A writer’s second novel, it is often said, truly gives the tone: Hughes has set his standards high ... The book is full of excruciating details ... Part of the thrill is recognising the correspondences between the characters and Homer’s originals ... Even if you can’t recognise the correspondences, the language is enough to keep you enthralled. Hughes is an actor as well as as writer...The novel, as one might expect, is driven strongly by the sound of a rhythmic speaking voice ... Matthew Arnold described Homer as 'eminently noble', 'eminently rapid' and 'eminently plain and direct'. If anything, Hughes’s achievement is to prove the opposite: that Homer remains ignoble, messy and horribly familiar.
With Homer’s Illiad as the baseplate for this 1990s novel, Hughes reaches deep into the country and grasps something furious, elemental and dark. There’s the language to consider. The register is coarse, furious. Hughes has an ear for his own tongue, brings into it a gnawed-at vernacular of fear and savagery. It needs to be tonally on the money and it is. But underneath it and through it you hear Homer’s cadences, the long lines of chant in dactylic hexameter. He mixes Border idiom with Greek formalism ... The text drips with blood and invective. There is a fearsome capacity for violence. You think of Dante’s Ugolino latched on to the back of Ruggieri’s head, chewing at it like a dog ... Hughes isn’t trying to pull off a literary stunt. It is as intellectual and comparative ballast that the crossover succeeds ... The Homeric grants epic despair to the sequence of brutality in the recent past ... The Illiad stripped of its lyricism carries an unfading relevance. Hughes’ perception is on the money. This is a hard, rigorous and necessary book which grinds out its beauty as the song cycles of empire and resistance fall silent, choked in their own blood.
Hughes has created more than a party trick ... by tapping into western literature’s greatest war story he reveals the elemental brutality of the Troubles — he spares nothing of its sordidness, especially when it comes to the way the women are used and abused. And his greatest triumph (helped no doubt by his acting credentials) is that he renders it all in a lively, convincing demotic that captures an Irish idiomatic flow and an echo of Homer’s formalities and hexametric lines. It begs to be read aloud.
This narrative is even more aggressively masculine than the Iliad, with Nellie and Henry’s wife Anna ...far less resonant than their originals. In the Iliad, it’s the Greeks who are usurping others’ territory, the Trojans who are on home ground. But that’s the beauty of Hughes’s schema: when it clicks you admire his ingenuity, when it doesn’t you contemplate the irony ... onvoluted talk of political machinations and ‘back-channels’ in Belfast, Dublin and London update the action, while Country’s grim, anti-heroic tone sometimes veers on the humorous ... More relentless are the equivalents to Homer’s ghastly passages about the hacking of human bodies in war. Knowing what’s going to happen lessens the tension; it’s easy to guess how Achill will re-enact the desecration of Hector’s body. A certain moral equivalence is granted all the fighters, though ultimately Hughes is less subtle and even-handed than his original. But there’s no shame in that.
Country, by the Irish actor and author Michael Hughes, is a propulsive, blood-flecked homage to the Iliad told against the backdrop of a fragile truce in 1996 ... Occasionally over the top — but let’s face it, so was Homer — Hughes’s story proceeds at a breakneck cinematic pace, full of booby traps, double agents and arias promising gruesome revenge. And a bit of black humor along the way ... [Hughes'] His novel sings of the stubborn, fundamental foibles that have kept people entangled — and at one another’s throats — for thousands of years.
... gives new context to the fatal forces that drive Homer’s epic: loyalty, machismo, and entitlement to women ... Some of the violence here, especially a 'kneecapping' scene and the treatment of a dead British soldier’s body, is hard to read; there’s also sexual crudeness aplenty. But there’s humor too, which, combined with the stellar writing (especially in the use of Northern Irish speech patterns and slang) and the revelation that, where men’s territoriality is concerned, nothing has changed since Homer’s time, makes this well worth reading. Readers may be inspired to tackle The Iliad after finishing Hughes’ work; they should also be guided toward Brian Friel’s play Translations, which involves a nonviolent but still fraught confrontation between Irish and English cultures.
Written in sometimes-difficult-to-understand regional vernacular, the novel nonetheless thrusts readers into the Irish countryside and the conflict that ravaged it. We can almost imagine eating potato soup with the men of a PIRA squad around a worn wooden table as they strategize about their next moves ... As in The Iliad, this story teaches that leaders must respect their men, and men, ultimately, must forgive each other for the sake of the common good.
This is, unrelentingly, a male world, hard-boiled and reeking of alcohol, stale cigarettes and rampant testosterone. The men hunker down and argue for hours about what to do next ... Women barely feature ... The only female characters with any presence in this version are Nellie (aka Helen), entrapped to tout for the British in exchange for an abortion, and Anna (aka Andromache) ... Mapping the Trojan war on to the armed conflict in Northern Ireland should work, yet somehow it doesn’t. The modern-day setting never quite manages to cut free from its source to establish a life of its own. Part of the reason is that Hughes’s central decision to translate the Trojans as the British is inherently problematic. Yes, the IRA want to drive them out, but then it was their country in the first place; having the Irish stand in for the invading Greeks severely strains the novel’s internal credibility.
...daring ... Readers familiar with the Iliad, whether charmed or peeved by Country, will surely admire Hughes’s dexterous grafting of the sordid present onto the fabled past. In the novel’s blistering opening scene, for example, he manages to conjure up the speech and landscape of rural Northern Ireland in pungent detail; to introduce characters as distinct from each other as they are close to their ancient counterparts; and to set in motion a plot already spring-loaded with betrayal ... part of the appeal of Country is indeed the recognition game that the reader plays not only with Hughes’s characters...but also with famous scenes such as the killing of Hektor ... Though some of those episodes, particularly towards the end of the novel, are a little strained ... But moments that verge on parody are rare in a novel that first seizes our attention with its theatrical boldness and then holds us captive...
The tragedy...sheds light on what these past and present conflicts have in common. The original gang from The Iliad is represented—Helen, Agamemnon, Achilles, Patroclus, Menelaus, Hector—and it is the author’s language that keeps the story fresh. There is rough poetry in both the self-serving speechifying of the leaders and the violent threats of the rank-and-file. This is a canny update of one of the world’s oldest stories.
The rest is…well…The Iliad. And that’s the problem. Writing in a fast-paced Irish lilt, debut bard Hughes is at his best...when he’s least faithful to his Homeric blueprint. His reimagining of Helen...is especially striking ... Hughes is faithful to Homer’s story at the expense of his own. His characters are not themselves but proxies for the Homeric originals; they don the armor and read the lines but are lacking in on-the-page emotional complexity. Similarly, dozens of scenes are included to simply check off their corresponding plot box in The Iliad—and therefore deliver very little affect of their own. The result? The novel, despite its promising start, quickly devolves into a litany of allusions ... A too faithful retelling that, despite some vivid moments, ultimately has little life of its own.
