The blurb on the inside cover of this book has the following to say about the tome: "Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty-one Homeric characters in the narrative idiom of our own modern imagination. Sacrificing none of Homer's panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homeric detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored."
That judgment is largely valid, and the book makes for a very quick read. I wondered, though, as I read it, why read this when one can read the Iliad itself? Does Baricco add enough to justify reading this as well, or does he make the experience so vivid, one could forgo reading Homer and read Baricco himself?
I must admit that I didn't find this had the gravity of Homer. There were moments when the inmost thoughts of characters came through marvelously. Little time is given to the character of Pandarus, a Trojan whose arrow restarts the battle between Trojan and Greek after hostilities have ceased following Menelaus' victory over Paris in Iliad III. One of the gods stirs up Pandarus to shoot his arrow, which event results in his death soon after. Baricco offers us some insight into Pandarus' decision, and does so without bringing the gods into it. And so we get the musings of an also-ran in the war, and his fatal decision to shoot an arrow at Menelaus, rather confused at Paris' disappearance from the fight (no goddess helps Paris, here -- he just scoots away on his own under cover of dust). In describing the thought process of Pandarus and other also-rans, like Thersites, Baricco does us a great service. These characters are often overlooked in the panorama that is the Iliad, but Baricco fleshes them out and lets us see a few of the minor characters from that great work.
One quick note here -- Baricco avoids using the gods in the work. Each of the character looks to his or her own motivation. There are no appearances of the gods in this poem, with one exception. The river Scamander which tries to stop Achilles from his rampage does appear as a character. It is a wonderful scene, but out of keeping with Baricco's apparent aim -- to show the war as a human event, with consequences to its human participants, with no comic relief or divine side-stepping. I can't help feeling he should have left it out.
In his treatment of the farewell between Hector and Andromache, Baricco uses Astyanax' nurse to tell the story. She is a character in Iliad VI and is a witness to the encounter of Hector and his wife. In trying to describe much of Book VI through this character, though, he has the nurse speak about things she couldn't know. This is glossed over by having the nurse note that much of the narrative she learned from others, but some of this seems rather unlikely for her to learn about (the encounter between Helen and Hector -- who'd be in on that to tell the nurse?). First person narratives pack a lot of punch. As we read the words, the "I" of the narrative becomes entwined in our minds with our own "I." And so we get a much more intimate connection to the characters. But the "I" in a personal narrative has a limited POV, and when an author uses the first person narrative, and gives the narrator something close to a third-person omniscient POV, that's a problem.
In addition, we have the chapter "Priam" narrated by a third person narrator, rather than by the king himself. All other chapters are narrated by the character whose name serves as title for the chapter. Why the change here? Some chapters have interchanging of narrators, such as the one describing the "Doloneia," Iliad X. Diomedes and Odysseus both go on this spy expedition into the Trojan camp and steal the horses of Rhesus, while despatching Dolon, a Trojan spy trying to get information about the Greek position by the ships. Though each paragraph goes to one or the other of the two men, there is little to distinguish them. Diomedes' fiery character is not much distinguished from the guileful Odysseus. William Faulkner had such quick interchanges between characters in his book, As I Lay Dying -- Baricco would have done well to read that work and adapt Faulkner's wonderful characterization in narration to his work here.
Baricco does add a chapter about the fall of Troy told by Demodocus, the poet who entertained Odysseus on the island of the Phaeacians. This is interesting because we don't get that story in the Odyssey; all we get is a summary of it, and a description of its effect on Odysseus. As it parallels what Baricco is trying to do here -- an outsider telling the inside story of Troy -- it is a suitable note on which to close. It also allows Troy to have its own funeral, something the Iliad ("Troy poem") does not do.
Finally, Baricco offers some insight on what the poem means to him and what a war poem can mean to a pacifist in his postscript: "Another Kind of Beauty: Note on War." He notes that though war is hailed as a noble pursuit in the poem, Homer takes pains to show how people avoid actual battle through talking or other means, and he also notes the "feminine" peace perspective as well.