King of Kings by Dan Carlin: Review of a Podcast

 (Podcasts--History)

Started: September 26, 2021

Finished: Finished the first listening on October 4, 2021
Finished the second listening on October 18, 2021
Finished the third listening on November 1, 2021

Finished the fourth listening on November 8, 2021

(This review is written using my new format for reviews.)

Background Information

I'm counting this as its own series, but this is actually just episodes 56, 57 and 58 of Dan Carlin's ongoing Hardcore History podcast (W).  (Also, Dan Carlin labels each episode separately as "King of Kings", "King of Kings II" and King of Kings  III", but I'm referring to the whole thing as just "King of Kings").  This came out on 2015.  It's a history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, from its founding by Cyrus the Great to its destruction by Alexander the Great.  As is usual for Dan Carlin, the episodes are very long--3 hrs 33 min for the first episode, 4 hrs 16 min for the second episode, and a whopping 5hrs for the final episode.  So there's close to 13 hours of content here in total.   

Much of Hardcore History is behind a paywall, but some of it is freely available, and these episodes are part of the free stuff.  You can go listen to it right now on Youtube, or just search "Dan Carlin's Hardcore History 56 Kings of Kings" to start episode one on your favorite podcast player.

Why I'm Listening to This

Back in 2015, when this first came out, a friend and co-worker of mine was listening to this, and telling me how fascinating it was.  I had never heard of Dan Carlin before then, but I was vaguely intrigued by the idea of a history of the Persian Empire.  I learned about the Persian Empire in my youth when studying the Old Testament, and its always seemed  mysterious and exotic, and I was interested to learn more about it.

This same friend gave me a copy of Death Throes of the Republic by Dan Carlin.  I listened to it, and found it absolutely fascinating.  (I reviewed it positively on this blog.)

I listened to the first bit of King of Kings, but it didn't really grab me.  I suspected that that was because I wasn't allowing myself to immerse myself in it, and that if I might enjoy it more if I made it a dedicated listening project.

However, just from dipping into the King of Kings, I realized that Dan Carlin was referencing Herodotus a lot.  It turns out that the Persians didn't leave us a lot of their own histories, so we're reliant on Greek historian Herodotus for much of the history of the early Persian Empire.  Dan Carlin was talking about not only what was in Herodotus, but also speculating on why Herodotus's histories had the style and format it did.  I thought to myself, "If I ever get around to reading Herodotus, then this would make the perfect podcast to listen to alongside Herodotus."

Well, I've started Herodotus now.  And I also finally finished (and reviewed) The History of Rome podcast, which opened up a slot for something new to listen to.  So I started King of Kings.

Summary of Content

We start (after some digressions on the character of the Spartans) with the Assyrian Empire, and then move quickly through the Empire of the Medes, and then to Cyrus the Great and the founding of the Persian Empire.  And then we run into the Greco-Persian wars.  All of this is based mostly on Herodotus, but Dan Carlin tries to bring in other materials as well when he can.

In addition to the narrative, Dan Carlin is fascinated by the psychology of the ancients and the psychology of ancient battle.  He spends about an hour at the end of episode 2 pondering how it was that men back in that era could face the horror of hand to hand combat without psychological damage.

After this long digression, we get back to the narrative and continue with the Greco-Persian Wars in episode 3.  Then, the primary source for all of this, Herodotus, comes to an end, and Dan Carlin admits there aren't much surviving sources left to cover the rest of the Persian Kings.  So we go quickly through the rest of them, until we get to the story of Alexander the Great, and the destruction of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Dan Carlin knows the conflict between the Persians and the Greeks is always told from the Greek side, and he wants to try to tell the story from the Persian side, but he's hampered by the fact that most of the sources are Greek.  He does his best to try to balance things, but  his "History of the Persian Empire" feels at times like a history of Greece

Evaluation

Perhaps it's fitting that Herodotus is being used as a basis for much of this series, because Herodotus is famous for his many digressions and taking forever to get to the point.  And Dan Carlin is taking a similar tack , and going off on all sorts of tangents, and taking forever to get to the point.

But, then for readers of Herodotus, all the wonderful digressions are supposed to be part of the enjoyment.  And I suppose the same must be true for loyal Dan Carlin listeners.  Or at least the ideal listener.  (He does, after all, have a big fan base.)  But if you're not ready for a lot of digressions, better pass this one by.

I'd previously classified Dan Carlin's Death Throes of the Republic as a narrative history, but King of Kings has so much digression and so much pondering that I can't really call it narrative history.

In particular, there's a very long digression at the end of episode 2 that goes on for about an hour in which Dan Carlin talks about what it must have been like to fight hand-to-hand in ancient warfare, and notes that this is so completely foreign to anything in modern experience, and questions how human nature could deal with the horrors of up-close hand-to-hand fighting.  He talks about it for an hour.  He just goes on and on and on, and I kept wanting him to get back to the narrative.

I don't know.  On the one hand, Dan Carlin is correct in that this is the big question of history.  These kinds of questions are why people read history in the first place--what is the difference between the ancient and modern psychology, and what is human nature anyway?

But on the other hand, I feel like every 10 year old boy reading about ancient battles is already thinking about these questions anyway, so it's a question that is already being pondered.  Dan Carlin, to his credit, is well read on the issue and brings in the opinions of a lot of learned historians, but after talking in circles around the issue, he doesn't really come to a firm conclusion about anything.  (It seems like the learned historians themselves can only speculate about what ancient battle must have been like for the human psyche.)

The Listening Experience

I found my enjoyment of this podcast depended on my mood.  There were times when I was in the mood to just get the information, and was frustrated by Dan Carlin's roundabout style of storytelling.  But then there were times when I was in a more relaxed mood, and was happy just to listen to Dan Carlin ramble, and follow his train of thought wherever it wandered.

The episodes were so long (5 hours for the last one!) that I had issues with losing my place sometimes, especially when I was playing them on my phone.  Sometimes I would resort to writing down the time markers when I would know where to start up again.

As for Dan Carlin's style itself, well, I feel like I gave my thoughts on this the last time I reviewed Dan Carlin.  So I'll just repeat myself from before:

He's not a professional historian--he's a broadcaster by trade.  But he's obviously a huge history nerd (You can really hear his love for the subject material come through in the podcasts) and he and his team do their research.

He's got an A.M. radio type voice.  His voice, tone, and cadence all remind me of Rush Limbaugh.  (I'm speaking only of his voice here.  None of his politics resemble Rush's).

He's primarily a narrative history story teller, which I like, but his podcasts aren't always exactly like a novel.  Rather, here again is more of the style and format of an A.M. radio DJ. He sounds like a talk show radio host who is giving out the daily news.  He tells a bit of the story, then he stops to comment on its importance, or to say why he thinks it's remarkable.

Connections With Other Things I've Read or Listened To

* Obviously this overlaps heavily with Introduction to Ancient Greek History by Donald Kagan.

* Also, the last hour of the podcast is all about Alexander the Great, so see all the books I've reviewed on Alexander the Great: HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

* A point that Dan Carlin makes is that in the history of Western Civilization, the Greeks are usually portrayed as the saviors of Western Civilization, and the Persian Empire is usually portrayed as the evil empire.  Dan Carlin contrasts this with the positive write-up that the Persians get in the Old Testament.  The Old Testament prophets were overjoyed that the Persians allowed them to rebuild the Temple, and so they praise the King of Persia very highly.  (I think Donald Kagan also makes this point in his lectures.)

Some of the praise in the Old Testament that Christians would later interpret as being about Jesus was actually in the original context meant to be about the King of Persia.  Robin Lane Fox and Christine Hayes both make this same point.   (The title of this podcast, King of Kings, is itself a reference to how some of the appellations for the Persian King in the Old Testament ended up getting transferred to Jesus, although Dan Carlin never explicitly makes the connection.)

* And, of course, this overlaps heavily with Herodotus, which I haven't finished yet, but which I'm currently reading.  

I found it interesting to read Herodotus while listening to this podcast.  It was interesting to hear Dan Carlin talk about the stories in Herodotus, and then read those stories myself.

Video Review (Playlist HERE)

King of Kings Podcast by Dan Carlin: Review

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

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.

Link of the Day
The Long, Shameful History of American Terrorism 

Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

                So, a few months back I was browsing through a used book store, and I stumbled upon Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s Alexander the Great trilogy.  I had never heard of Manfredi or this trilogy before.  But I thought: “Well, it’s high time I read up on Alexander the Great, and I like historical fiction, so why not?”  So I bought Manfredi’s Alexander the Great trilogy, and read and reviewed all - three - books on this blog.

                But as I was reading Manfredi’s trilogy, I looked up a few reviews on-line, and there were several indications that I was reading the wrong trilogy.  Many people mentioned Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great trilogy as the gold standard against which Manfredi’s trilogy failed to measure up against.  For example Game of Thrones author G.R.R. Martin, wrote:  It takes a certain amount of hubris for any novelist to tackle the life of Alexander the Great, knowing that his efforts will inevitably be compared to Mary Renault’s classic and enduring treatment of the same materials, but that is just what the Italian historian, archeologist, and jouralist Valerio Massimo Manfredi has done....If it fails to match the power and the poetry of Renault’s, well… very little does.

                Or several Amazon.com reviewers, who also unfavorably compared Manfredi's trilogy to Mary Renault.  To take just a couple examples: The writing was entirely lacking in any sort of poeticism or complexity, especially when compared to the Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault.

Or

I question the need for any new history of Alexander that cannot improve upon Mary Renault's, and this one definitely does not fit the bill.
Or
"Alexander, Child of a Dream", while a nice a nice collection of facts and anecdotes, does not have the magic to carry beyond the ordinary. There are several books on Alexander the Great by Mary Renault I would not hesitate to recommend.

(Those three quotes are just examples.  If you go to the Amazon site for Manfredi's book (A), just about every reviewer is invoking Mary Renault.)

And if all that wasn't enough to kindle my interest, then there was this Guardian article on Mary Renault's Alexander the Great trilogy that I stumbled across:
They're superb books, there's huge scope for discussion in Renault's presentation of the politics and personalities around her famous hero, there's much to say about her interweaving of myth and history
 and
just as significantly, the cover of my new copies of the Alexander The Great Trilogy also carry quotes from Hilary Mantel ("Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers") and Sarah Waters (who calls The Persian Boy "one of the greatest historical novels ever written"). Based on those two quotes alone, it could be argued that Renault has changed the face of modern literary fiction (and most definitely of the Booker prize).

                With my interest officially kindled, I resolved that when I was back in the United States over Christmas, I would track down a copy of Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great trilogy.  Which I did.  And here I am reviewing the first book.

Alexander the Great Overkill?

For anyone keeping track of my reading list, I suppose the obvious question is: "Isn't this a little bit much on Alexander the Great now?" After all, I've just finished one trilogy on Alexander the Great, plus Philip Freeman's biography of Alexander the Great (which I read to supplement the historical fiction), and now I'm embarking on another trilogy."Aren't you getting a little sick of Alexander the Great?" someone might ask me.

And the honest answer is: yeah, a little bit.  But after seeing Mary Renault's trilogy so highly praised, I decided I had to give it a try.  Plus, another reason I wanted to read Mary Renault's trilogy is because the last book in the trilogy, Funeral Games, tackles something neither Freeman nor Manfredi cover: the descent of Alexander the Great's empire into warring factions following Alexander's death.  And I'm really looking forward to learning more about that period.

However I'm not up to Funeral Games yet, and this first book in the trilogy, covering Alexander's boyhood up to his father's assassination, is material I've already seen covered by Manfredi and Freeman.  It's slightly boring to retread it again, but at the same time, it's also kind of fun to see a different spin that a different author puts on the same events.  And that, after all, is the fun of historical fiction.  So on the whole, I'd say I'm still enjoying myself with Alexander the Great reading.

The Review
One of the reviewers I quoted above already mentions this, but Mary Renault does write in a very poetical way at times.
Not all the time.  There are sections of the book where the drama is pushed forward by sparse narration.  But there are a lot of other descriptions in this book that are perhaps more poetical than prose.
Readers will probably differ in how much they appreciate these poetical descriptions.  For my part, I admit to struggling with them a bit.  But no doubt this will differ from reader to reader, so I'll quote a typical long descriptive section of the book (something that I struggled to keep focused on), and you can decide for yourself how appealing this prose sounds to you.

The mild summer day declined to evening.  On the salt lake of Pella fell the shadow of its island fort, where the treasury and the dungeons were.  Lamps glimmered in windows up and down the town; a household slave came out with a resined torch, to kindle the great cressets upheld by seated lions at the foot of the Palace steps.  The lowing of homebound cattle sounded in the plains; in the mountains, which turned towards Pella their shadowed eastern faces, far-distant watch fires sparked the grey.
The boy sat on the Palace roof, looking down at the town, the lagoon, and the little fisher-boats making for their moorings.  It was his bedtime, and he was keeping out of his nurse's way till he had seen his mother, who might give him leave to stay up.  Men mending the roof had gone home, without removing their ladders.  It was a chance not to be wasted.
He sat on the tiles of Pentelic marble, shipped in by King Archelaos; the gutter under his thighs, between his knees an antefix in the shape of a gorgon's head, the paint faded by weather.  Grasping the snaky hair, he was outstaring the long drop, defying its earth-daimons.  Going back he would have to to look down; they must be settled with beforehand.
Soon they gave in, as such creatures did when challenged.  He ate the stale bread he had stolen instead of supper.  It would have been hot posset, flavored with honey and wine; the smell had been tempting, but at supper one was caught for bed.  Nothing could be had for nothing.
A bleat sounded from below.  They had brought the black goat, it must be nearly time.  Better now not to ask beforehand.  Once he was there, she would not send him away.
He picked his way down the long spaces of the ladder-rungs made for men.  The beaten earth-daimons kept their distance; he sang himself a song of victory. From the lower roof to the ground; no one was there but a few tired slaves going off duty.  Indoors Hellanike would be searching; he must go around outside.  He was getting too much for her; he had heard his mother say so. (p.33-34)

....et cetera.   To be fair, not all of the passages are quite that slow moving.  (Mary Renault can also speed up the action when she wants to).  But a fair amount of the prose is like this.
Of course some people will love those descriptive passages.  (In fact, based on all the high praise this book has gotten, it's fair to say many people have really loved those descriptive passages.)  So although they tried my patience at times, perhaps that's my fault and not the book's.  Perhaps I was just not the ideal reader for this book.

The other big negative for me was there was way too much focus in this book on Alexander's relationship with Hephaistion.
Some historical context is perhaps in order here.  According to Wikipedia, Mary Renault was one of the first 20th century writers to write sympathetically about romantic love between two men, and this made her a popular figure in the emerging gay rights movement in the 1970s.  (Fire from Heaven, although not the only work of Mary Renault to deal with love between men, was written in 1969, so you can imagine it was pretty far ahead of its time back then.)
However, those of us with a low tolerance for mushy romance, whether it be homosexual or heterosexual, will find all the scenes of Alexander and Hephaistion gazing into each other's eyes a little bit tiring.

To quote from one of them:
He looked deep into Hephaistion's eyes, as always before a confidence.  As always, Hephaistion felt as if his midriff were melting.  As always, it was some moments before he could follow what he was being told.
"...who were in other cities and escaped the siege, have been begging Father to have Stagira restored and the citizens enfranchised.  That's what this Aristotle wants.  What Father wants, is an alliance with Hermeias.  It's a piece of horse-trading.  Leoidas came for politics, too.  Old Phoinix is the only one who came for me."
Hephaistion tightened his arm.  His feelings were confused; he wanted to grasp till Alexander's very bones were somehow engulfed within himself, but knew this to be wicked and mad; he would kill anyone who harmed a hair of his head.
"They don't know I've seen this.  I just say Yes, Father.  I've not even told my mother.  I want to make my own mind up when I've seen the man, and do what I think good without anyone knowing why.  This is only between us two.  My mother is entirely against philosophy."
Hephaistion was thinking how fragile his rib cage seemed, how terrible were the warring desires to cherish and to crush it.  He continued silent.  (from p. 144-145)

That's just a few paragraphs, but that scene continues for two more pages, and these kind of scenes are all throughout the book.

Mary Renault defends her portrayal in the author's afterward at the back of the book, citing a lot of evidence that Alexander and Hephaistion were probably more than friends, before finally concluding. "No physical relationship is proved, and those whom the thought disturbs are free to reject it" (p. 374).
In other words, Mary Renault spends a lot of time talking about the love between Alexander and Hephaistion, but always stopping short of portraying a physical sexual relationship.

This would be quite clever, were it not the same approach that everyone else seems to use.  Oliver Stone's movie also hinted quite strongly at love between Hephaistion and Alexander, without ever explicitly showing a sexual relationship.  So did Manfredi.  At a certain point, I get tired of all these ambiguous portrayals, and wish some author would just have the guts to go one way or the other.  I could go for either portrayal at this point:  either full on homosexual lovers, or just plain old heterosexual bros. I just want someone to have the courage to choose one.

...but of course I'm being unfair, because I'm judging Mary Renault's 1969 book against material that all came after it.  At the time, this pseudo-homosexual portrayal was no doubt quite shocking.

So, those are all my complaints about this book.  Now onto the positives:

The Positives
One of the really great things about this book is how three-dimensional all the characters are.
I appreciate this all the more after coming out of Manfredi's trilogy, where quite often Alexander's companions were just a list of names that followed him everywhere.  Mary Renault, on the other hand, knows how to write characters.

Aristotle, for instance, is not just a supporting character to the saga of Alexander the Great.  He's someone portrayed with his own motivations and ambitions.
Alexander's great antagonist Demosthenes is in many ways the villain of the book.  And yet, he is not simply a mindless antagonist to  Alexander's greatness.  Mary Renault shines the spotlight on him for several pages, highlighting his motivations, his insecurities, his jealousies, et cetera.
In this book, you really get to understand all the characters and what they want.
(It's worth mentioning here that this isn't easy to do.  In fiction, the author has the luxury of creating their own characters whole, and thus can always give the characters personalities consistent with their actions.  In historical fiction, the actions of the characters are already pre-determined, and the author has to go back and give realistic motivations to explain what is already a matter of record.  Not everyone can make these historical characters fully come to life as real people, but Mary Renault has done an excellent job.)

There is also a very rich portrayal of the ancient Greek world.  Mary Renault, a classicist who has written many books on ancient Greece, knows the world of her characters very well.  Before writing her trilogy on Alexander the Great, she had already written on book on the Peloponneisan War (W), and one book on the aftermath of the Peloponneisan War (W), and she weaves in these rich historical details about Athens and Sparta in with her story of the rise of Macedonia.
(After having read this book, I feel like I really want to read more about ancient Greek history.  I probably want get to it anytime soon, but Mary Renault creates the feeling of such a rich world that I feel the desire to learn more about the Peloponneisan Wars.)

Well, those are all my thoughts on Fire from Heaven.  I'm off to the next book in Mary Renault's trilogy next: The Persian Boy.

Link of the Day
We Are All...Fill in the Blank

Alexander: The Ends of the Earth by Valerio Massimo Manfredi (Alexander Trilogy Book 3)

(Book Review)

                And so, after having read and reviewed book 1 and book 2 of Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s Alexander the Great trilogy, I come at last to the end of this series.

                In broad terms, everything I said about books 1 and 2 holds true for this last book as well.  The prose is very clunky, cheesy, and full of unnatural speech and exposition dumps.  And yet, it’s all quite readable.  As with the previous two books, this book seems to be re-interpreting a lot of events to put Alexander the Great in a better light than he deserves, but aside from minor details the main narrative is pretty historically accurate.

                But since I’ve already critiqued this series in broad terms in my previous two reviews, I’ll jump right into the historical nit-picking in this review.

Historical Inaccuracies

                First a couple disclaimers.  (1)  I’m not an expert.  My only source of information is just one biography of Alexander the Great I read by Philip Freeman.  I use Philip Freeman’s biography of Alexander to critique Valerio Massimo Manfredi, but if Philip Freeman is in error, then so am I.  (2)  I’m not going to get into all the small nitpicky little details, or I’d be writing here forever.  I’ll just try to confine myself to what I view as the major inaccuracies.

                In this third book of the trilogy, Alexander personally kills, or has killed, many of his friends and companions: Philotas, Parmenion, Cleitus the Black, and Callisthenes.

                Of these four, only the death of Cleitus the Black is portrayed as similar to the historical version Philip Freeman recounts—Alexander speared Cleitus during a drunken argument, immediately regretted it, and spent days in mourning afterwards.

                As for Parmenion and his son Philotas, Philip Freeman says that the relationship between Parmenion and Alexander had been tense all along—Parmenion was one of the aristocracy of Macedonia, he and his family were a potential rival to the throne for Alexander, a somewhat unwelcome reminder to Alexander of his father’s old-guard soldiers, and Parmenion and Alexander were constantly in conflict over policy and strategy throughout the whole campaign.  In Philip Freeman’s version, when Alexander finally has an excuse to eliminate Parmenion and his son Philotas, he’s only too happy to do so.

                In Manfredi’s version, all the Macedonian leaders are one big happy family.  Parmenion and Philotas are devoted to Alexander, and he loves them.  This makes it somewhat harder to believe that Alexander would turn on them.  And so accordingly Manfredi has to give Alexander much more motivation.

                In Philip Freeman’s version, the evidence against Philotas is extremely thin—his only crime appears to have been disregarding rumors of a plot to kill Alexander that may or may not have been serious. 

                In Manfredi’s version, Philotas knows full well the plot against Alexander is real, and is even involved in a softer version of it.  (In Manfredi’s version, Philotas does not want Alexander killed, but is part of a plot to remove him from power.)  In fact in Manfredi’s version, the plot against Alexander manifests itself into an actual assassination attempt that Alexander barely survives.

                Similar comments can be made about the execution of Callisthenes.  In Philip Freeman’s version, there was absolutely no evidence connecting Callisthenes with the Pages’ Conspiracy, but Alexander just used it as an excuse to get rid of a troublesome insubordinate. 

                In Manfredi’s version, Callisthenes is still not directly involved, but the pages are directly getting their inspiration from him. 

                According to Philip Freeman, ancient sources differ on whether Callisthenes was executed by Alexander, or whether he died in prison, but he was definitely arrested by Alexander.  In Manfredi’s version, Callisthenes commits suicide before he is arrested, completely removing Alexander from any guilt.

                To give credit where credit is due, although Manfredi’s version may not make great history, it makes much better drama.  The historical story of Alexander finding some flimsy excuse to get rid of his enemies is not very interesting.  But the drama of a man betrayed by his best friends, and forced to take action against the people he loves the most, has much more potential.  (I don’t think Manfredi’s flat prose takes full advantage of the dramatic potential he’s created, but there’s certainly an element of pathos and tragedy in his version of the story.)

                One last major difference: according to Philip Freeman, Alexander’s lover Barsine bore him a son named Hercules, and they both survived until Alexander’s death (after which, they were both poisoned in the power struggles that followed Alexander’s death.)

                In Manfredi’s version, Barsine is killed in the battle of Gaugamela.  I’m not exactly sure why Manfredi made this change, but I suspect it was because he wanted to romanticize Alexander’s love for Barsine, and so Barsine had to be killed off to free Alexander’s heart so he could marry the Persian queens.

Historical Nitpicks

                When seeing the dead body of the Persian King, Manfredi has Alexander reflect thus:

                There came to his [Alexander’s] mind the lines of the Fall of Ilium which describes the lifeless body of Priam, killed by Neoptolemus:

                Here lies the King of Asia, the powerful lord of armies

                Like a tree felled by lightening

                And abandoned trunk, a body without a name.  (from p. 231)

                I actually read The Fall of Ilium back in my youth, when I was going through my stage of being obsessed with the Trojan War.  And The Fall of Ilium was written was written by Quintus of Smyrna in the 4th century A.D.  (W).  Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C.  (Unless there is another earlier work called The Fall of Ilium, but if there is, I can’t find it on Google.  So I’m going to count this as an anachronism until someone can tell me differently.)

                And yes, I do realize this is exactly the sort of nitpicky historical detail I just said I wouldn’t get into in this review, but since I have some familiarity with The Fall of Ilium, I couldn’t resist commenting on this.

A Comparison with an Obscure Japanese TV Show that No One Else has Ever Heard Of.

Throughout reading this whole trilogy, I was constantly reminded of the Japanese TV drama Shinsengumi.  And I know that’s a really obscure comparison to make, but I’m going to indulge myself anyway.

                As I said in my review of Shinsengumi, the whole series was a historical whitewash designed to make the characters appear much more likeable than they actually were.  To its credit, the show didn’t completely skip over problematic historical incidents, but any sort of atrocity the Shinsengumi committed would be completely re-worked so that somehow the Shinsengumi were always in the right, and their victims were always in the wrong.

                And, as I also mentioned in my review, as much as this historical inaccuracy irked me on the one level, it also became part of the fun on another level.  If you knew the history, then you knew all the terrible things the Shinsengumi were going to do, but you didn’t know how the writers of the show were going to re-frame everything to show that the Shinsengumi weren’t that bad after all.  And so, trying to guess how the writers would excuse away all the Shinsengumi’s atrocities became part of the fun of watching the show.

                It was a similar experience reading Manfredi’s Alexander the Great trilogy.  Seeing how he would squirm and weasel to mitigate Alexander’s historical guilt could be irritating, but it could also be part of the fun of reading historical fiction.

Good Points of This Trilogy

                Throughout these reviews, I’ve mostly been harping on the bad points of this trilogy.  But as easy as these books are to criticize, let me re-emphasize that they’re not all that bad, as reading experiences go.  They’re cheesy, sure, but they’re pretty fun to read, and they’re easy reading.  If these books were boring or difficult or troublesome, rest assured I wouldn’t have finished the first one, let alone stuck through with the whole trilogy.

                Historical fiction is a very demanding genre—the writer has to satisfy both the needs of a novel, and of a history.  And while I wouldn’t say that Manfredi’s trilogy is flawless, it’s good enough, and it’s no small thing to write a narrative that encompasses all of the major events and battles in Alexander the Great’s life.  (I know I’ve nitpicked these books on historical inaccuracies, but on the whole they seem to be fairly accurate.)

                Also, although I’ve relied on Philip Freeman’s history to critique these trilogies, there are some interesting details and characters that Philip Freeman misses, which I only found out about from Manfredi.

                For example, Philip Freeman writes little about Alexander of Epirus, who was Alexander the Great’s uncle (and also, because of the incestuous relationships of ancient royalty, his brother-in-law).  It was from Manfredi’s version of events that I learned the story of Alexander of Epirus, and the interesting historical parallels between the two Alexanders.  As Alexander the Great went East into the Persian Empire, his uncle/brother-in-law went West to Italy, where he became involved in the wars there, and even made a treaty with the Roman Republic, before being killed in battle. 

Having my interest in Alexander of Epirus aroused by Manfredi, I went to Wikipedia to find out more.  Wikipedia has more interesting details on this.  According to Wikipedia (W), the Roman historian Livius speculated what would have happened if Alexander the Great had gone to fight the Romans, instead of his uncle/brother-in-law, and this speculation is regarded as the first surviving piece of alternative history.

                Some other interesting characters also pop into Manfredi’s historical fiction that are also absent from Philip Freeman, like the philosopher Pyrrho, who is briefly mentioned on page 443 of this final book.  Manfredi doesn’t give a lot of details about Pyrrho, but just a brief mention that some significant philosopher was travelling with Alexander’s armies around India.  And those small details were enough to at least encourage me to go to the Wikipedia page (W) to learn more.

                There are also some hints of a larger story.  For example, in Manfredi’s trilogy much is made of the love between Alexander’s companion Perdiccas and Alexander’s sister Cleopatra.  Somewhat disappointingly, nothing ever comes from all this build up in Manfredi’s narrative, so once again the curious reader must go to Wikipedia to find out what the pay-off of this story will be.  In Wikipedia (W), I found out that after Alexander’s death, Perdiccas did indeed marry Cleopatra, and then shortly afterwards was killed in the power struggle between Alexander’s generals.

                The power struggle after Alexander’s death is not really covered in Manfredi’s trilogy.  Which is unfortunate.  It seems to me to be the most interesting part of the whole Alexander saga.  Which brings me to my next point…

Manfredi and Oliver Stone and Game of Thrones

                The publisher’s introduction to this book on the front page claims that Manfredi’s Alexander the Great Trilogy has been translated into 24 languages in 38 countries, and that the “film rights have been acquired by Universal Pictures in light of a large international production.”  Since this book was published way back in 1998, I thought, “Aha!  Is this trilogy where the Oliver Stone movie takes its inspiration?”

                Well, a quick Internet search reveals that no, apparently it’s not.  The Universal Picture movie was apparently a planned, but never produced, project with Leonardo DiCaprio as Alexander the Great and Nicole Kidman as Alexander’s mother [LINK HERE].

                It might as well have been the inspiration for Oliver Stone’s movie, however.  Many of the major events are the same: the assassination of Alexander’s father, for example, as well as Alexander turning on and killing his former companions: Philotas, Parmenion, and Cleitus the Black.  All of these are prominent events in Manfredi’s trilogy, and all of these also made it into Oliver Stone’s movie.

                The problem with compressing the entire story of Alexander the Great into two hours, however, is there’s no time to develop any of these characters.  Who cares if Alexander kills Cleitus the Black, Philotas, or Parmenion, if the audience is never given a chance to get to know any of these characters in the first place?

                If the story of Alexander the Great is ever to be told on screen, it will have to be as a TV show, not as a movie. 

                It used to be commonly thought that television audiences didn’t have the patience for complicated history with too many characters and too much complicated intriguing.  But now Game of Thrones (which is essentially a fake-history drama) has proven that there is actually an audience hungry for these kind of stories of complicated intrigue.  And ever since Game of Thrones, I can no longer read a history book without imagining it as an HBO drama series.  So you’ll have to forgive this.

                Alexander’s story could easily make a great HBO drama series.  There was way too much story here for Oliver Stone’s movie, but you could easily stretch all these conquests, intrigues, and conspiracies out into a TV show.  The intrigues around the Macedonian throne in the first book of this trilogy could easily be season one.  Then once Alexander succeeds his father as king, the conquests of Alexander the Great could be a couple more seasons easily.  But then the real Game of Thrones style drama would be the power struggle that followed Alexander’s death, when all his generals turned on each other, and everyone started killing everyone else. 

                As mentioned above, I’m somewhat disappointed that this didn’t make it into Manfredi’s version of the story.  (There’s a brief epilogue which alludes to this fighting on pages 569-572, but no details.)  Given Manfredi’s version of events, in which all the Macedonian leaders are just one big happy family, it’s somewhat difficult to imagine how he would have explained away the fact that they all started killing each other as soon as Alexander died.  But I would have been interested to see his attempt.

                At any rate, whilst reading this trilogy, I’ve read a number of reviews that said Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great trilogy is much better than Manfredi’s.  And it looks like Mary Renault has the whole last book of her trilogy dedicated to telling the story of the power struggle after Alexander’s death.  That should be interesting.

Link of the Day

Stefan Molyneux & Noam Chomsky Great Conversation By 2 Anarchists