“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Ilium by Dan Simmons
HarperTorch (2005)
731 pages

I better be admitting this up front — I wasn’t looking forward to doing any sort of recap of this book or Olympos. It’s a messed-up jumble in my head, both of the books, and if asked to summarise the plot points I’d probably fail, since it seems more like a whirl of characters and events. I’m not saying that I didn’t like the book — it was intriguing and mostly well written, and I did spend a few sleepless nights reading both Ilium and Olympos.

Here’s what it’s about: it’s the Trojan War, but being reenacted in the future, on a terraformed Mars. Yeah, I know. Took me a while to wrap my head around that myself. There are three major strorylines going on, the first one about said Trojan War, the other about humans living on earth about 2000 years into our future, and the third about Shakespeare-analysing, Proust-quoting man–machine hybrids called moravecs from the Jovian moons. The first part is in the first person — we’re tagging along with a scholar from the 21st century named Thomas Hockenberry who has been revived to observe as the war progresses, and basically he’s sick and tired of the whole thing and he eventually does something to derail the original course of the Iliad. We almost get a blow by blow account of the war at some parts of his story. The other story is about the old-style humans on earth, post-literate and almost completely ignorant about everything — their history and origins, the world around them — but a group of them from Ardis Hall are finally realising that not everything is as fine and dandy as they had been led to believe. The third, centred on the moravecs, is about their mission as they travel from Jupiter to Mars, and later their journey through the terraformed Mars, to investigate what is going on. All three storylines converge somewhat, near the end of the book.

. . . You know, I’m giving up on the summary. Wikipedia has a pretty detailed spoiler-full synopsis (which, personally, I think, needs some heavy editing) of the novel.

I don’t know much about the Iliad. I probably know more about the Odyssey, but even that not by much. Nor have I ever read anything by Marcel Proust and while I do know my Shakespeare, it’s mostly from casual reading, and it’s not something I ever studied. Ilium still worked for me despite the numerous, sometimes bewildering, literary references. I missed a lot of the more subtle references, I’m sure.

Most of the times the characters have no idea what’s happening, and I was pretty much as confused as they were, and it was the worst with Hockenberry, since his narrative was in first person, present tense and we only know what he knows. The man can’t even remember much about his previous life on earth — the only thing he knows with complete clarity is Homer’s Iliad. Yet I liked reading about Hockenberry most, though I liked, as a character, Mahnmut the moravec from Europa and his interactions with Orphu of Io more. I have trouble with the “old-style” humans on earth; I liked them pretty well, but none of them caught my attention — Daeman annoyed me no end at the start though I liked him best at the end, Harman thinks himself too clever for his own sake, Ada . . . just doesn’t do anything that interests me.

The dialogue needs some work at some points — I can’t remember where, but there was a point that I had blinked at the pages wondering who the heck talks like that, 2000 years in the future or not. Sometimes Simmons’s graphic descriptions of the Greeks and Trojans killing each other made me go “eww”, and the somewhat mechanical descriptions in the sex scene(s?) also made me go “eww” in a different way, but I was already kind of expecting that, thanks to Hyperion. Some continuity problems, but I’m willing to dismiss them (I can’t even remember what they are now; I generally don’t take notes as I read) due to sheer volume of the book. Simmons also tends to be repetitive at times — I don’t know how many reminders we need about how Orphu of Io can’t “see” or what communicating with the little green men (no, that’s not the end of things you’ll find yourself completely bemused by in this novel) will do to them.

Other points in the novel that left me blinking — or at least, I think it was Ilium, it may have been Olympos, the way I’m confusing things: how apparently some Islamic caliphate was the terrorist that helped end the world, and the call for prayer by the muezzin in Jerusalem called for killing the Jews. (It didn’t help that while reading that part, it coincided with the actual call for Subuh prayers — early morning prayers, before dawn — I could hear from the mosque down the road, leaving me feeling disoriented, which was partly from lack of sleep. I have a really bad track record with not going to bed on time thanks to reading.) Terrorists, huh. A reflection of the current times, I suppose. :/ I was mildly miffed.

The ending of the book was a cliffhanger. I think that’s just the way Simmons does things — he did the same thing in Hyperion before. The story continues in Olympos.

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This book was also read partly for the speculative fiction challenge hosted by Renay!

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