Alessandro Baricco explains in the introduction to his version of The Iliad that his text developed from an initial idea to publicly read the entire Iliad. Having realised that this would be too long, he decided that something more manageable was needed for a modern audience. So, he adapted a modern prose translation by Maria Grazia Ciani, and An Iliad is the result. An Iliad is not a modern retelling in the style that we have become used to over the last few years. The Greek myths have become a valuable source for feminist retellings, for instance: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Circe come to mind: Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy Trilogy; Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra and Jennifer Saint’s Greek retellings of several myths, and many other retellings by other authors, also, now adorn bookshop shelves. Works like these tend to dig beneath the outer surface of the ancient narratives. They try to see things from a new perspective, imagine characters against the grain of their received personas, and in doing so come to a modern understanding of the works, as well as find ways to articulate modern values through a new understanding of the stories.

Baricco’s An Iliad is not that kind of thing. It is far more respectful of its source material, even though he makes amendments for his own purposes, which he explains in his introduction. I mean, whatever changes he makes for An Iliad, the tone of the writing and the concerns of the characters are mostly how we find them in Homer, with minor exceptions (Achilles loves Briseis in Baricco’s version – much more acceptable to modern sensibilities – whereas in Homer, she is his prize of war, first and foremost). But is respectful a good thing? Yes and no. It depends on your expectations.

There are some readers who will come to An Iliad and find everything they were hoping for. If you’re interested in The Iliad but don’t wish to wade through it, then Baricco’s version gives you the essential aspects of the story with fewer repetitions. The number of battles and battlefield speeches are greatly reduced and it is lighter on the violence, even if a few gruesome deaths remain. Honestly, to film Homer’s original, faithful to the battlefield descriptions he gives, would easily earn a film a restricted classification!

Baricco’s version really is much more palatable for the modern reader who wants to get to the crux of the story but is not comfortable with the length and detail of the original. For instance, there is no mention of the long long list of boats and heroes that we find in Book 2 of Homer’s Iliad. Many casual readers would be stopped dead by such detail. And the long battle at the Achaean defensive wall is reduced in length. Essentially, the battle of the ships is an important plot element that necessitates Patroclus’ key moment in the story. The building sense of dread and desperation we find in the original is diminished in An Iliad because it is truncated, but doing this allows Baricco to find an efficient narrative line through the original text which will suit readers who want to focus on the personal stories from The Iliad, instead. Baricco captures the personal moments between Hector and his mother, Hecuba, and with his wife Andromache, when he re-enters the city, for instance. But in the world of men (as Baricco terms it in his afterword) his focus is primarily upon the story of Achilles and Hector, throughout. Having mired the two forces in battle at the ships, Baricco quickly moves the story on, to the moment that is going to break the narrative deadlock: the death of Patroclus.

However, Baricco’s version also has obvious flaws, or to be more generous, it won’t suit everyone. If we return to Baricco’s introduction, we find that he explicitly lays out several objectives for his version of the story. First among these is his decision to remove the gods from the narrative and express the story as a function of “human agency”. This doesn’t mean that characters don’t speak of the gods or sacrifice to them, but the gods certainly don’t turn up in the middle of battles to influence events, and there are no scenes in which we are privy to the machinations of the competing divine factions supporting either the Trojans or Achaeans. I personally have no issue with this, since the story certainly does work without the gods, and their removal is an easy decision to make when attempting to slimline the narrative. It’s AN Iliad after all, not THE Iliad. But for those unfamiliar with Homer’s original narrative, their absence certainly diminishes the scale and richness of the story. Baricco argues that from a storytelling point of view the gods are not necessary to explain events. This comes with one exception, however. Baricco seems to have been unable to write around the presence of Scamander, the river god who attacks Achilles when he clogs the river’s waters with Trojan corpses. Not only does Scamander take action, he speaks to Achilles – “Stop piling up corpses in my beautiful waters” – and he narrates the chapter in which Achilles fights the river:

I had seen years of war, because a river does not run blindly among men. And for years I had heard their groans, because a river does not run deaf where men are dying.

The storytelling in this chapter works reasonably well. There is a far stronger sense of character from the river than in many other chapters of the book purportedly narrated by other characters from the story, both major and minor. Baricco states in his introduction, “I have made the narrative subjective. I chose several characters from The Iliad and let them tell the story, supplanting the external, unitary, Homeric narrator.” He admits that, “It’s obviously a stratagem dictated by the work’s intended audience, just as Homer’s method was suited to his.” In doing this his intention is to give, “the reader a modicum of personality to lean on”. Baricco also admits, “For the most part, it’s purely a technical move: Instead of saying, ‘The father took his daughter in his arms,’ in my text the daughter says, ‘My father took me in his arms’.” But this “technical” adjustment does not necessarily achieve strong or believable characterisation. It is not what Pat Barker or Madeline Miller are doing in their retellings, for instance: trying to get into their characters’ heads to tell us a new version of an old story with new eyes. Instead, the attempt to use multiple points of view mostly feels like window dressing.

Each chapter is titled with the name of the purported speaker, but often speakers are marginal or adjacent to the action. Even the technical adjustment of moving from third to first person is not always consistent. In the chapter supposedly told from King Priam’s perspective the narrative refers to “the king”, “the old king” (twice), “the mad old man”, and frequently uses third person pronouns, “he” and “they”, to refer to Priam and include him in a group, before he finally states halfway through the third page of the chapter, “I couldn’t move. I was petrified with fear.” I may generously allow that a king might refer to himself in the third person from time to time. He is royalty, after all. But this was not the only instance.

In an earlier chapter the story is told from the point of view of the unnamed Trojan nurse from Book 6 of Homer’s Iliad. The nurse recounts the personal moments Hector spends with his family when he returns to the city. The nurse admits, “In truth I wasn’t there. But I know these things because they were talked about . . .” At least, here, we understand how the nurse connects to the events she relates. Sometimes, for other narrators, that becomes a little unclear. But we do not expect her to talk like this:

He [Hector] came to his house but he didn’t find us. He asked the servants where we were and they told him that Andromache had gone to the walls of Ilium. She had heard that the Trojans were giving way before the power of the Achaeans and she had rushed to the walls, and now the nurse with her, carrying little Astyanax in her arms.

It is obvious from the opening – “he didn’t find us” – that “the nurse” who carries Astyanax is meant to be the narrator. But it isn’t clear why she switches to third person, as Priam does, or why this does not sound like a frightened nurse. Except, of course, if we consider Homer’s original which describes the same scene (“a servant held the boy against her breast” [Robert Fagle’s translation). We see that Baricco may simply be too close to his source material to imaginatively inhabit the perspective of his character. In fact, all the various ‘characters’ in the story seem to speak with one generic voice. They speak with the voice of a writer who uses words like “unitary”, “supplanting”, “modicum” and “stratagem”. The nurse doesn’t think to tell us her own story at all, as we have come to expect from other modern retellings. She is merely a mouthpiece, “a modicum of personality to lean on”, in what is clearly meant to be a pared down retelling of Homer’s own words.

The nurse’s example also foregrounds another aspect of the retelling that Baricco addresses in his introduction:

I couldn’t resist the temptation to make a few additions to the text. You will find them in italics, so that there are no equivocations: they are like forthright restorations, in steel and glass, on a Gothic façade.

The comment reveals much about Baricco’s approach to writing his book. There is that ‘respect’ for his source material I have already anticipated: wishing to preserve it as much as he can for the modern world, but mindful of the adornments he feels compelled to make to complete his edifice. This is the approach of a scholar, not a novelist (Baricco’s background is in philosophy), and these little italicised textual additions appear here and there in the narrative, but would mostly remain unnoticed had he not drawn attention to his method.

The only time an addition might raise eyebrows – again, it’s what you want from the text – is in the manner Baricco concludes his retelling, which I will speak about here because he discusses it in his introduction. Those unfamiliar with The Iliad, specifically, but who have grown up with the story of the fall of Troy in one way or another, are often surprised that the Trojan Horse and the fall of Troy are not featured in The Iliad. For those who have watched a popular movie adaptation like Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 Troy starring Brad Pitt, this would be an expectation. Homer chose to end the story with Priam’s grief and a meditation on violence and war (apart from the funeral games for Patroclus, but really another measure of grief). Perhaps seeing Troy fall to the Achaeans is too tempting to leave out. It’s a good story, after all. Too tempting for Baricco to resist. The last chapter headed ‘Demodocus’ refers to the bard who sings about the Trojan War when Odysseus visits the Phaeacians in Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey. Baricco gives us the Trojan Horse and all that comes with it: “it seemed to me treacherous not to tell how the war finally ended” he states in his introduction.

Overall, I would not consider this an insightful retelling. The primary focus is on the events of the story, as Baricco chooses to tell it, with far less insight into the characters or what Tolkien might call the story’s “applicability”. We may feel empathy for characters when we read this text, like the pathos we feel when we hear Priam’s pathetic plea for pity: “unique among all fathers” he describes himself to Achilles, “not ashamed to kiss the hand that killed my son.” But that is because many scenes are already powerful in Homer’s original. Baricco is a second-rate painter copying the work of a master.

And because of this, he fails to successfully imbue his work with fresh insight. Instead, Baricco chooses to leave his thoughts about his work for the afterword, expressed rather than shown, which he titles, ‘Another Kind of Beauty: Note on War’. Baricco’s thesis in this afterword is basically that there is a beauty to war which will always draw men (specifically) to it until something equally beautiful and appealing replaces it. I found it a troublesome thought. He cites great thinkers like Wittgenstein and Gadda as men drawn to the ‘beauty’ of war, “that peak experience – the atrocious practice of mortal combat – [which] could offer them what daily life was unable to express.” Baricco speaks of masculine and feminine spheres of the world, in which women lean towards peace and encourage men to that end, as do Andromache and Helen when Hector returns to the city. But in the masculine world peace, “is little more than a political convenience”. It sounds like Baricco is advocating war and violence by the way I summarise him, but he is not. Instead, he paints a portrait of humanity that lacks the imagination and will to create anything better for itself: to truly live with purpose and in peace. The Iliad, he tells us, is “a monument to war”, yet he is drawn to Achilles’ speech: “the life of a man does not come back, one cannot steal or buy it, once it has passed the barrier of the teeth.” I found in these final equivocations writing directed by philosophical intellect rather than feeling: pleased with the balancing of an argument, like the sophists of old, rather than speaking to the practical concerns and experience of people: more pleased with the cleverness of its own argument than having anything truly insightful or practical to say.