2025/083: Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories — Diarmuid Hester

... this new queer writing was all about using language to weave connections: to a place (San Francisco’s Bay Area) and between people (real or imagined). All in the service of queer community politics. In the late 1970s, [Bruce] Boone and [Robert] Glück thought about calling it something. ‘How about New Narrative?’ Boone suggested as a joke. [p. 287]

Hester starts off at Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman's house at Dungeness, with the vague notion of 'a larger project I had in mind, which would examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture' [p.7]. He begins with E. M. Forster and Cambridge (where, when he arrives in 2017, there is not a single queer bar or club); continues with queer suffragettes (Vera Holme and Lady Evelina Haverfield); explores the excesses ('given a choice of either/or, she chose both') of Josephine Baker's time in Paris. 

Then to Jersey for Claude Calhoun and Marcel Moore, who in 1937 'packed up their stuff, put their cat in a Hermès handbag and bid adieu to France': in Jersey they used their special middle-aged-woman powers of invisibility to distribute surrealist anti-German propaganda, and were sentenced to death, but walked free after Germany's defeat.

I was less familiar with James Baldwin, Jack Smith and Kevin Killian, the other artists featured in Nothing Ever Just Disappears. Hester's curiosity about their lives and deaths, his pilgrimages in search of forgotten queer spaces, and the ways in which queer artists imagined those spaces differently, kept me reading, and made me think about how artists use their art to carve out and transform spaces. I hadn't previously encountered the concept of the New Narrative: authenticity, honesty, subjectivity, and the identity politics of the (often queer) author. Feels quite punk...

2025/082: The Bull from the Sea — Mary Renault

The fire leaped high; it shone down the long stone-lined cutting into the mound, showing the painted doorposts of the burial vault, the new bronze hasps of the open doors, and the Erechthid snake upon the lintel. But it did not pierce the dark beyond; sometimes when my back was turned I could feel him standing in the shadows beyond the doorway to watch his rites, as they show dead men in the funeral pictures. [loc. 336]

Sequel to The King Must Die: I think as a teenager I read this first, an old paperback from the jumble sale. Narrated again by Theseus, it's the story of everything that happens after his return from Crete: his father's funeral, becoming king, his friendship with Pirithoos the Lapith (a Bad Influence, to be honest), his relationship with the Amazon Hippolyta, their son Hippolytus and Theseus' frustration with his chosen life... There are curiously primitive Kentaurs, an encounter with Oedipus, and a foreshadowing of Paris's Judgment: also a fleeting encounter with a young Achilles. And through it all, warp and weft, Theseus's sense of the gods: his religious and spiritual practices. 

Again, though there is nothing that's definitely supernatural or mystical, those beliefs shade every experience he has. He attributes the stroke he suffers to Poseidon, though others say it was the Mother ('I had stolen two of her daughters out of her shrines, and tamed her worship at Eleusis') or Apollo ('I was struck without pain, as men are killed by his gentle arrows; and as I was only half to blame for his good servant’s death, he left me half alive.'). 

Though there are moments of great happiness, this is not a happy book. It's about pride and downfall, about misjudgements and poor choices. I had less patience with Theseus' piracy and war-making than with his bull-leaping: I was angry at his dismissal of his mother's valid concerns about how he might have offended the Great Mother, and especially his dismissal of abandoned Ariadne ('Do you know how the Wine King dies? She took to it like a fish to the sea, though she had been reared softly, knowing nothing of such things. There is rotten blood in the House of Minos' [loc. 661]); his treatment of his son is horrific, though he does realise this in the final chapter of the novel.

Renault's writing is superlative. I especially like her descriptions of landscape, and her ability to craft sentences that sound as though they have been translated from an ancient text. I'm saving my last unread Renault historical, The Praise Singer, for when I want to really immerse myself in her evocation of ancient Greece.

Man born of woman cannot outrun his fate. What need, then, to trouble his short morning with the griefs of time? He will never live to know them. [loc. 3831]

2025/081: The King Must Die — Mary Renault

‘Listen, and do not forget, and I will show you a mystery. It is not the sacrifice, whether it comes in youth or age, or the god remits it; it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.' [p. 17]

Definitely a reread, and I can remember when and where I first read it: in the library during study period in my third year at secondary school. I also remembered encountering the quotations from this novel in the chapter-headings of Watership Down, my favourite book when I was nine or ten years old... I remembered most of the details of The King Must Die, despite not having reread in the last couple of decades: I had forgotten (or never noticed) just how many hints of other myths -- Orpheus, an anachronistic Agamemnon, Jason -- are present, and how much they are woven into the theme of goddess-worship.

Theseus grows up in the citadel of Troizen, where his grandfather teaches him about moira, '‘The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end.' [p. 15]. He doesn't know who his father is, but decides after experiencing 'earthquake aura' that it must be the god Poseidon. When he's seventeen, his mother tells him that his father is Aigeus, the King of Athens. Theseus sets out to find him, encountering many adventures en route, and becoming Year-King (doomed to death next year) in Eleusis: and when he reaches Athens, his father's wife Medea tries to poison him.

When it comes time for the tribute to Minos, Theseus is one of the party: seven youths and seven maidens, sent to Crete to die in the Labyrinth. There, he forges a loyal and lucky bull-dancing team; falls in love lust with Minos' daughter Ariadne, a living goddess; foments a rebellion; foresees an earthquake; and elopes from the ruins of Minoan civilisation with Ariadne, who he abandons on Naxos.

All true to the myth: but with the possible exception of the earthquake aura (a sensitivity that many animals possess) none of it is supernatural or mystical, except that Theseus interprets it so. Renault's ancient world is rooted in archaeological evidence and in the tension between the 'sky gods' and the ancient matriarchal religion. Theseus seemed heroic to my teenage self: now I read him as misogynist, violent, arrogant and hot-tempered. (So: heroic!)

I still love this novel: and I still wonder, as I have wondered for nearly fifty years, exactly what Ariadne has in her hand after the Bacchic revels. 

Great introduction by Bettany Hughes, too: 'not fact-bound chronicles, but respectful dances with antiquity' [loc. 155]. She stresses that "The ancient Greek muthoi, myths, does not mean fairy-tales, but rather points of information – things seen or experienced to be shared for the benefit of humankind."

2025/080: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

[They say] that keeping them here in the pits is too much, that it goes beyond war. They say we should just kill them, make them slaves or send them home, but ah, I like the pits. It reminds us that all things must change. I recall the Athenians as they were a year ago: their armour flashing like waves when the moon is upon them, their war cries that kept you up at night, and set the dogs howling, and those ships, hundreds of ships gliding around our island, magnificent sharks ready to feast.[loc. 131]

I reviewed this back in December 2023: prepublication review. Since then, I've been puzzled by readers saying they'd expected something light-hearted and humorous -- then I discovered that it won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2024, and that it was being promoted as 'bold and funny', 'Fierce, funny, fast-paced', 'hilarious' etc. Reading these plaudits, you may be surprised to find that the novel's mostly set in a concentration camp, where prisoners (chained and starving) are regularly beaten to death.

Reread for book club, where we discussed the tension between humour and horror, and I discovered the story behind the mysterious Tuireann: we felt he was a collector, but his story was only broadly hinted.

There's some glorious prose here, too, that reminds me to look forward to Lennon's next novel.

It’s an eerie walk this morning. The moon is still up, a slender blade that’s larger and crisper than the frail sun. Theros is long gone. The leaves don’t so much fall as rip from the trees. All of them are red, and they skitter along the roads like bleeding stars under that knife of moon. [loc. 1366]

And here's an interview which gives some background to the novel: .

...thousands of Athenian prisoners being flung into a quarry outside the city of Syracuse. ... a couple of years later, I was reading Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, where he describes how some of those defeated Athenians survived by quoting lines from Euripides. Ferdia Lennon: ‘I was tired of Merchant Ivory accents’ (Observer)

2025/079: Funeral Games — Mary Renault

‘All those great men. When Alexander was alive, they pulled together like one chariot-team. And when he died, they bolted like chariot-horses when the driver falls. And broke their backs like horses, too.' [p. 308]

At times heartbreaking, and at others profoundly unpleasant, this is the story of how Alexander's empire fragmented after his death. There are a lot of strong and deadly women in this novel: Roxane, Alexander's widow (and pregnant with his son when he died), later murders his other wife and her unborn child; Olympias, Alexander's mother, murders quite a few people before being stoned to death; Kynna raises her daughter Eurydike as a warrior, and dies as one herself. I was fascinated by Eurydike, the warrior queen of Macedon, and her grudging care for her husband Philip II (Alexander's half-brother, who had 'learning disabilities': I applaud (and wince at) the scene where Eurydike's political ambitions are shattered by the sudden arrival of her period.

Bagoas, narrator of The Persian Boy, grieves for Alexander and plots with Ptolemy (now Pharoah in Alexandria, Egypt) to redirect Alexander's mummy and bier, which was to be buried in Macedon but is cunningly diverted to Egypt. And at the end of the novel, in 286BC, Ptolemy -- who Renault presents as Alexander's half-brother -- has finished his History of Alexander, and is sitting with his cat Perseus in a sunny room, looking out at the gold laurel-wreath on the tomb of Alexander. That's the happiest moment of what is often a very dark book. There are moments of calm and joy, and even justice: but history does not permit many.

2025/078: The Persian Boy — Mary Renault

The living chick in the shell has known no other world. Through the wall comes a whiteness, but he does not know it is light. Yet he taps at the white wall, not knowing why. Lightning strikes his heart; the shell breaks open.
I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a king.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it. [p. 130]

The narrator of The Persian Boy is Bagoas, a Persian nobleman's son enslaved and gelded as a child. After years of abuse (not all of it sexual) he catches the eye of Darius the Great, King of all Persia, and is for a time the king's favourite. But Darius flees before the armies of Alexander the Great, and Bagoas is given as a gift to Alexander by Nabarzanes, a lesser king who rebelled against Darius and then surrendered to Alexander. 

Bagoas becomes Alexander's lover, wracked by jealousy of the King's former(?) lover Hephaistion: 'Maybe, since their youth, desire had faded ... but the love was there, public as marriage' [p. 147]. Bagoas is Alexander's companion for the next nine years, until Alexander's death in Babylon soon after Hephaistion's. He accompanies the army through Persia and all the way to India, and observes Alexander's conquests, the wife he marries in Bactria, and the eventual refusal of his men to push further East.

It's a romance, but it's also a keen-eyed account of Alexander's career, his personal relationships^* and military prowess, and his desire to unite the Greek and Persian lands over which he rules. Bagoas is a delightful narrator: a competent aide, a jealous lover who sets aside his jealousy because it is more important that Alexander is happy, a seasoned courtier, a man set on vengeance for his murdered family. He is courageous, cunning and resilient: and his first-person narrative reveals a complex and passionate emotional landscape.

As ever with Renault, the historical aspects of the novel are impeccable. I learnt a lot about Alexander's campaigns, in a format I found more congenial than a history book, and about the world in the fourth century before Christ: for instance, I hadn't known of the Canal of the Pharaohs. Though this is a very different novel, in timbre and scope, to Fire From Heaven, I found it even more enjoyable.

^{Renault's theory about the sexual dynamics between Alexander and Hephaistion, and Alexander and Bagoas, is clear without being explicit.}

2025/077: Fire from Heaven — Mary Renault

'Man’s immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.’ The rose-red on the hilltops changed to gold. He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, I am not afraid. It was better than music or his mother’s love; it was the life of the gods. No grief could touch him, no hatred harm him. Things looked bright and clear, as to the stooping eagle. He felt sharp as an arrow, and full of light. [p. 120]

This first volume of Renault's 'Alexander' trilogy covers the life of Alexander the Great from childhood (he's four years old in the first chapter) to the death of his father, King Philip of Macedon. It explores the conflict between his parents: Olympias, fierce and domineering, an acolyte of Dionysus and perhaps of darker goddesses, and Philip, drunken and lascivious but still a fearsome warrior and charismatic leader. Olympias tells Alexander that he is descended, via her, from Achilles: and she likes to hint that Alexander is not Philip's son at all.

Alexander is intelligent, good-looking and determined. Whatever he sets his mind to -- playing the kithara, taming a horse, making his way across country to kill his first man in battle -- he achieves. (Philip rarely appreciates his son's accomplishments.) Hephaistion loves him helplessly, though not hopelessly: their relationship does become sexual, though it's clear that Alexander could as easily have remained chaste. Ptolemy, who may be his half-brother, swears blood-brotherhood with him. 

This being Hellenic antiquity, the women get a rough deal. "...at the best? The loom, the bed, the cradle; children, the decking of bride-beds, clacking talk at the hearth and the village well; bitter old age, and death. Never the beautiful ardours, the wedded bond of honour, the fire from heaven blazing on the altar where fear was killed." [p. 246]. There's a scene between Alexander and his sister Kleopatra, when Philip's arranging for her to marry her maternal uncle: she says 'The gods are unjust to women.' ‘Yes,' says Alexander. 'I have often thought so. But the gods are just; so it must be the fault of men.’ [p. 338] There is a girl who flirts with him: his mother is implicated in her death. And he loses his (heterosexual) virginity to another girl, whom Olympias has sent to him. His heart, though, is given to Hephaistion. 

The prose is dense: Renault writes tremendously evocative scenes, full of sensory detail and of the characters' response to their environment. She can say as much in a wordless scene as with a page of dialogue. Fire from Heaven is told in omniscient third person, with characters' thoughts described as freely as their actions. Its centre, though, is always Alexander, and the historical and psychological forces that shaped him. 

I found Renault's depiction of ancient Hellenic society and culture -- with its constant brutal violence and danger, its appreciation of beauty and learning, and its religious and spiritual practices -- compelling, coherent and very different to post-medieval life. Alexander is the centre of the novel, and the epitome of a Macedonian prince. To modern eyes, he is monstrous: a calm, efficient, brutal killer. But Mary Renault makes him heroic, and makes us see him thus.  I was occasionally reminded of Dorothy Dunnett (whose Lymond novels also centre on a gifted young man and the forces that shape him): there's something about the style (perhaps a convention of mid-20th century novels?) and especially the descriptions. Perhaps they are both mythologising.

I purchased this copy in 2019: I'm pretty sure I read the novel decades ago, and did not especially appreciate it. Now, with a reignited interest in Ancient Greece, and a better idea of the politics / warfare of the region, I found it fascinating -- and Renault's prose is addictive.