Those who have already read all three novels in Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy will have to forgive me for pointing out the blindingly obvious: these books are seriously good. As we draw towards the end of the Reading Group month with Mary Renault, and I'm cracking the spine of Funeral Games, and the perspective on Alexander and his legacy broadens and deepens, I feel like I'm just beginning to understand their worth.
I'm also beginning to realise what a mistake I made a few years ago when I read Fire From Heaven in isolation. I liked the book well enough then, but didn't properly understand its value - and didn't see how important it was as a bridge to the later instalments in the trilogy. (In my partial defence, I should note that Fire From Heaven was then involved in the Lost Booker prize (an award given retrospectively to novels from 1970, when the Booker prize skipped a year) and had to be judged as a unique work. It was also up against JG Farrell's Troubles, a book so brilliant that anything set against it has to lose some lustre.)
There's plenty I could say about what makes these books so good. I've already written quite a bit about Renault's ability to blend known fact and imaginative speculation, and to recreate a convincing reality – but also a reality rich in mythological possibility and divine influence. I could also talk about her taut, clear prose. About her ability to write at a consistently high emotional pitch, in a register largely free of humour and irony, and yet to never seem ridiculous. About her unflinching depictions of battle with its gore and horror, its adrenaline and cruel joy. About her knack of using sharp brief descriptions full of sensory details to add weight not only to the world she is describing, but to the emotions of the people within it. To lift a quote from the page wouldn't do justice to the way these quick moments fit within the rest of the text. You'll just have to trust that I felt an almost physical lurch as Bagoas chokes up at the scent of "cloves and cinnamons" when Alexander withdraws a copy of The Iliad from Darius's casket "of pure white silver, gold lions on its sides, the lid inlaid with malachite and lapis, carved into laves and birds."
Yet while that list could go on and on, the real measure of Renault's success doesn't come in the accumulation of these technical details. Indeed, she can also occasionally be clumsy, sometimes a little dull. But that doesn't really matter because the books are so overwhelming in one crucial regard: the creation of Alexander, his legend and legacy. He has a kind of radiant force that affected me as a reader almost as much as he dazzles everyone else alongside him on the page. When, for instance, Renault described Alexander calming a wounded soldier during an operation by allowing the agonised man to grasp his shoulder and telling him to "hold on", I completely believed this regal presence would be enough to ease the pain. I was also in full emotional sympathy a few pages later when Bagoas declares: "I thought, There goes my Lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a king." Away from the book I think kings are absurd and deplorable. Under Renault's spell, I think Alexander is as great as everyone says he is.
Which brings me back to the fascinating question of how real this Alexander may be – and whether that matters. In the paragraph above, I used the word "creation" intentionally. Renault's Alexander impresses me most – I think – as a fictional character. Although that does prompt a question that has already been raised eloquentlyhere by nightjar12:
"It strikes me as odd to write a fictional character but call him/her after a real one … Why not just write complete fiction? I am enjoying the books as fiction so it would not make any difference if it was about Frederick the Great instead of Alexander – am I missing something?"
This question has already had a number of excellent responses.
"The thing I love about Mary Renault's writing is that she started with the scaffold of what was known about Greek culture at that time; the geopolitics, the religions, the art, dress, writing, theatre and on that framework she then hung all the psychological dressing we understand to be human nature. Her novels are full of the deep knowledge of what makes people tick that is the bread and butter of good fiction writing.
I think it is the underlying skeleton that supports the fiction and the seamless way they are joined together that raises these books above the ordinary. "Her work reminds me of Knossos in Crete. The palace is full of amazing excavations of Bronze Age architecture, but it's the heavily restored north entrance with its bull fresco that makes it onto the postcards. Reconstructing history may be controversial but it brings it alive for people. There has to be value in that."
"Although Alex is a historical personage, and I don't think Mary Renault falsified any historical facts, she certainly treated him as a fictional character …
"But he is also a unique figure in history. A perfect choice for fiction, in a way, as we must believe in Alex. The exploits of someone like Conan the Barbarian are hardly credible, but A never lost a battle no matter where he fought it, and so on. But I think MR also wanted to have a real Greek feel to his story. He is the final flower of classical Greek antiquity, of the Hellenic, and also the first bud of the Hellenistic, when Greek culture spread in diluted form over the ancient East. She makes clear and laments that the glories of Athens and Attica are no more, and that the Greek stories of Homer (especially Achilles and his young male lover Patrocles) of Hercules, and of the Xenophon's Anabasis inspired Alex. But she seems to me to make Alex's story equally heroic and tragic."
I'd agree with the bulk of both of those comments. I'd also suggest that using this historical figure adds a real frisson and energy to the books. There's added potential for sparks when the fiction collides with historical events. And could anyone read the books without wondering what Alexander himself would make of them? The fact that she's writing about someone who really did walk the earth, and really did drag all those men along with him and achieve such astonishing things also adds an interesting layer to her fiction. Would her Alexander seem too good to be true if he wasn't real? If, say, she had made him the leader of a tribe on a Dune-like alien planet, would we still believe he could have such power over other people and do so much so young – or would we doubt him more? She can let her Alexander thrash armies far bigger and better equipped than his, against all apparent odds, because it is no more than the real man did. … In short, Alexander's story is a thumpingly good one. And one that is compelling in its tragedy. He lived fast, but he died young. As theorbys points out there are few better examples of hubris:
"My idea is that MR's idea was to write a tragedy about being human. The central concept of tragic hubris is sometimes translated as 'pride' but means something more. It is when a human affronts the gods and fate usually by being more than human or maybe just presuming too much as a human (at least that is my brief interpretation). Hubris is what is often thought to be the cause of the downfall of tragic heroes like Oedipus or Pentheus. Alexander seems like the poster boy for hubris."
If you want to write about hubris – as most writers have since at least the age of Sophocles – you might as well set the story in Greece, and you might as well write about Alexander. Dozens, hundreds of others have. But Mary Renault's achievement is the simple fact that she has done it so damn well.
