Funeral Games (1981) by Mary Renault

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.


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