Mary Renault
Fire From Heaven
    Pantheon, c1969, ISBN 0394722914
The Persian Boy
    Pantheon, c1972, ISBN  0394751019
Funeral Games (now out of print - how dare they!)
    Pantheon, c1981, ISBN 0523418264
 

I have decided to deal with all three of Renault's Alexander books in one fell swoop.  Though twelve years separate the publishing dates, and the styles differ in point of view from the distant third person limited of Fire From Heaven to the intimate first person of The Persian Boy, they should be treated as a whole.

The books are not, by any means, perfect.  But then, few books by any author, even pulitzer winners, could be said to be perfect.  Some of the problems with these are unavoidable fall-out from the passage of time.  When Ms. Renault first penned Fire From Heaven, Macedonian studies as a sub-discipline of Greek history had not really begun:  Charles Edson, Nick Hammond and Harry Dell were just beginning to garner interest in Macedonia itself, not just in Alexander or Philip.  (Papers from the first International Symposium on Ancient Macedonia appeared in 1970, and the first volume of Hammond's massive 3-volume History of Macedonia appeared in 1972).  Manolis Andronikos had not yet uncovered the famous royal tombs at Vergina, and there was little discussion (much less controversy) regarding the "Greekness" of the ancient Macedonians.

Consequently, Renault places the ancient capital of Aigai northwest at Edessa, not southwest at Vergina, and her descriptions of Macedonian culture are more Greek than we now know to be accurate.  Yet she can hardly be blamed for scholarly advances post-dating her publications.  Fear of what might come out of the ground next (to invalidate one's carefully researched work) is felt by any conscientious author of historical fiction.  Nonetheless, a truly Macedonian Alexander remains to be written.

As with all her Greek historical fiction, Renault's intimate knowledge of the countryside stands out, as does her awareness of the worldviews of the Greeks.  If an historical novelist commands these two aspects, then mistakes in the details can be forgiven.  It is possible for an historical novelist to get some details correct while fundamentally misunderstanding the people about whom he or she writes.  In such cases, historicals become costume dramas for twentieth-century characters transposed into the past.  Renault does not fall into this trap.  In fact, her great gift as a novelist is her ability to take a reader into the past with her, making it intelligible.  At that point, whether she has placed ancient Aigai at Edessa or Vergina ceases to matter much.  People who know will recognize the problem; those who do not will still come away with a better appreciation for Alexander's world.  The problem of Greek attitudes versus Macedonian ones is more significant, but when comparing their world to ours, Macedonians and Greeks were far less different from one another than either is different from us.  And Renault does get across the differences between then and now.  More, she does it elegantly, and without making her characters so alien as to become unsympathetic.  She teaches the reader how to understand them.

There are, however, problems in the book beyond issues of a rapidly-changing scholarly landscape.  These three books are not my favorites from among her works.  What I see as the achilles heel of this trilogy is the long shadow of W.W. Tarn.  Tarn was the most significant of the English-speaking Alexander scholars at the beginning of this century.  His two-volume biography of Alexander and his article in the Cambridge Ancient History influenced the popular thinking of future generations even after his theories had been torpedoed by Harvard's Ernst Badian in scholarly circles.  In fact, portrayals of Alexander in some high school and college world history text books still reflect Tarn more than anyone who has come after.  Tarn's portrait of Alexander was a highly favorable one which, as one scholar delicately put it, turned the Macedonian conqueror into a proper Scottish gentleman (as was Tarn himself).  Engaging in sometimes elaborate apologetics to explain away Alexander's questionable decisions, Tarn painted him as the original philosopher in armor, a chivalrous young king who brought higher Greek culture to the poor benighted barbarians, and who worked assiduously towards the "Brotherhood of Mankind" -- probably Tarn's most persistent ideological legacy.

Although Renault herself claims not to owe to Tarn, and although she certainly differs from Tarn on a number of points -- most significantly, on Alexander's homoerotic interest (Tarn was quick to "defend" him from all such charges) -- nonetheless, to an external reader, her heroic Alexander owes far more to Tarn than to Badian, Peter Green, or even Brian Bosworth.  One might argue that an author is certainly permitted to pick the scholars whose opinions she finds convincing.  Gene Borza noted in his introduction to Ulrich Wilcken's biography:  "It is enough to say that there are many Alexanders, perhaps as many as there are those who profess a serious interest in him" (Alexander the Great, 1967, ix).

But there are good literary reasons why I find Renault's Tarn-esque Alexander less compelling than he might have been.  She admired him too much, and her characterization rendered him too perfect.  It is most noticeable in The Persian Boy, where through her protagonist she engages in a kind of apologetics reminiscent of Tarn.  One might say that she is simply reflecting the attitudes of her narrator, Bagoas.  And no doubt, this is part of it.  But we find the same shiny gloss on the young Alexander in Fire From Heaven.  For instance, he organizes a battle (if only a border skirmish) at only twelve.  The living man may, indeed, have been something of a polymath but even child geniuses have things to learn, and one never quite feels that Alexander learns much.  Things happen to him which shape his attitudes, but the kind of complex character growth that we find in, say, Alexias from The Last of the Wine is absent here.  Renault's dark hero Theseus is more compelling than her Alexander; so, incidently, is Orson Scott Card's child genius in Ender's Game.  One cannot help but feel that Renault's admiration blinded her to the full complexity of the man.  Perfect characters have no where to grow and are, in the end, less engaging.

A similar flatness attends some of the other characters.  Hephaistion suffers most.  Though in her biography of Alexander she defends both Hephaistion's intellect and ability, when reading her novels -- Fire From Heaven especially -- one cannot help but see him as a bit of a boor, limping along in the meteor wake Alexander's passage.  (Melissa Scott's or Aubrey Menen's Hephaistion is more interesting.)  Olympias, also, left me cold, being too shrewish (and thus, too Plutarchian) for a careful reading of the ancient evidence.  No doubt the woman was horrific at times, but she was also capable and charismatic.  In Fire From Heaven, I never quite believed in her fundamental competence.  Renault's Philip is rough and ready and vaguely repulsive.  Yet the historical man was known for his quick wit and his charm (and in his youth, his looks, too).  By contrast, though, Aristotle is well drawn (Renault has luck with philosophers:  Sokrates, Plato, Phaedo, Aristotle), and the love-hate relationship between Alexander and Philip does convince -- and compel.

Fire From Heaven has other virtues, if the characterization is not her best.  Its language is pure poetic Renault, and any book which begins, "The child was wakened by the knotting of the snake's coil about his waist," practically begs one to read on.  The use of imagery and metaphor is strong; it is a rich narrative.  And despite the tendency to make Alexander too perfect, there are moments when she can evoke profound sympathy for him in the reader.  If not my favorite of Renault's books, it is far from my least favorite.

The Persian Boy, by contrast, is my least favorite -- significantly so, in fact.  Despite the fact that this novel has almost a cult following in certain circles (particularly among fans of gay fiction), it is the novel in which I feel Renault's own agendas most interfered with her ability to tell the story.  (And I don't mean her homoerotic agendas.)  My greatest difficulty is that I couldn't believe in the relationship between Alexander and Bagoas.  Given how much of the novel depends on it, that is a serious problem.  It's certainly not the homoerotic aspects which deter; the problem lies in its improbability.  She shows more understanding of Greek homoerotic behavior in The Last of the Wine.  That Alexander may have been attracted to a eunuch is possible enough, and there is certainly testimony that he kept Bagoas with him at least some of the time.  But there is no evidence that Bagoas was as important to, much less as influential over, Alexander as Renault paints.  She gives to Bagoas a role which history suggests was filled by Hephaistion.  And while one expects reconstruction in historical fiction -- it is fiction, after all -- as a reader, I was never quite sure why she fixated on Bagoas.  He does allow the reader to see Alexander from the point of view of a Persian -- and that is by far the most interesting aspect of the novel -- but use of him also weighs down the narrative with apologetics rather than taking a serious look at some of Alexander's more controversial actions.  Thus, one cannot help but feel her own goals (to defend Alexander) interfered with the story.

Funeral Games is, I think, the best of the three.  Obviously, buyers don't agree with me, since it's also the only one that's now out of print.  (Find it in your local used bookstore, or purchase it via ABE.)  Many problems inherent to the first two are absent here.  Bagoas has little role, and Alexander is dead -- although his shadow lies long over the story, which is why it's counted part of her 'Alexander' trilogy instead of a book of the hellenistic era.  Instead, we are left with the truly interesting political game-playing which followed Alexander's death.  None of the characters is perfect, or even almost-perfect.  The reader is permitted to feel sympathy for several, even while they are at odds with one another.  More remarkable yet is Renault's ability to make clear the muddle of political factions -- for which one normally needs a flow chart -- in the years directly following Alexander's death.

So Renault's Alexander trilogy represents one of those unusual cases where the last book is the best.  Whether one agrees with her interpretation of Successor politics, nonetheless, few authors could as successfully have navigated the complex maze with the surety she displays.  The book is certainly the work of the mature Renault.

In the end, though, and however I may feel about The Persian Boy, this trilogy remains the best thing out there in mainstream fiction on Alexander.  And Renault at her worst is still far, far better than many other authors at their best.