Book Review: Fire from Heaven

[osprey_archer]

As I reported yesterday, I have AT LONG LAST finished Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, which I have been reading since, God help me, August.

In the past I've sort of informally sorted war books along an axis, based on their attitude from war, which axis runs from BRUTAL to GLORIOUS. During Fire from Heaven, it occurred to me, perhaps belatedly, that these are properly two separate axes: brutal to not-brutal and glorious to not-glorious. These axes should be overlaid to form four quadrants of war stories.

So, on the glorious/not-brutal quadrant, you have classic boy's own war adventures. On brutal/not-glorious, you've got things like All Quiet on the Western Front. And then you've got Fire from Heaven, which is in the "war is brutal AND glorious" quadrant."

In a sense this is unavoidable: it's a book about Alexander the Great, who is Great because he conquered a swathe of the known world, and this is not a book that is trying to complicate your understanding of whether that is truly Great. This is a book about how Alexander is the bee's knees, and although war is brutal (I wouldn't say that Renault lingers unduly on the brutality, but there is a certain "this is not a boy's own story" emphasis on its presence) this does not, somehow, mean it is not glorious. In fact, brutality and glory may be inseparable.

For many modern readers, and by "many modern readers" I of course mean myself, this is an alien view. Frankly, I probably found it as challenging as many of her early readers may have found her positive depiction of Alexander and Hephaistion's love affair. (This is adorable and does not take up a lot of page time.) I was not, unfortunately, in the mood to be challenged, particularly not on this particular topic, because I read so many war books over the past year that I am honestly just tired of war right now, so whenever Alexander marched to the cusp of another brutal yet glorious battle I screeched to a halt, hence the fact that it took me four months to read the darn book.

Possibly I'm just not the right audience for historical fiction about world conquerors. I should keep this in mind if I ever run across a novel about Napoleon.

***

ALSO, does Mary Renault have an Oedipus complex kink, or DOES she have an Oedipus complex kink? It had not occurred to me that this could be a thing, but I've read four of her novels now, and the Oedipal thing is ALL over three of them, and the fourth one has female main characters, so there's really no place to shove in an Oedipal complex, but let's be real, The Friendly Young Ladies had MORE than enough going on already.

1. In The Charioteer, baby!Laurie asks his mother to marry him. They grow up to have an arrestingly dysfunctional relationship during which she's more or less constantly telling him to stop having feelings about things like "you put my beloved dog down because he was inconvenient." (At one point Laurie, apparently with no sense of irony, tells Ralph "my mother's pretty well-balanced." Laurie. Laurie. IS SHE, Laurie?)

2. In The Last of the Wine, Alexias's father accuses him of sleeping with his hot young stepmother and Alexias runs away into the hills SO far and SO fast that he almost DIES and then collapses, sobbing, because although the accusation is not literally true it is true in his HEART. And then he gets his first girlfriend, who is literally old enough to be his mother.

3. In Fire from Heaven, baby!Alexander (like Laurie!) asks his mother to marry him, AND ALSO spends most of the book seesawing about whether or not he wants to kill his father, before finally deciding that his father is NOT his father so patricide is not technically patricide and is, therefore, okay, probably. But then his father dies of other causes anyway.

In a way it is futile to ask why an author kinks on certain things, but also WHY. WHY, MARY.

I scream this to the heavens as if it is going to in any way hinder me from reading more Renault books. It definitely will not. I will continue reading them and then shrieking like an incoherent dolphin.

...But probably these further Renault readings will take place after a break of some months because honestly I am SO tired of war books right now. I've read so many. I just want to read books about books and savor the quiet life among people who are not leading any conquering armies at all.

Comments

[kore]

Oh ghod it's SO whumpy. And there's a lot about sexual abuse in it (altho a lot of the details are spoilers). It feels like a Lot. But the writing is really exquisite and Bagoas is one of my fave characters. He reports on his own experiences in this dry objective (but beautifully written) way that just makes it even worse. He is a super Stoic Woobie. Plus he is really Not Greek and has this outsider-insider view on their culture, and even his own. (I am NOT objective about him, obviously.)

So many characters locked in horrible antagonistic relationships with their closest relatives/former friends, whom they cannot escape.

That gets even worse in Funeral Games, which she originally called Hot Ashes, and it's awful because there's no Alexander or Bagoas or Hephaistion or anyone else I really liked, it's a real grind. It also has what I think is one of her most misogynistic scenes ever, altho I haven't read her non-Greek books. And she's writing about ancient Greece, there's going to be that fatedness, but FG makes it feel really stifling and tragic.

[tei]

I really love the outsider view of The Persian Boy, and was actually thinking recently that in the context of the wider cultural tropes of Greek vs. Persian/ west vs. east, it’s actually pretty unusual? Specifically, I was listening to the History of Persia podcast (https://historyofpersiapodcast.com/), and there was an AMA episode where someone asked the host (who is a historian specializing in the Achaemenid period, I think?) why he thinks the history of Persia is so overlooked in schools and general culture. And his answer was along the lines of a) the Greeks wrote a lot more stuff down that survived, b) Greek and Roman history and literature have undergone several centuries of deliberate white supremacist centering in the study of ancient history, and c) there are relatively few in-depth, sympathetic fictional portrayals of this era of Persian history in English literature. And he cited Gore Vidal’s Creation as one of the few examples in recent times of Persian history being treated as… as literarily useful as Greek and Roman history, which reminded me that Vidal read and praised The Persian Boy ten years before the publication of Creation. So the fact that FFH takes place before any of the real meat of Alexander’s career, and FG takes place entire after his death, and basically all of the important events of the campaign are told from a Persian perspective where Persian culture is solid and civilized, Greek culture is strange and barbaric, and Alexander becoming more Persian is evidence of good influence instead of the Greek narrative of increasing moral dissolution, seems like it was a somewhat unique perspective for a book written in English and thus aimed at readers who have undergone a general cultural conditioning to identify with “the greeks” to take!