Susan Spitzer
In the Shadow of a God
Brunswick Pub., c1984 ISBN 0-931494-53-2
[no cover to reproduce]
 

I wanted to like this book.  I really did.  A first-person novel from Hephaistion's point of view?  Of course I had to read it!  (Said the woman whose dissertation concerned Hephaistion).  I went to some trouble, in fact, to lay hands on a copy.

Thus, it's with no little regret that I must say it now occupies the proud place of Worst Book Ever Encountered on Alexander the Great. It's bad history, bad plot, bad characterization, bad writing . . . it's just plain bad.  In fact, it seems to be a classic example of vanity publishing.

The novel is an unabashed romance between Alexander and Hephaistion and owes a great deal to Renault.  Like Renault, Spitzer, too, is a registered nurse -- but she shouldn't quit her day job.  Her husband is a high school history teacher, and Spitzer has supposedly "given classroom instruction" on ATG (where and to whom?).  The back-blurb makes the amazing claim, "This book is her first full-length work, but unlike other books about Alexander the Great, it is almost entirely non-fictional."  Hmmm.

The novel opens with a truly bizarre, violent and all but inexplicable scene which remains inexplicable until Chapter Six . . . thirty pages later.  That isn't a hook, or even artful ellipticism.  It's simple bad plotting and disorganization.

The narrator is "Hephaistion of Amyntor" -- the absolutely literal translation of "Hephaistion Amyntoros" -- but she doesn't realize the genitive "Amyntoros" means "SON of Amyntor."  Amyntor was a person, not a city.  She shows the same problem with Ptolemy "of Lagos," and says Oxhead was the favored name for Bucephalas -- as if these are two different names, not the English translation of the Greek -- and she doesn't seem to understand why the horse had that name in the first place.

Nor does she understand Greek homoeroticism, Macedonian politics or Macedonian society -- her description of the "court" would make the Huns look civilized.  There are a number of plain old factual mistakes, too.  E.g., she makes Herakles Alexander's ancestor on his mother's side -- not his father's.  So much for ". . . it is almost entirely non-fictional."

Other anachronisms arise from modern colloquialisms ("I've already gone through hell for this throne" [26]) -- and modern thinking.  She gives sexual and physical abuse as the ultimate cause of Alexander's emotional instability -- something implied by Renault as well in the opening scenes of Fire From Heaven.  Yet, and whatever one may think of this "oedipal complex" characterization of Alexander, Renault at least tried to put it in an ancient context, and showed rather more comprehension of human nature in her characterizations, too.  By contrast, Spitzer has made her Alexander almost a poster-child for Bass and Davis' The Courage to Heal.  In another example of modern thinking, Spitzer has Hephaistion describe Alexander's intellect as being "on a genius level" (22).  I wasn't aware they had IQ tests in antiquity.

In the end, and despite the trouble it took to find this novel, I simply couldn't finish it, skimmed it instead.  And that's saying a lot, as I have (laboriously in some cases) read from cover-to-cover almost every other book in my collection.  This one is just fundamentally unreadable.  Her narrative style is stilted, awkward and immature.  There is an overuse of proper names and far too much tell.  Great ground is covered time-wise, but all in summary, few in scenes (Spitzer needs to learn the virtue of "show, don't tell").  She evinces no ability to pull a reader into the world of the story -- even a reader predisposed to follow her.  The language is overblown . . . purple prose . . . and full of [shudder] romance cliches.  So not only is this the Worst Book Ever Encountered on Alexander the Great, I think it may be the worst (published) book I've ever encountered period.

In the Shadow of a God is the work of a beginning writer, not a professional-level author.  Some novels should stay safely in their trunk.