What an amazing, stunning, beautiful, mesmerizing, spellbinding, thrilling, epic poem. The subtitle says War Music is "An Account" of Homer's Iliad. I don't know exactly what an account is but might as well use it because certainly none of the other words one might use make sense. It follows the story and trajectory of the Iliad but is not a "translation" with a direct mapping of lines or groups of lines. A "retelling" would belittle something that really does a lot more than just tell the story. It is certainly not a "modernization" even though the language is deliberately modern and anachronistic in some places.

I read this on and off slowly over nearly four weeks, probably longer than I've spent on the Iliad itself. But it was really worth a slow and careful reading--even if it was all so fluent that it never felt difficult.

Christopher Logue wrote this and published parts on and off over the course of his life. Sadly he did not finish it, it includes and "account" of Books 1 through 9 and then of Books 16-19 (Patroclus entering the action, getting killed, and Achilles mourning his death and vowing vengeance). I would love nothing more than to have Logue's "account" of the rest of the Iliad, especially the death of Hector and the ransoming of his body. Sadly, it is not be. But what we do have is extraordinary.