Funeral Games by Mary Renault

(Book Review)

This is the third book in Mary Renault's Alexander the Great trilogy.  It is a narrative of the dynastic infighting that occurred after Alexander the Great died.

I've previously given lukewarm - reviews to the two first two  books in Mary Renault's trilogy.  But this book was where my patience with this trilogy paid off.  This was the book I had been waiting for.  It was an absolutely fantastic and thrilling narrative of a very turbulent time in history.  In fact, I'm going to count this among my favorite historical fiction reading experiences.

So, how do I account for the fact that this last book so thrilled me when the previous two books bored me?

I think partly it was because this book was new material for me.  (Neither Valerio Massimo Manfredi nor Philip Freeman, the previous two authors I had read on Alexander the Great, covered this period.)

 And perhaps another reason I enjoyed this book so much was because the story itself was inherently interesting.
I'm reminded of the comment a friend of mine made, when he was explaining why he never wasted his time reading fantasy novels, and preferred to read history instead.  "The stuff that happens in history is always more interesting than any fantasy book.  The stuff that happened in history--you couldn't make that stuff up if you tried!"

Of course it must be granted that most historical stories do not have happy endings.  (No doubt, one reason why some people prefer fantasy to history.)  But there is a lot of drama in this story--the rise and fall of many interesting personalities who gambled for great power and then lost spectacularly.  This is proper Game of Thrones stuff.
Mary Renault herself, in her author's afterward, commented on how drama rich the whole history was.  When talking about the demise of one of the many families involved in the power struggles following Alexander's death, Mary Renault writes: "This extirpation of the entire line reads like the vengeance of the Furies in some Greek tragedy" (Author's Afterward p. 334)

Although history may be inherently more interesting than fiction, the problem with history is that it's not always written as well as fiction.  I'ts hard to really care about the personal stories of people recorded in history when they are just written as boring names in the historical record.  Whereas a good fiction novelist can take you in to the head of the character, show you their feelings and motivations, and make you care for them.  And this is where good historical fiction can come in.

After finishing Manfredi's trilogy, I did actually go to Wikipedia to look up the final fates of various characters like Perdiccas (W), Eumenes (W) and Olympias (W).  But it was difficult for me to remember or fully absorb the information read directly off a dry encyclopedia page.  All I really took away was that there was a bunch of fighting and betrayals and they all died.

Well written historical fiction is invaluable for people like me to help us truly get our heads around the story.  Reading history as a novel helps me to fully understand it and absorb it, and after reading Mary Renault's story, I now have a much clearer understanding of the exact chain of events that lead to the downfall of Perdiccas, Eumenes, Olympias, and many others.

Another reason I enjoyed this book was because this was a story I had long wanted to hear.
Like most people, I had known ever since my schoolboy days that Alexander the Great's empire dissolved into fighting factions immediately after his death.  (I remember first learning about this in Bible class in 7th grade, when we were studying the intertestimental period.  For those of us brought up in Christian environments, this story has a direct impact on biblical history.  Israel was caught up in the middle of the struggles between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties--both dynasties founded by Alexander's former generals.)
 But although I had long known that Alexander's Empire fell apart, I had always been curious as to how exactly it happened.  (Certain types of people, us history geeks, are always curious about these things.)

The story is far too big and too vast to be completely covered in one novel.  Alexander's Empire spanned all the way from Macedon to India, and Mary Renault simply doesn't have room to write much about was happening in the former Persian Empire.
Even in the Western world, there was so much intriguing and backstabbing that Mary Renault can't include it all either.  (In her Author's Afterward at the end, Mary Renault gives a brief summary of some of the interesting stories she simply didn't have time to tell.)
I almost wish this last book had been a trilogy in itself, allowing the reader to get into more of these fascinating stories.
But it's pointless to lament what this book doesn't include.  Rather, it is better to praise it for what it does include.

There's a lot of characters vying for power in this book: There's Roxana (W) , Alexander's Bactrian wife.  There's also Alexander the Great's mentally impaired half-brother Philip III (W), who is crowned king, but is mentally incompetent to rule on his own.  Philip III is manipulated by several people around him with ambitions of his own, including his wife Eurydice (W), who herself is of royal descent and has claims to the throne.  And then there's Alexander's scheming mother Olympias (W).  And the regent left in charge of Macedon while Alexander was away, Antipater (W).  And Cassander (W), Antipater's vicious son who the old man can not control.   And Alexander's sister Cleopatra (W), who tries to manipulate events through marriage contracts.  And Perdiccas (W), who was left Alexander's ring when Alexander died, and tries to take control of the army.  And Ptolemy (W), who gives up on the dynastic succession fights and opts to carve out his own kingdom in Egypt instead.  And Antigonos (W) left in control of  a powerful army in the middle of Alexander's vast empire, and determined to make his influence felt.  And....
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Mary Renault, as I've noted in my two previous reviews, knows how to write good 3 dimensional characters, and each of these personalities are people we are made to care about, even though most of them end up meeting tragic ends.
(There's one exception to this: Mary Renault drops the ball on Cassander, portraying him simply as driven by pure malice and envy--in other words, a one dimensional villain.  But every other character in this story is written as complex and interesting.)

The sheer number of characters and storylines in this book also means that the action has to keep moving.  So all of my complaints about the previous two books in the trilogy (mainly that they spend too much time on mushy love feelings) are completely absent here.

And so, despite having mixed feelings about the first two books in the trilogy, I thoroughly enjoyed this last volume.

Other Notes
* Gore Vidal apparently said of this book: "One of this century's unexpectedly original works of art."  At least according to the publisher's blurb on the back cover.  And of course you always have to be careful of these publisher's blurbs.  (I google searched this quote, and can't find evidence for it anywhere aside from websites quoting the publisher's blurbs, which makes me doubly skeptical.)
But nonetheless, that caveat aside, I am inclined to agree that this book is a work of art.  I don't think historical fiction always gets the respect it deserves, but I think that this kind of thing is a form of art.  It's not easy to take something from the historical records and breathe life into it and make all the characters come alive, but when it's done well it should be recognized as any endeavor that seeks to understand and explain the human condition--that is, as art.

* Digression: My friend Bork once described to me what it was like working in a bookstore, and being surrounded by books constantly.  "You get into these weird phases, where you suddenly realize you're completely ignorant about something that seems important.  Like you just all off a sudden realize, Oh gosh, I don't know anything about the Mongolian Empire, and then you spend hours reading about it until the feeling goes away." 
I don't work in a bookstore myself, but I know the feeling.  I suspect most of us (at least, most of us geeks), get this feeling about various subjects all the time.
I was feeling this a bit as I read this book.  For example, I know nothing about the Seleucid Empire (W).  But it's fascinating to consider that for about 100 years or so, Persia was controlled by Hellenistic rulers, isn't it?  (This is only tangentially related to Mary Renault's book.  Seleucus is barely mentioned in the book, and the founding of the Seleucid Empire is completely absent.  Nonetheless, it is a thought that occurred while I read this book, and pondered the legacy of Alexander the Great's Empire.)

Link of the Day
"Who does control the world?" - Noam Chomsky - BBC interview 2003