Iliad. It is not, he is at pains to stress, a translation (he knows no Greek), but an episodic "account" of the ancient epic that has already taken far longer to produce than Troy took to fall.

And, as you read those words, I can hear you sigh. The prospect of yet another tawdry modernization of a classic that needs none seems like nothing to look forward to. Our age often shows itself too restless, unimaginative, and self-important to attempt a genuine understanding of our culture's past. Hot in the pursuit of some imagined relevance, we are forever reinterpreting and updating, here The Tempest as an allegory of slavery, there a few nipples to spice up that boring old Jane Austen. And if, in the process, the sense of the original is lost, we shrug, and settle for what is left: deracinated pap, bland at best, topically -- and inconsequentially -- "controversial" at worst. Only later do we bother to wonder where our literature has disappeared to.

But All Day Permanent Red is very different from the usual dross. Logue's previous work on the Iliad has been called a masterpiece (Henry Miller, not always a reliable source, described an early section as better than Homer): a devalued term these days, but, in this case, well deserved. All Day Permanent Red is the latest chapter and it doesn't disappoint. Here is Logue's description of the Greek soldiers rising to face their Trojan opponents:

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian

blind.

Add the receding traction of its slats

Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it

up.

Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

Then of a stadium when many boards are

raised

And many faces change to one vast face.

So, where there were so many masks,

Now one Greek mask glittered from strip

to ridge.

In earlier installments -- War Music (1981), Kings (1991), and The Husbands (1994) -- Logue darted in and out of Homer's chronology, starting with the death of Patroclus and the return of Achilles, then taking his readers back to the early quarrels between Agamemnon and Achilles, and then on to the single combat between wronged Menelaus and spoiled, lethal Paris. In All Day Permanent Red (the title is, wonderfully, borrowed from an advertisement for lipstick), Logue takes a step back -- to the very first full day of combat between the two armies.

The language is as ferocious as its subject matter and, in its cinematic intensity, it's easy to see the hand of the former screenwriter:

Sunlight like lamplight.

Brown clouds of dust touch those brown

clouds of dust already overhead.

And snuffling through the blood and

filth-stained legs

Of those still-standing-thousands goes

Nasty, Thersites' little dog,

Now licking this, now tasting that.

But there is more to this saga than a simple recital of slaughter. The savagery on the plains before Troy is echoed in the heavens above. Nowadays we tend to trust in the benign God of the monotheistic imagination or, failing that, in the indifference of a universe that does not actually set out to harm us. The men of Homer's time had no such comfort: "Host must fight host, / And to amuse the Lord our God / Man slaughter man."

The gods of antiquity were capricious, selfish, and vain, playground bullies or the smug members of the smart set in a high-school movie, monsters as often as they were saviors. Pitiless, dangerous Olympus is a recurrent theme that Logue, like Homer, has emphasized throughout his narrative, and this new volume is no exception. Here is Athena's response to a plea for help from Odysseus:

Setting down her topaz saucer heaped

with nectarine jelly

Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her

ice-white face

Teenaged Athena jumped up and

shrieked

"Kill! Kill for me!

Better to die than to live without killing!"

Logue's language, both grand and, at times, oddly conversational ("Only this much is certain: when a lull comes -- they do -- / You hear the whole ridge coughing"), brings immediacy to an ancient epic. His use of deliberately anachronistic wording neither jars (partly because most English-speaking readers, including this one, are not comparing Logue's work against the original Greek) nor does it break that sense of the past that is no small part of the spell of a tale thousands of years old. And, yes, the references to Venetian blinds, plane crashes, and even an aircraft carrier somehow work in this tale of Bronze Age fury. Their very modernity reminds us both of our vast distance from this saga, and of the extraordinary cultural continuity that its survival represents.

And if we want to understand why, beyond an accident of history, the Iliad has been remembered for so long, Logue's extraordinary, compelling poetry gives us a clue. The Iliad has as much to say about the human condition now as it did when Homer began to write, not least the destructive, glorious, inglorious love of battle that will endure until the Armageddon which, one day, it will doubtless bring about: