Christopher Logue began writing his version of the Iliad in 1959, after a BBC producer commissioned him to translate a section of it for radio. Logue demurred initially on the very reasonable grounds that he didn’t know a word of Greek, but the producer – Donald Carne-Ross – wasn’t having any of it. He advised Logue instead to go away and “read translations by those who did. Follow the story.” Logue gave it a go, and the result – a bright and bold rendering of Achilles’ fight with the river Scamander – sowed the seed of what was to blossom over the decades into the centrepiece of Logue’s working life; his ultimate creative endeavour. He continued to follow the story, on and off, for the next 40-odd years, bringing out sections of the poem at semi-regular intervals - the last of which, Cold Calls, bagged him the Whitbread in 2005. At that point, sadly, illness overtook him. He died in 2011 at the age of 85, leaving his project incomplete.
Part of the fascination, however, of reading Faber’s 341-page edition of War Music (the first time all the constituent parts have appeared in a single volume) is working out what, in this context, the word “incomplete” really means. It’s true that Logue’s output fell short of his intentions: back in 2003 he wrote to his editor outlining what there was still to do (“rather a lot”), and he left behind copious notes and drafts-in-progress on the parts of the Iliad that he had yet to tackle (since sifted and sorted by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid to create the appendix with which this edition concludes). Taken altogether, though, this brilliant, vaulting, ragged volume reminded me of nothing so much as an archaeological site – something like the ruins of Troy itself. Parts of the work are fair and fully formed, standing proud of the page. Others are potsherds, vital and vivid but fragmentary; carefully disinterred and placed into their most likely seeming settings but still disconnected from the whole. You couldn’t rightly call the work complete, therefore – but as with archaeology, the idea of completion feels reductive here: not unachieved so much as fundamentally unachievable. In the first place, the interconnectedness of Homer’s poem and Logue’s remodelling is such that you can’t fully pick them apart; Homer’s words run beneath Logue’s like bedrock under soil, and where there are gaps in Logue’s version, Homer’s swells up to carry us over them. Secondly, and just as significantly, Logue’s retelling of the Iliad plays with the idea that, when it comes to war, any sort of ending is an illusion. His decision to illustrate Homer’s story of brave men and bickering gods with flagrantly anachronistic combat imagery (“whumping” helicopters; Uzis “shuddering warm against your hip”) makes the point that, when it comes to war, the best humanity has ever managed is the odd break between battles. War Music is incomplete because the war isn’t over.
It’s the way in which Logue twists and tinkers with his source material to hammer home this message that really makes the book. He couches his anachronisms in cheerfully demotic language which creates, at times, an almost tabloid feel (the goddess Aphrodite is recast as “Miss Tops and Thongs”), and brings Homer’s devastating perspective shifts bang up to date by making them explicitly filmic – pulling back to give a god’s-eye view of the antlike armies beating against one another one minute, zooming in to focus on foot soldiers’ deaths the next. He draws on the language of cinematography (“Reverse the shot./ Go close”) in a nod to the ubiquity of the war reports that saturate our screens today, and marshals his readers as a director might, issuing peremptory commands (“imagine”, “look”, “hear this”).
At one point he uses the image of a yacht to describe the Greek hero Merionez charging across the beach to protect Patroclus’ dead body:
Picture a yacht
Canting at speed
Over ripple-ribbed sand.
Change its mast to a man,
Change its boom to a bow,
Change its sail to a shield:
Notice Merionez
Breasting the whalebacks to picket the corpse of Patroclus.
The image is a distillation of Logue’s approach: fast-paced, fluid, emphatic; explicitly contemporary (that yacht) but at the same time exulting in its epic roots. Just eight lines long, it pulls in a dozen different directions, including all of those elements and bringing them to perfect balance. It looks simple, but is anything but. No wonder writing it was a life’s work.
Cold Calls, the final finished section of War Music, ends on a cliffhanger. Achilles, shattered by the death of his adored Patroclus, has buried the hatchet with his king, Agamemnon, and agreed to re-enter the fray, determined to destroy Hector and bring Troy to its knees. He mounts his chariot to go in search of Hector and is borne off over the poem’s horizon; carried back, perhaps, into Homer’s version of events. “Someone”, the last line reads, “has left a spear stuck in the sand.” It’s an ideal outgoing image: still, striking, but throbbing with potential; gesturing to the war to come. The notion of a “complete” War Music may be a chimera, but the fact that we won’t have Logue to describe to us what comes next is an incalculable loss.
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