Funeral Games by Mary Renault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Funeral Game of Thrones While the first book of Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great trilogy, Fire from Heaven (1969), depicts Alexander’s youth and ends with the death of his father, and the second, The Persian Boy (1972), recounts Alexander’s Asian conquests and ends with his death, the third, Funeral Games (1981), deals with the aftermath of his death, depicting how his empire, as the priests put it, fragmented like a meteor fallen to earth. Alexander’s final breath at 32 throws his empire into “the uncertainties of the shattered future.” The unique man (endowed with a fire from heaven!) has died after conquering in several years a vast empire, including Greece, Egypt, and much of Asia all the way into parts of India. Before dying, he’d tried to unite his Macedonian men with those they conquered, especially the Persians, by adopting Persian customs, incorporating Persians into his armies, and marrying his generals to Persian noble women and himself to Persian princesses. His death threatens all that fragile cross-culturalism, for in their “victor’s pride and xenophobia” most of the Macedonians hated Alexander’s adoption of the “barbarians” and their customs. Furthermore, Alexander died before he could name a successor and before his two mutually hostile pregnant wives (Bactrian chieftain’s daughter Roxane and Persian princess Stateira) could give birth. He did apparently give his ring to one of his generals, Perdikkas, to act as a regent, but the ambitious man is not well liked. Another general, Ptolemy, who was Alexander’s bastard half-brother and trusted blood-brother, is setting his sights on Egypt and Alexander’s divine corpse. Some think that Alexander wanted Krateros, another general he trusted, to succeed him, but before the king fell ill, he sent the man with some veterans back to Macedon to replace the regent there, Antipatros. Antipatros’ vile son Kassandros, who has enviously hated Alexander all his life, has seemingly played a role in facilitating Alexander’s death and is eager to rule Macedonia. And then there is Alexander’s half-brother Arridaios, simple and epileptic: good puppet king material. Still more. Whenever Renault is depicting events in one arena, Asia in the first half of the novel or in Macedonia in the second half, related developments in the other arena are brewing offstage. Alexander’s “gorgon” mother Olympias has been intriguing against Antipatros while Alexander has been off in Asia, and his younger sister Kleopatra wants to become the queen of a new king like, for instance, Perdikkas. And Alexander’s amazon-like half-sister Kynna and her amazon-like daughter Eurydike have been tossing their javelins and planning to go to Asia so Eurydike may become queen by marrying Arridaios. The complex and volatile situation makes Renault’s novel suspenseful. And all of the intrigue and infighting shows how special Alexander was to have been able to keep it all together for so long. As one character put it, “Alexander contained us all.” Renault narrates from the points of view of multiple characters, including all of the above-mentioned players in the funeral games (except for Krateros), as well as Babylonian priests, Alexander’s secretary Eumenes, the mother of Darius Sisygambis, a phalanx captain, a harem eunuch, a Persianized Macedonian satrap, and even briefly the Persian boy Bagoas who narrated the second book. All the many points of view are compelling. Although many of her characters, like Roxane, Olympias, and Kassandros, do atrocious things, they all have human motivations: there are no cardboard villains. Renault does make us root for Ptolemy, who is strong, practical, and loyal and knows that no one can slip into Alexander’s shoes. She even gets us to sympathize with Roxane remembering Alexander: “After, he had fallen asleep; she remembered the fair boyish skin with the deep dimpled scars, the soft margins of his strong hair. She had wanted to feel and smell him as if he were good to eat, like fresh-baked bread. When she buried her face in him, he half-woke and held her comfortably, and slept again. The sense of his physical presence came back to her like life. At last, alone, in silence, she shed real tears.” As in her other two Alexander books, Renault writes great historical fiction. She writes psychologically complex and historically convincing characters. She makes history seem contingent and suspenseful. She writes striking similes (e.g., “She knew moderation no more than a hunting leopardess,” and “Tears ran from his eyes in silence like blood from an open wound”). She writes lines of wisdom for any era (e.g., “It was well to know that war was not all flags and trumpets,” and “Like other men who have indulged a long, rancorous hate, he blamed all adversity upon its object, never considering that his hatred, not his enemy had created his predicament”). She writes vivid descriptions that insert the reader into the era of her history and into the scenes of her story, as in the opening paragraph: “The ziggurat of Bel-Marduk had been half-ruinous for a century and a half, ever since Xerxes had humbled the gods of rebellious Babylon. The edges of its terraces had crumbled in landslides of bitumen and baked brick; storks nested on its ragged top, which had once held the god’s golden bedchamber and his sacred concubine in his golden bed. But this was the only defacement; the ziggurat’s huge bulk had defied destruction. The walls of the inner city by the Marduk Gate were three hundred feet high, but the ziggurat still towered over them.” It’s not a perfectly satisfying novel. Renault gives some figures and developments short shrift. Kleopatra disappears without explanation, and the actual ultimate division of the empire is left unexplained. Although we learn the fates of many of the funeral games players, especially the early losers, we do not learn much if anything about what happened to Alexander’s generals who went on to found new dynasties in different parts of his empire, like Seleucus, Antigonus, and Lysimachus. The first chapter, 323 BC, in which Alexander dies, is the longest and strongest in the novel, because it fully captures the chaotic vacuum he left. In any case, the book is an impressive, immersive conclusion to her Alexander trilogy, and the audiobook is finely read by Brian May. View all my reviews
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The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Eunuch Who Loved Alexander, or From Culture Shock to Cross-Cultural Intercourse Whereas Fire from Heaven (1969) tells the story of Alexander’s youth via a variety of third-person narration point of view characters, many of whom, like Alexander, Philip, and Hephaistion are martial men of violent action, The Persian Boy (1972) is the first-person story of Bagoas, an aristocratic Persian scion who was sold into slavery and gelded at age ten and then trained in the arts of giving pleasure to serve the Persian king Darius. Needless to say, although he is referred to as “the Persian boy,” his experiences rob him of his boyhood and leave him mature beyond his years. Bagoas follows the rumors and reports about Alexander, who, after his father Philip’s assassination, came to Asia with his army and began conquering the Persian empire. As the story develops, Bagoas, who says that “When we serve the great, they become our destiny,” finds himself serving Alexander. By having a eunuch from the culture the great conqueror is conquering tell Alexander’s story, Renault focuses her novel on cross-cultural intercourse. This is sexual, as in the relationship between Alexander and Bagoas, Alexander and his Bactrian wife Roxane, Alexander’s generals and the Persian noblewomen they married, and Alexander’s soldiers and the Persian (and Sogdian and Indian etc.) women they had kids with, and so on. But it is also general, as in the fusion of Macedonian and Grecian elements with Asian (especially Persian) elements. This was not an easy marriage of differences, as many old school Macedonians scorned the Persians as effete, gawdy barbarians and hated Alexander’s adoption of Persian customs (especially prostrating oneself before the king but also including his relationship with the eunuch Bagoas). Alexander faces more than one assassination attempt or mutiny. For his part, Bagoas at first finds many Macedonian customs barbaric or unseemly (e.g., their casual nudity, their use of rivers to wash bodies and clothes, their privies without privacy, their coarse food and manners, their lack of respect for officers and rulers). Although much of the novel deals with culture shock, however, still more of it deals with cross-cultural communication and mutual influences: “Two good wines blended to make a better.” There are scenes featuring interpreters and language learning, conflation of different cultures’ deities (e.g., Dionysius and Krishna or Zeus and Zoraster), and Alexander modeling his rule on that of the famous former Persian king/conqueror/unifier/hero Cyrus, or adopting Persian royal dress, or recruiting Persians into his bodyguard and even into the elite unit of Companions, or having an army of 30,000 Persian boys trained in Macedonian tactics and weapons, or taking under his wing boys born to Macedonian soldiers and Persian and other Asian women after their fathers returned to Macedonia. Renault’s Alexander is no bigot, saying things like, “To hate excellence is to hate the gods. One must salute it everywhere” (no matter in what person or culture or race it is found). At one point Bagoas thinks to Alexander, “You have brought more life than death into the world,” and for Renault Alexander’s conquests (which did of course result in many deaths, especially when a city or satrap rebelled against him after having surrendered to and allied with him) were not products of blood or power lust or racism, xenophobia, or nationalism, but more of a curiosity to see the whole world and a desire to unify its peoples into a single harmonious culture drawing on their best parts. Though she writes no graphic sex scenes, one strong element of her Alexander trilogy is the way in which Renault depicts natural and deep homosexual love, particularly that between Hephaistion and Alexander in the first book and between Bagoas and Alexander in the second. Bagoas thinks heartfelt things, like “There is nothing like giving joy to the one you love,” and “What can compare to giving comfort to the one you love?” Bagoas is telling the story from decades in the future when he’s living in Alexandria and Alexander is long dead. This recalls Count Belisarius (1938) by Robert Graves, in which a eunuch first-person narrator tells the story of a military man of action. In addition to exploring love and gender, etc., Renault uses the narrative strategy to avoid describing Alexander’s famous battles like Issus in first-hand eye-witness real time, because Bagoas is no soldier and isn’t present at most of them. Instead, he hears what happened from various sources and then relays the information to us. Bagoas happens to be in Babylon when the second big battle between Alexander and Darius is fought nearby, so he is able to tell us first hand about the preparations, the soldiers and armies and support staff and so on, and the post-battle chaos in the city, and much later he describes part of Alexander’s siege of a fortified town in India, but that’s about it. In short, readers who want detailed and exciting accounts of Alexander’s battles in Asia will be disappointed. Readers who want vivid and moving accounts of Alexander in his prime from the point of view of the Persian pleasure eunuch who became his lover will be engrossed. And audiobook reader Brian May's voice and manner enhance the novel. Renault wrote vivid historical novels that transport the reader to the distant past through vivid details and empathetic imagination for how people in any time think and feel. Her descriptive writing is concise and vivid: “The dead lay everywhere, like some strange fruit of the land, darkened with ripeness against the pale withered grass and scrub. A faint sweet stench was starting. It was hot.” “The room smelled of sex and sandalwood, with a tang of salt from the sea.” “Nothing could have made her anything but hideous, yet even a clay lamp is beautiful when its light shines at dusk.” “…smiling and showing teeth like peeled almonds.” There is appalling cruelty in the novel, as when Bagoas’ father’s nose, ears, and then head are cut off, or as when Bagoas is castrated. But Bagoas is a gentle, thoughtful, and empathic person. If, as the magi say, “There is the light and the dark, and all things that live have the power to choose,” Bagoas and his Alexander choose the light (and love and life). Thus, Alexander says, “One must live as if it would be forever and as if each day were the last.” Thus, the last line of the novel reads, “the embalmers filled him with everlasting myrrh.” View all my reviews
Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Young Alexander, or A Dysfunctional Family Tragedy In Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven (1969), King Philip and Queen Olympias of Macedon have the mother of all toxic marriages, permanently scarring their young son Alexander with their scorched earth warfare: “a pain he had been born with.” While at first one’s sympathy is with Olympias, Philip appearing drunken, brutish, and ugly and flinging four-year-old Alexander out of her bedroom and down the stairs, in time one begins sympathizing with the King, who seems to act with ironic restraint in the face of his wife’s hatred and curses (invoking the gods) and witchcraft (piercing the penis of a doll figure of the king with a needle), not to mention her provocative exaggerations, treasonous intrigues, and emotional blackmailing of her son when Alexander tries to be independent. True, Philip marries a series of teenage girls and has affairs with his young male squires (“minions”), but one suspects that had Olympias been more loving, Philip might have been more faithful. Another compelling thread through the novel is the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion--“Alexander’s shadow.” Although the novel demonstrates a general acceptance of homosexuality or bisexuality, Alexander is mostly beyond things like sex and mainly just wants to unburden himself to Hephaistion as they sleep together, while Hephaistion tries to convince himself that he’s blessed by the gods to be so close to Alexander and to refrain from wanting more than pillow talk. Renault depicts their love and friendship as natural and deep: “Without you I should go mad.” “I, too, without you.” The story begins with four-year-old Alexander waking up with a snake wound round his waist and sneaking into his mother’s bedroom to return it, he thinks, to the Queen. Renault proceeds to depict landmark events from the future conqueror’s youth that reveal his personality, historical context, and destiny, including having his growth stunted by an overly zealous pedagogue admirer of Spartan severity, learning about Achilles and Patroclus, meeting Hephaistion for the first time, making Ptolemy his blood brother, killing his first man in his first violent action (at age twelve), meeting Demosthenes, winning and naming his beloved horse Bucephalus, receiving an education from Aristotle, successfully leading an army in battle for the first time, becoming regent at sixteen and cavalry general at eighteen, protecting his father during a mutiny, and so on. Renault renders such things suspenseful and compelling. Interestingly, the book stops before Alexander is king of Macedon, before he’s set foot in Asia, and before he’s known as Alexander the Great--although at sixteen he does defeat a Thracian tribe, displace them from their land, and found a city in his name there, earning the nickname Basilicus, or Little King. The novel, then, is about Alexander’s youthful potential. It does not even relate what happens in the aftermath of Philip’s death, ending, in a way, with a shocking cliffhanger. And the second novel in the Alexander trilogy, The Persian Boy (1972), will begin several years later with the point of view of the orphaned, enslaved, and castrated son of a Persian noble in the middle of the Persian Empire, while the third, Funeral Games (1981), begins with Alexander’s death. Mary Renault is impressive in her refusal to pander to readers. Another impressive feature of Fire from Heaven is the psychological complexity of her central characters, Alexander, Philip, and Hephaistion. Especially interesting is Alexander’s relationship with Philip: “Each eyed the other with curiosity, resentment, suspicion, regret, and a half-hope which each hid too well.” Philip loves Alexander and is proud of him but can’t help but see Olympias in the boy’s features and mannerisms, while Alexander is often too quick to believe his mother’s worst interpretations of Philip’s actions, even when it means ignoring his beloved Hephaistion’s more balanced ones. The King is at times reduced to wondering, “What did I do to deserve this?” Alexander is superb in Renault’s hands: beautiful, brave, loyal, loving, poised, reckless, clever, curious, unpretentious, charismatic, and destined for glory and fated to die early: “Shining and calm at the center of his mystery, the godlike freedom of killing fear.” Renault narrates by switching from among multiple points of views in third person, doing things like telling us what Alexander was up to on an early campaign by showing Philip reading a letter from the boy telling him what he accomplished (instead of showing Alexander accomplishing it in real time), and efficiently making events lead up to Philip’s death, the tragic core and climax of the novel. En route, she works in plenty of matter from Greek myths and The Iliad, Greek, Macedonian, and Persian history, and cultural contrasts, like Greek-Macedonian, Thebes-Athens, Attic-Sparta, Greek-Persia, etc. The novel is vivid, believable, transporting, moving, exotic, lean, fierce. It does what the best historical fiction does, transporting us to another time and place with details and imagination while making the characters relatable, as in the following lines: “In the midst of it, dwarfing shrines and altars like toys, a vast oak lifted its bare black labyrinth above the snow.” “She gave him with dropped lashes a little smile, fragile, mysterious like a hamadryad slipping out briefly from her tree.” “The smell of its sweat and breath and leather bathed him in its steam.” “He walked over, put out his hand, and touched Hephaistion as a man might touch a sacred object for luck or a good omen, while deeply concerned with something else.” Brian May reads the novel professionally and engagingly. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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