Read it, all aspiring historical novelists, and take note
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In the slew of wordier, more hyped fiction about the classical world that is engulfing us at the moment, I hope some readers are prompted to go back to Mary Renault. Her books are an object lesson in what you can leave out. It's not about research, it's not about pages of painstaking archaeological description leavened by sword-slashing and peplum-ripping, it's about the kind of imaginitive immersion in an ancient culture that can enable the author to present it in its own terms, without explication, but so that the perennial dilemmas of the soul that were present then as now leap across to the modern reader, defamiliarised and sharpened by their alien setting.
The Last of the Wine is about Athens in the time of Socrates, but is above all an Oedipal tragedy of the starkness that you would expect in a culture where fathers had the power of life and death over their children. Alexias finds out that his father never meant him to survive and this knowledge blights their relationship and his whole life, successful and adventurous though it is on the surface. In a bitterly poignant moment, when the father lies dying, he tries to ask forgiveness but Alexias thinks he only wants to be told all over again that he was right; it is symptomatic of how Alexias, unlike his lover Lysis, is too emotionally scarred to escape from the conventions of his doomed society - but Lysis dies (as does Socrates), and Alexias survives, bereft, disillusioned, revealing much more as a narrator than he has understood himself.
For the combination of page-turning narrative brilliance with psychological insight, no one rivals Mary Renault. Read it, read all her other books on ancient Greece, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo, the Alexander trilogy, The Praise Singer. Mouth-watering, stomach-filling writing, the kind of meal one remembers years later.
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The human side of Thucydides
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Renault takes Thucydides' magisterial account of the Peloponnesian War, the deadly conflict between Athens and Sparta in the second half of the 5th century bc, and shows us what it meant to the ordinary people growing up and coming of age in the middle of the war that lasted over 30 years and broke the power of classical Athens.
Her 'heroes' are young men who study under Socrates, fight against the Spartans and witness the struggles of Alcibiades and Lysander.
If you've read Thucydides, this is a wonderful fictional complement, and if you haven't then if this doesn't make you want to, nothing will!
Steeped in the cruelty, violence and beauty of ancient Greece, this is a beautifully written and subtle novel that really whisks you back 2,500 years so that you can experience the texture of life then for yourself. Brilliant.
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Excellent Historical Novel
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Renault demonstrates a true understanding of the classical world and Greek culture (unlike many novelists, who demonstrate only a superficial understanding). In addition, the tale itself is gripping, and exceptionally well written.
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