The Persian Boy by Mary Renault

(Book Review)

Two books in, and I regret to say that I'm finding Mary Renault's Alexander the Great trilogy to be boring.

And I say this with regret because I had been looking forward to this trilogy for several months.  Way back in December, I first noted that I had been hearing good things about Mary Renault's trilogy, and was planning on tracking it down the next time I was in the States.

Each trip to the States, I can only take a few books with me back to Asia.  (There's a weight limit on the suitcases, and books are heavy.)  But I went through the trouble of tracking down Mary Renault's trilogy, and lugging it with me all the way back to Asia.

And now, two books in, and to be honest I'm finding it boring.

But given how much praise there has been for this trilogy, I have to assume that the fault is mine and not the book's.  I  must just not be in the target audience for a book like this.  So take my opinion with a grain of salt.

After a bit of self-reflection, I've come up with 3 reasons why I'm probably not in the target audience for this book, and why the average reader might enjoy it a lot more than I did.

1). This book uses a lot of poetical literary language, and I tend to like straightforward prose. 

2). This book is essentially a love story, and I have a limited tolerance for love stories.

3). This is now my third time through Alexander the Great's story (after having read Valerio Massimo Manfredi's version and Philip Freeman's version).  If this had been my first time encountering his story, doubtless the sense of excitement would have been a lot greater.  But this time through I already know everything that is going to happen, and so I'm just slogging through the same journeys and the same conspiracies again.

So there you have it.  Another reader, free of these three prejudices, would probably enjoy this book a lot more than I did.

But that's not to say that I found this book a complete waste of time.  There were some interesting aspects.

This second book in the trilogy is written in the first person from the perspective of Bagoas the eunuch.
The historical Bagoas (W), mentioned briefly in both Freeman and Manfredi, was a eunuch of supposedly great beauty, who first served the Persian King Darius and then, after Darius's defeat, came to be part of Alexander the Great's entourage.  Although Alexander the Great's sexuality is still being hotly debated, the ancient sources left strong hints that they were lovers.

Mary Renault takes the view that they were definitely lovers.

(In my review of the previous book in this trilogy, I complained that Mary Renault only hinted at Alexander the Great's bi-sexuality, but stopped short of explicitly committing herself to any unambiguous portrayal.  However it appears I had spoken too soon.  There is absolutely no timidity in this book.  In The Persian Boy, Bagoas and Alexander the Great are unambiguously, explicitly, homosexual lovers.  So I have to retract my criticism from earlier.)

In my opinion, the choice of Bagoas as narrator has positive and negative effects. I'll start with the positives first. 
The more interesting result of having Bagoas as narrator means that the whole story is told from the Persian perspective.  The way the story of Alexander the Great is usually told (at least in Western Countries) is of the civilized of Alexander and his men invading strange exotic Persia.  (I'd be interested to know how Alexander the Great is taught in Iranian schools!)
However, in Mary Renault's version, with the Persian Bagoas as the narrator, this time it's Alexander and his men who are the strange exotic foreigners, and Persia which is the center of civilization.

Bagoas as the narrator also allows Mary Renault to highlight a different part of the history.  In Manfredi's trilogy, King Darius III is primarily represented as simply the antagonist to Alexander the Great, and the intrigues of the Persian court are all reported to the Greeks second hand.  In Mary Renault's version, in the first several chapters, Alexander and his conquests are only distant news and rumors.  The story centers on Bagoas, and his rise to favor with the Persian emperor Darius III.  We see, through the eyes of the Persian narrator, the great cities of Susa and Babylon, and the customs of the Babylonian temples.
Through the eyes of Bagoas we get a first hand account (fictionalized) of the Persian court, and for the first several chapters it is the intrigues of King Darius and Bessus (W) and  Nabarzanes (W) which take center stage.  Mary Renault, with her talent for creating three dimensional characters, gives interesting and vivid descriptions of each of these Persians.

Once King Darius dies, Bagoas comes into Alexander's camp, and the story shifts emphasis to the story of the Greek camp.  But Bagoas remains our narrator, and his status as an outside observer allows Mary Renault to have several passages of him observing and commenting on Macedonian culture.

Having Bagoas as narrator also allows Mary Renault's to streamline her story a bit.  When Mary Renault last wrote about Alexander, at the end of Fire from Heaven, Alexander had just ascended to the throne of Macedonia, and none of Alexander's conquests had taken place yet.  Before he even took possession of the Persian Empire, Alexander had to conquer Greece, Turkey, Tyre, Palestine, and Egypt.  (In Manfredi's trilogy, these conquests alone took up about a whole book.)  I was wondering how Mary Renault was going to cram all of Alexander's conquests into one book, but she does this by having Alexander's early conquests simply recounted as bits of news reaching the Bagoas at the Persian court.

But now I come with my complaints.
Shortly after meeting Alexander, Bagoas falls completely in love with him.  And then the whole rest of the story is essentially just one love story, in which almost all of Bagoas's narration is just him viewing each event in Alexander's life through the prism of how much he loves Alexander.   When Alexander does something brave or magnanimous, Bagoas tells us how much he loves Alexander.  When Alexander got sick or wounded, then Bagoas spends pages telling the reader how much he worried about Alexander, and everything he did to nurse Alexander back to health.
I tired of it quickly. But then (as I wrote above), that's just me.  I'm just not in the target audience for this type of book.   (For a contrasting opinion, check out just about all of the overwhelmingly positive reviews for this book at amazon.com (A).)

On Mary Renault's Portrayal of Alexander the Great
I've previously praised Mary Renault's ability to write full three dimensional characters, but unfortunately the character of Alexander the Great himself appears to be an exception to this.  Mary Renault portrays Alesander as being too perfect to be true.  To be fair, Alexander does appears to have been a truly remarkable person, and someone who really did have several good qualities, but a more rounded portrayal would have perhaps been more interesting.

To her credit, Mary Renault at least takes the trouble to defend her portrayal in her afterward. She has adjusted many of the negative events in Alexander's life to portray him in a more positive light, but she had her reasons.  Many of the ancient sources on Alexander, she claims, were hopelessly biased by various political prejudices of the day, for example the Athenians had a grudge against the Macedonian King who conquered them.
"The favors of Fortune being conducive to hubris and nemesis, Alexander's story is bent that way by recourse to Athenian anti-Macedonian agitprop, written by men who never set eyes on him, and bearing just as much relation to objective truth as one would expect to find in a History of the Jewish People commissioned by Adolf Hitler." (Mary Renault, Afterward, p. 415)
Although I understand it's only an analogy, that reference to Adolf Hitler is a bit tasteless.  Mary Renault further shows herself to be tone-deaf one page later.
"As regards the ancient world, the political motives of these unconvincing attempts to show Alexander corrupted by success are clear enough.  More puzzling is a present-day outbreak of what one may call blackwashing, since it goes far beyond a one-sided interpretation of facts to their actual misrepresentation." (p. 416)
It's probably a legitimate debate whether or not Alexander really was corrupted by his success, but I don't think it's at all "puzzling" to explain why present-day attitudes have turned against Alexander.  After the horrors of World War I and World War II, of course modern attitudes towards an overly aggressive conqueror would be negative.

 Other Notes:
* Despite all my complaints, I'm still planning on continuing on with the 3rd book in Mary Renault's trilogy: Funeral Games.  The story of what happened to Alexander the Great's empire after he died seems like it has to make for a fascinating book, even if I'm not particularly enamored with Mary Renault's writing style.

* I've already linked to the Amazon review page for this book above, but it's worth mentioning again.  (A)  Although the reviews are overwhelmingly positive, a number of the reviewers mention they were resistant to a Bagoas story because they're such big supporters of Hephaestion.  Apparently among fans of Alexander the Great stories, there exists a division between "team Bagoas" and "team Hephaestion." Who knew?

* This book was pretty far ahead of its time when it was first published in 1972, and apparently (according to some reviewers on the Internet) it was banned in many libraries because of its frank portrayal of homosexuality.  So it gets one extra cool point for being a banned book.

* Add this book to my list of historical fiction books.

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