Aubrey Menen
A Conspiracy of Women
Random House, c1965 (no ISBN?)
 

I didn't actually intend to read this book when I picked it up.  I intended to look through it, then put it back on my shelf.  But I made the mistake of flipping through the front-matter.  There, in his "Preface for Men of Good Will," Menen says:

   "You must often have wondered why men of good will, like you and like me, never seem to get our own way.  We want the whole world to live in peace and harmony and we do our best to see that it does.  Then why is there always war, and trouble, and quarrels?
   Here is the answer.  I have had to travel four continents and spend a lifetime in study to find it.  But like all important truths, it is very simple.  As a matter of fact, it is so simple that I have have been able to state it in the first seven lines of this story.  If you are pressed for time, those are all you need to read."

   "One day when Alexander the Great was sitting in his tent he said to his friend Hephaestion, "Hephaestion, have
you ever thought about the fact that women make up half the human race?"
   "Once," said Hephaestion.
   "And what did you think about it?" said Alexander
   "I thought it was a pity," said Hephaestion.

Given the quotes above, and the fact that the book jacket describes Menen as "one of the most delightfully wicked misogynists of our time," one may then wonder why I --  a woman -- have placed it on my "recommended" list?

Well, the book jacket missed the point.  Menen isn't a misogynist (at least, not that I can tell from this novel alone).  But Menen is a 'delightfully wicked' satirist.  If one takes too seriously the above quotes, one missed Menen's second preface, "for Women," wherein he states, "[The novel] is a story about a number of clever women and some silly men.  I hope you will see yourself reflected in the women, and I dare say you will find your husband or your lover somewhere among the men . . . Dear ladies, spare me.  I saw very little and I have not told all."

And, of course, both prefaces are quite tongue-in-cheek.  This is a novel about the equal-opportunity absurdities of both sexes (and all cultures).

Menen used Alexander's campaign to allegorize the present, or more specifically, the recent past, employing the Macedonians' trek through Persia and India as an opportunity to poke fun at the British occupation of India in the 1800s -- all done with Menen's elegant dry wit and keen eye for irony.

Indo-Irishman Aubrey Menen was a well-known essayist, drama critic, stage director, radio reporter, television and film staff director, ad agency director, and free-lance writer -- a man of many and varied hats, whose literary talents were uncovered by no less a figure than H. G. Wells.  Menen was born in 1912 to an Irish mother and Indian father, and raised Roman Catholic in London, where he graduated from University College.  Thus, he grew up three kinds of minority in the heart of the British Commonwealth, and it gave him the biracial child's causticity.

"As a satirist, my desire it to amuse, rather than reform.  Many of the world's tragedies have stemmed from people who have thought that human nature could be improved  ... The message of at least one kind of satirist is that human nature is corrupt, but that this is not necessarily either a disastrous or a melancholy thing."

It certainly isn't in this novel.  Unlike other works on the list, this romp makes no attempt to take itself seriously, even while showcasing just how well Menen understood human foibles, especially those of imperialist nations versus Traditional societies.  Menen's novel succeeds by, first, making sure that the historical situation he chose to write about actually worked for the purpose to which he put it, and second, by making any changes to history suit his theme and plot purpose.  That is, they aren't random alterations, or the result of errors from lazy research.

In its time-line, Menen's novel is all turned around.  Alexander returns directly from Baktria to Susa -- where he holds his mass weddings (at the suggesting/plotting of one of the fictional female leads -- Berenice).  Then from Susa, he heads back east to India, where the infamous mutiny is staged by the 'Daughters of Macedon,' a group of camp followers dedicated to 'ethnic purity,' and opposed to interracial marriage.  From there, he goes back again into central Persia, but the novel ends before his death.  In history, of course, Alexander went directly south from Baktria into India, and didn't return to the west until forced to do so.  Yet Menen's satiric comedy is all about how various groups of people can converse endlessly without ever quite understanding each other, be they women and men, or Macedonians, Persians and Indians.  Therefore, he had to scramble historical events in order to place the weddings sooner -- which then led to the plot crisis between Persians and Macedonians (and Indians).  The result is a delightfully wicked parallel between the arrogant and ethnocentric Macedonians and the Nineteenth-Century imperialistic Brits, both set against the far older Indian culture.  Yet Menen didn't spare the self-righteousness of Indian brahmins and rajas, either.  (Menen spares no one.)

Thus, his shift of history didn't bother me because it was deliberate, and served his narrative purpose -- which isn't about Alexander at all.  The only detail error in the book that actually annoyed me was making Thebes the capitol of Macedon.  That seemed a plain mistake, not deliberate change, and I'm unsure how he could have overlooked something so obvious when he got other, less obvious details correct.  Otherwise, I see Menen's A Conspiracy of Women as historical allegory at its absolute finest.

The basic plot concerns two women:  one a Persian (Berenice) who is disgusted with her backwater home city, and takes up with a Macedonian named Cleon who she perceives to have "culture."  In truth, what she's after isn't culture, but status (and money), and she eventually discards her poet-soldier husband in the pursuit of both.  Among other things, she becomes a personal advisor to the king, and what she advises -- in response to his need to solve conflict in his new empire -- is to unite East and West by marriage.  Alexander takes her up on it (and thus, we have Menen's reason for holding the mass weddings at Susa so early in the novel).

The other main female protagonist in the novel is a Macedonian concubine/camp follower (Iris), who finds her position threatened by Alexander's new plan, because her man has been ordered to take a Persian bride.  So she decides to fight back, and ends up forming the Daughters of Macedon among the other Macedonian camp followers.  These women are not voluptuous sex kittens or "harlots with hearts of gold."  They're stalwart, pragmatic sorts who, under cover of preserving Macedonian "purity," are really protecting their own security.  (And, of course, isn't that usually the truth of things?  People only worry about "ethnic purity" when they're feeling threatened.)

There are also three Persian queens who get in on the act:  the clever, plot-wise Barsine (Statiera), the dim-witted Parysatis, and the romantic Roxane.  There's the cynically clever philosopher Anaxarchus who torpedoes the pretty illusions (delusions) of Cleon -- the Persian Berenice's rejected poet husband.  Then there's the Piscean, philosophical figure called "Iskander" who claims to be the REAL Alexander, abdicated in favor of Melanippus (the impostor who claims to be Alexander), because he was tired of being king.  But according to camp wisdom, "Iskander" is Melanippus, a crazy man with delusions of grandeur.  Is he?  Menen leaves us in just enough doubt so that we wonder who is the real king -- and who's the true fool:  the one with power, or the one who claims to have given it up?

In the end, Alexander's great plans for peace are overthrown by conflicts between and conspiracies among these various women (hence the novel's title).  Yes, the women are depicted as conniving, but the men are mostly incompetent and rather short-sighted.  As I said, Menen is a satirist, and happy to take pot-shots at everyone.  There's only one character who has much in the way of true common sense:  Hephaestion, and he's sensible mostly because he doesn't take anything too seriously, least of all, the airs which people ascribe to themselves.  (Hanno, the money-lender, has a certain amount of common-sense as well.)  One gets the feeling that in Hephaestion, he or she can hear the voice of Menen himself.

One other very interesting virtue of this novel is the chance to see the Indian perspective on Macedonians, told by a novelist of part Indian ancestry.  This is something which isn't found in any other Alexander novel (in English) that I've seen to date, and I thought it quite intriguing.  As a child of two cultures -- one of them Indian, the other a western scion of Greece -- Menen has an insight on East versus West that few other novelists could bring to bear.  To have one foot in two worlds allows one to see both from the underside, but also to be enough outside either to observe them with detachment.  This is the blessing of being bi-cultural (and also the curse, says one who is bi-cultural, too).  If you read this novel for no other reason, read it for his Indian perspective.

But really, just go read it.  This is a fun novel, in addition to a perceptive look at our human foibles.  I grinned and chortled my way through the whole thing, finishing it inside three days (and it took me that long only because I had other obligations).  This is not the most historically accurate novel on the list, by any means.  But it may well be one the most darkly amusing.