Tom Holt
Alexander at the World's End
Little, Brown & Co., c1999, ISBN 0316850586 (hardback)
Abacus, ISBN 0349113157 (paper)
(Thanks to Susan for the review)
 

(My note: The reviewer seems to have forgotten that Holt has already published two novels about Greece:  Goat Song and A Walled Orchard.  Having read both, I'm anxious to read this new one, too.)

Cynic's progress

Holt is normally thought of  as the writer of around 15 sometimes over-elaborately humorous works of fantasy, somewhat in the same genre, loosely speaking, as the novels of Terry Pratchett.  These centre around figures from classical, Norse or mediaeval legend:  Theseus, Beowulf, the flying Dutchman, Faust, Galahad, and so on.

His latest book is of a rather different type, the historical novel written as a monologue around a classical period and characters, couched in contemporary and rather downbeat terms (the closest parallels I have come across are the Roman Empire detective novels of Lindsey Davis and David Wishart).

Holt, however, has chosen the period of the Macedonian conquest of Greece and the Persian empire; his Alexander is the endlessly fascinating Alexander the Great of Macedon.  But this is no updated version of Mary Renault's The Persian Boy.  Holt has chosen to focus on a minor Athenian philosopher, in the Cynic School, a pupil of that Diogenes who is supposed to have lived in a barrel by choice, who, sent with Demosthenes on the famous Athenian mission to Philip of Macedon, is hired by Philip to help Aristotle (whom he detests) to educate the young Alexander.  Being broke, he takes the job and lectures Alexander on military tactics (from an old textbook modified by his natural cynicism), convincing the impressionable boy that he is a military thinker of genius.  From Philip's court this philosopher is sent to help settle a surplus of mercenaries in a model township on the Black Sea coast and leaves it one day ahead of its obliteration by the Scythian natives.  He ends up in Sogdiana at one of the numerous Alexandropolises, now Iskander, north of Tashkent, to become its mayor, governor, director or whatiever.

When he is young, the philosopher writes, he believed in democracy.  As he grew older he passed through admiration for oligarchy and philosopher kings.  At the end he believes only in drainage, public sanitation and clean water.  Alexander, by contrast, believes he is a god and emperor-designate over the entire world. Holt depicts him as an occasional psychic degenerating into the psychotic, in a natural progression from his early upbringing, his adolescent competition with his father, his mother's superstition, all taken with his literal acceptance of the trend of Aristitle's political theorising as pointing towards a world state as an achievable model.  The theme of the book is the contrast between the philosopher's journey toward minimalist municipalism and Alexander's toward maximalist megalomania.  A fascinating, gripping, moving story.