Harold Lamb
Alexander of Macedon
Doubleday, c1946, ISBN 0523008775
 

"The strength of Heracles . . . The bravery of Achilles . . . The wisdom of Aristotle . . . ."  So advertises the backblurb of the 1976 paperback edition.  And it characterizes well Lamb's rather romantic view of Alexander.

It is difficult to know just what to call Mr. Lamb's book.  It is not, strictly speaking, historical fiction.  Most novels do not come with an index and extensive historical afterword.  The spine of the book calls it "nonfiction/biography" and the library of congress catalogues it as history, not fiction.  But it is not really history, either.  Much is plain narrative summary, but there are a number of invented conversations interposed as well.  It might be best describes as "popular fictionalized romantic biography" of a sort which Lamb applies to a number of other historical figures, including Peter the great, Charlemagne, and Ghengis Khan.

Lamb, a soldier, wrote the majority of it, as he tells himself, while stationed in Asia during WW II.  He has actually seen much of the area traversed by Alexander, and this familiarity with the land, as well as familiarity with matters military, comes across.  Few authors of fiction on Alexander have Lamb's experience.

It is still not a good book.  It is not a bad book, precisely, but it is not a good book -- as either history or fiction.  If one wants a
military-oriented biography or history of Alexander, one would do better to read Brian Bosworth's Conquest and Empire or the chapter on Alexander in John Keegan's Mask of Command, or even Nick Hammond's Alexander the Great: King, Commander and Statesman.  If one wants a military novel, one would do better to read Melissa Scott's A Choice of Destinies (even if it is alternate history).  Lamb's book is just a strange fish, succeeding neither as one nor the other.  It has no "plot" in the sense a novel has.  Even historical fiction that follows history very closely will still have a plot / theme / point beyond merely a recounting of historical events.  Lamb's does not, really.  But there is far too much invention (some of it fanciful) for the book to qualify as history.

His portrait of Alexander owes much to W.W. Tarn.  In the frontmatter, he includes a quote from Tarn's chapters on Alexander in The Cambridge Ancient History.  (For background on Tarn and his place in Alexander scholarship, see the review of Mary Renault's works.)  But towards the end of his book, Lamb shows a more dissipated Alexander than Tarn would have approved, and Lamb concentrates on the contradictions in Alexander's personality: the king's ascetic tendencies set against his violent temper and blood-lust, his philosophic-literary interests set against his adventurous spirit.  Although Lamb frequently over-emphasizes these dichotomies, it is the most useful aspect of his book.

But really, Lamb's quasi-novel is best taken as an example of the popularized biography enjoyed at the end of the second world war up into the 1950s.  A similar surge of interest was seen in full-blown (but not necessarily very accurate) historical fiction, in print, in
television, and on the big screen.  At no time in this century, in America, has historical fiction enjoyed such a high profile.