Books: "The King Must Die"
I've finally had the time lately to look into Mary Renault's work. It's been literally years--since 2004 Worldcon, when it played local in Boston, I've been meaning to read Renault. There was a literary panel on slash (not a guy in the room, for some odd reason), and all the speakers were so pleasantly up-front about it that I asked something I'd been wondering about for a long time: "Where did slashers go to get their fix before 'slash' was a concept? Because before I knew there were other writers with a thing for m/m sexual tension, I used to write Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde slash." (See, I had this whole AU where they really were separate people, and Jekyll was an opium user and Hyde was his pusher...)
One of the speakers said, "Read Mary Renault, The King Must Die." Well, now I have. I think, in retrospect, she may have meant to point me towards The Last Of The Wine instead. TKMD and its sequel don't actually have overt gay storylines in them, just a few slight references. TLOTW, on the other hand, from what I've seen so far, seems to be entirely about Greek dudes who have the sex. Scratch that. They have the romantic passion for each other. Lots of longing looks and heartbroken poetry and playing the lyre. I've just read the first few chapters, but I have to finish it soon. Anyhow, TLOTW doesn't seem to have a very strong plot beyond "I'm doing a slow burn for this guy, and by the way we're all philosophers and there is a war on." The King Must Die has an unavoidably strong plot, however; it's about Theseus.
Theseus' story, without the bull-headed monster, the approachable underworld, the witches, or the actual, physical gods. I have mixed feelings about this genre. Scratch that: I resent this genre. Nobody is quite sure what to call it--historical fiction? It's too fanciful and based on legend. Fantasy? But there are no overtly magical scenes and no undeniable gods. I've seen this called "Low, Low Fantasy" on TV Tropes--in the same way as the Troy movie, it's a story based on myths in which the gods and supernatural beings were prominent, and from which all the overt supernatural and holy elements have been ruthlessly chopped. Sigh. It's like the kind of educational book for children which says, "Real dragons did walk the earth. They were called dinosaurs." Or, more honestly, "There were no such things as dragons, but dinosaurs did exist and are even cooler." Which, no. That's just not on. Nothing against dinos, mind you; and nothing says that you ought to prefer dragons. But when I want dinosaurs, I know where to get them. If I came in looking for dragons, dinosaurs are not an equivalent story element.
On one hand, Renault is a great writer, and I even enjoyed Troy. But at the same time, ancient legends are fantasy. To me, part of Theseus's story and the Trojan War's story is that the gods are real. They're all one with the story. Such legends aren't just stories of men and battles, and it feels deeply wrong to me to make them so. The Trojan War is a war where one hero's mother is Aphrodite, and where the gods can overlook the battlefield like chess experts, or perhaps more closely, like the owners of fighting-cocks. It happens in a world where a goddess can actually, personally barge onto the field of combat to protect her son, and be stabbed by his opponent. Where Poseidon can pick up a guy and fling him out of the way to cheat his opponent of victory. Ancient myths are set in the same world of fantasy as fairy-tales and religious writings: they all contain fantastical events, in aid of telling a deep truth or a good story or both. To pretend that they are not--to deliver versions of events with all the fantastical woo-woo chopped out--is like making a pie without the crust or a crust without the pie. As much as I like each element, one alone is not satisfying.
As long as I'm on the subject, you guys want to know something funny? I liked 300 much better than I did Troy, exactly because the former movie was successfully set in a fantasy world. Granted, it really wasn't the world I would have chosen, but it was a non-realistic presentation--wolves aren't just animals, they're this ghastly demonic presence with glowing eyes; mountain crags overhang their bases as if we were on a low-gravity planet; the sky is bronze and green; flying arrows fill the air in great solid slabs of blackness; there are ten-foot-tall enemies coming to kill you. (The fantasy element in 300 creates racist and xenophobic problems all over the place, but that's another discussion.) There still aren't gods, but it's a world in which gods could be real and appear in person without a jarring mood shift.
"Low Low Fantasy" is a pretty judgmental title. I would have called it something equally negative, left to my own devices, though. Thinking of movies, here... I watched Clash of the Titans, the original movie, and then decided I would leave well enough alone and not go to the remake. Basically, the point of the original is to watch cool monsters in stop-motion animation. If it's all done with CGI, then you're just watching another poorly-written epic movie. The original was pretty dull, frankly, except for a few scenes, mostly involving Harryhausen creatures. (Medusa? Woooohh! She was beautiful. Don't take my word for it. Go look.) Oh, and there was an old actor named Burgess Meredith, best-known for playing George opposite Lon Chaney's Lennie in the 1939 Of Mice and Men. He played an old philosopher/poet/wacky old dude, and he did manage to class up the proceedings. "You must excuse my not trusting you completely. It's a hard old world out there these days--robbers and murderers everywhere you look, and gloomy fellows going around saying things like, Call no man happy if he is not dead!" Anyhow, my point is that stories with the gods cut out feel wrong, but that you can leave the gods in a story and still make it a lousy story. The Olympian gods of Clash of the Titans were profoundly uninspiring. I haven't got the heart to talk much about it. Picture Lawrence Olivier dressed as Zeus, gesturing grandly and spouting plot exposition, wrapped in a bedsheet, with blue laser lines behind his head. That sort of thing.
Anyhow, to Mary Renault... The King Must Die annoyed me by not having overt gods and monsters, but if you don't judge it on those standards--and I managed not to after a while--it's an excellent book. The first half of Theseus' story, from his early childhood to the return from killing the Minotaur, is a Ripping Yarn, and Renault tells it well. It's got a first-person hero narrator, which I just love; she has a good eye for characterization and for what each speaker would notice of the world.
I got started on the whole gods-vs.-realism discussion partly because TKMD is all about the gods. Theseus lives in a polytheistic world, and grows up sort-of-believing himself to be the son of Poseidon. He spends his entire adult life either aligning himself with religious beliefs or struggling to contain and master them. This creates some of the most interesting contradictions of the book. Most of the contradictions are justifiable within Theseus' own conflicting view of the world, and add to the story rather than diminishing it. The plot requires him to alternately believe strongly that the gods must not be offended, and believe that he can do what he likes and the gods will just have to suck it up. For example, he's grown up with the idea that a king must be willing to make a human sacrifice of himself to the gods on behalf of his people. It's a family tradition to jump off a cliff for the good of the kingdom, when things are going poorly. Then again, in his first heroic journey, he goes to the matriarchy down the road. There he kills the year-king and marries the goddess-queen. (Renault has been reading the anthropologists who believe that all goddesses originally stemmed from one Great Mother, and that all male gods are late-coming upstarts whose followers overthrew the matriarchy. I don't buy this in real life, but I accept it in service of a good story.)
Why is it, by the way, that I have never read a good matriarchy in fiction? Good as in either "admirable" or "well-written". Every time you see a woman-dominated society depicted in any media, they're dysfunctional. They tend to go in two directions: either they're man-haters who are in the story so that the downtrodden men can rise up and overthrow them, or they are a humorless society of Amazons who are in the story to prove what a wonderful thing a matriarchy would be. They're usually used as a stick to beat the reader with, in either direction. You'll never see a matriarchy that's, say, played for laughs, or one with enlightened types who try very earnestly to live on terms of love and equality with their men. Mostly, they're just no fun. Anyhow, Theseus marries a Goddess-Queen who is, frankly, pretty whiny and weak-willed for someone who has supposedly been changing husbands every year and ruling with an iron fist her whole adult life. And instead of dying at the end of his term, he decides to leave and go seek his fortune in the next kingdom. Oh, and by the way, lady, you and your country don't get to kill kings anymore, because I say so. You have to have a fake sacrifice, and also the buck stops here as far as all this poncy women-rule-the-state thing goes. I'm giving you a parliament system, instead, and the women can go back in the kitchen where they belong. Because screw your thousand years of tradition, I'm Theseus and I'm the hero so of course I'm right.
And, of course, they do what he says, because he is the hero. It was alternately wish-fulfilling and aggravating, throughout the book. Theseus is a pretty convincingly written leader. Even so, he gets away with murder, as plot elements go. The downtrodden men of the matriarchal society, for example, rise up and follow his lead, even though he is an outlander year-king and even though the custom of the country is umpteen centuries old and supposedly ingrained in everyone's souls. But Theseus changes their country and walks off, and it all works out because he has the Author fighting on his side. He's a total Gary Stu in that respect, but he's so well-written that you love him anyhow. And vicariously enjoy all his struggles and easy wins, because wouldn't we all like to be that mighty a leader? Well, I would.
However I may beef about the inconsistencies of the story, the climactic episode of the book comes when Theseus gets sent to Crete as a sacrifice/tribute. The world of Crete and the Court of the Bull is internally consistent, and riveting. The bull-dancers are somewhere between human sacrifices, matadors, the bull-runners at Pamplona, and the halftime show at a football game. It involves Theseus in the best sort of leadership, the sort that involves preserving one another's lives in desperate circumstances. I am a sucker for this kind of thing. He and the other teenagers shipped to Crete that year manage to form a nigh-untouchable team of bull dancers and survive for months of risking their lives in public; also, they lead La Resistance and help to take the bad guys down from within. It's awesome, powerfully written, and tear-jerking.
And then we have to have the obligatory betrayal and abandonment of Ariadne, because It's In The Script. There aren't any obvious gods in this world, so Theseus doesn't have a vision of Dionysus giving him orders to leave Ariadne behind. Instead, the two of them make the mistake of participating in the rites of the maenads on their way back from Crete. There, they both get drunk, split up, and have lots of sex with strangers. When Theseus comes round, he finds Ariadne passed out, being carried down the mountain, having helped to personally dismember the sacrifice-king who was playing Dionysus. And Theseus--even though he knew what he was getting into when they started the rites--is revolted and dumps her, sailing off as fast as he can before she wakes up. It was the sort of thing that makes you want to reach right through the book and punch the character. The thing was, it's internally consistent, in that Theseus is exactly the sort of guy who would have a double standard. "It's okay for me to kill a sacrifice-king, but not her, because I'm me and she's her. Also, ZOMG SHES A HOR." Sort of thing. Anyhow, it tallies with his established character, though that doesn't make Theseus any less of a butthead.
The Bull From The Sea , the sequel, is an unavoidable down trip, because it's about the middle and end of Theseus' career: family tragedy upon disaster upon horrible mistake on Theseus' part. I'm glad I read it, but it didn't excite and annoy me like The King Must Die.
One of the speakers said, "Read Mary Renault, The King Must Die." Well, now I have. I think, in retrospect, she may have meant to point me towards The Last Of The Wine instead. TKMD and its sequel don't actually have overt gay storylines in them, just a few slight references. TLOTW, on the other hand, from what I've seen so far, seems to be entirely about Greek dudes who have the sex. Scratch that. They have the romantic passion for each other. Lots of longing looks and heartbroken poetry and playing the lyre. I've just read the first few chapters, but I have to finish it soon. Anyhow, TLOTW doesn't seem to have a very strong plot beyond "I'm doing a slow burn for this guy, and by the way we're all philosophers and there is a war on." The King Must Die has an unavoidably strong plot, however; it's about Theseus.
Theseus' story, without the bull-headed monster, the approachable underworld, the witches, or the actual, physical gods. I have mixed feelings about this genre. Scratch that: I resent this genre. Nobody is quite sure what to call it--historical fiction? It's too fanciful and based on legend. Fantasy? But there are no overtly magical scenes and no undeniable gods. I've seen this called "Low, Low Fantasy" on TV Tropes--in the same way as the Troy movie, it's a story based on myths in which the gods and supernatural beings were prominent, and from which all the overt supernatural and holy elements have been ruthlessly chopped. Sigh. It's like the kind of educational book for children which says, "Real dragons did walk the earth. They were called dinosaurs." Or, more honestly, "There were no such things as dragons, but dinosaurs did exist and are even cooler." Which, no. That's just not on. Nothing against dinos, mind you; and nothing says that you ought to prefer dragons. But when I want dinosaurs, I know where to get them. If I came in looking for dragons, dinosaurs are not an equivalent story element.
On one hand, Renault is a great writer, and I even enjoyed Troy. But at the same time, ancient legends are fantasy. To me, part of Theseus's story and the Trojan War's story is that the gods are real. They're all one with the story. Such legends aren't just stories of men and battles, and it feels deeply wrong to me to make them so. The Trojan War is a war where one hero's mother is Aphrodite, and where the gods can overlook the battlefield like chess experts, or perhaps more closely, like the owners of fighting-cocks. It happens in a world where a goddess can actually, personally barge onto the field of combat to protect her son, and be stabbed by his opponent. Where Poseidon can pick up a guy and fling him out of the way to cheat his opponent of victory. Ancient myths are set in the same world of fantasy as fairy-tales and religious writings: they all contain fantastical events, in aid of telling a deep truth or a good story or both. To pretend that they are not--to deliver versions of events with all the fantastical woo-woo chopped out--is like making a pie without the crust or a crust without the pie. As much as I like each element, one alone is not satisfying.
As long as I'm on the subject, you guys want to know something funny? I liked 300 much better than I did Troy, exactly because the former movie was successfully set in a fantasy world. Granted, it really wasn't the world I would have chosen, but it was a non-realistic presentation--wolves aren't just animals, they're this ghastly demonic presence with glowing eyes; mountain crags overhang their bases as if we were on a low-gravity planet; the sky is bronze and green; flying arrows fill the air in great solid slabs of blackness; there are ten-foot-tall enemies coming to kill you. (The fantasy element in 300 creates racist and xenophobic problems all over the place, but that's another discussion.) There still aren't gods, but it's a world in which gods could be real and appear in person without a jarring mood shift.
"Low Low Fantasy" is a pretty judgmental title. I would have called it something equally negative, left to my own devices, though. Thinking of movies, here... I watched Clash of the Titans, the original movie, and then decided I would leave well enough alone and not go to the remake. Basically, the point of the original is to watch cool monsters in stop-motion animation. If it's all done with CGI, then you're just watching another poorly-written epic movie. The original was pretty dull, frankly, except for a few scenes, mostly involving Harryhausen creatures. (Medusa? Woooohh! She was beautiful. Don't take my word for it. Go look.) Oh, and there was an old actor named Burgess Meredith, best-known for playing George opposite Lon Chaney's Lennie in the 1939 Of Mice and Men. He played an old philosopher/poet/wacky old dude, and he did manage to class up the proceedings. "You must excuse my not trusting you completely. It's a hard old world out there these days--robbers and murderers everywhere you look, and gloomy fellows going around saying things like, Call no man happy if he is not dead!" Anyhow, my point is that stories with the gods cut out feel wrong, but that you can leave the gods in a story and still make it a lousy story. The Olympian gods of Clash of the Titans were profoundly uninspiring. I haven't got the heart to talk much about it. Picture Lawrence Olivier dressed as Zeus, gesturing grandly and spouting plot exposition, wrapped in a bedsheet, with blue laser lines behind his head. That sort of thing.
Anyhow, to Mary Renault... The King Must Die annoyed me by not having overt gods and monsters, but if you don't judge it on those standards--and I managed not to after a while--it's an excellent book. The first half of Theseus' story, from his early childhood to the return from killing the Minotaur, is a Ripping Yarn, and Renault tells it well. It's got a first-person hero narrator, which I just love; she has a good eye for characterization and for what each speaker would notice of the world.
I got started on the whole gods-vs.-realism discussion partly because TKMD is all about the gods. Theseus lives in a polytheistic world, and grows up sort-of-believing himself to be the son of Poseidon. He spends his entire adult life either aligning himself with religious beliefs or struggling to contain and master them. This creates some of the most interesting contradictions of the book. Most of the contradictions are justifiable within Theseus' own conflicting view of the world, and add to the story rather than diminishing it. The plot requires him to alternately believe strongly that the gods must not be offended, and believe that he can do what he likes and the gods will just have to suck it up. For example, he's grown up with the idea that a king must be willing to make a human sacrifice of himself to the gods on behalf of his people. It's a family tradition to jump off a cliff for the good of the kingdom, when things are going poorly. Then again, in his first heroic journey, he goes to the matriarchy down the road. There he kills the year-king and marries the goddess-queen. (Renault has been reading the anthropologists who believe that all goddesses originally stemmed from one Great Mother, and that all male gods are late-coming upstarts whose followers overthrew the matriarchy. I don't buy this in real life, but I accept it in service of a good story.)
Why is it, by the way, that I have never read a good matriarchy in fiction? Good as in either "admirable" or "well-written". Every time you see a woman-dominated society depicted in any media, they're dysfunctional. They tend to go in two directions: either they're man-haters who are in the story so that the downtrodden men can rise up and overthrow them, or they are a humorless society of Amazons who are in the story to prove what a wonderful thing a matriarchy would be. They're usually used as a stick to beat the reader with, in either direction. You'll never see a matriarchy that's, say, played for laughs, or one with enlightened types who try very earnestly to live on terms of love and equality with their men. Mostly, they're just no fun. Anyhow, Theseus marries a Goddess-Queen who is, frankly, pretty whiny and weak-willed for someone who has supposedly been changing husbands every year and ruling with an iron fist her whole adult life. And instead of dying at the end of his term, he decides to leave and go seek his fortune in the next kingdom. Oh, and by the way, lady, you and your country don't get to kill kings anymore, because I say so. You have to have a fake sacrifice, and also the buck stops here as far as all this poncy women-rule-the-state thing goes. I'm giving you a parliament system, instead, and the women can go back in the kitchen where they belong. Because screw your thousand years of tradition, I'm Theseus and I'm the hero so of course I'm right.
And, of course, they do what he says, because he is the hero. It was alternately wish-fulfilling and aggravating, throughout the book. Theseus is a pretty convincingly written leader. Even so, he gets away with murder, as plot elements go. The downtrodden men of the matriarchal society, for example, rise up and follow his lead, even though he is an outlander year-king and even though the custom of the country is umpteen centuries old and supposedly ingrained in everyone's souls. But Theseus changes their country and walks off, and it all works out because he has the Author fighting on his side. He's a total Gary Stu in that respect, but he's so well-written that you love him anyhow. And vicariously enjoy all his struggles and easy wins, because wouldn't we all like to be that mighty a leader? Well, I would.
However I may beef about the inconsistencies of the story, the climactic episode of the book comes when Theseus gets sent to Crete as a sacrifice/tribute. The world of Crete and the Court of the Bull is internally consistent, and riveting. The bull-dancers are somewhere between human sacrifices, matadors, the bull-runners at Pamplona, and the halftime show at a football game. It involves Theseus in the best sort of leadership, the sort that involves preserving one another's lives in desperate circumstances. I am a sucker for this kind of thing. He and the other teenagers shipped to Crete that year manage to form a nigh-untouchable team of bull dancers and survive for months of risking their lives in public; also, they lead La Resistance and help to take the bad guys down from within. It's awesome, powerfully written, and tear-jerking.
And then we have to have the obligatory betrayal and abandonment of Ariadne, because It's In The Script. There aren't any obvious gods in this world, so Theseus doesn't have a vision of Dionysus giving him orders to leave Ariadne behind. Instead, the two of them make the mistake of participating in the rites of the maenads on their way back from Crete. There, they both get drunk, split up, and have lots of sex with strangers. When Theseus comes round, he finds Ariadne passed out, being carried down the mountain, having helped to personally dismember the sacrifice-king who was playing Dionysus. And Theseus--even though he knew what he was getting into when they started the rites--is revolted and dumps her, sailing off as fast as he can before she wakes up. It was the sort of thing that makes you want to reach right through the book and punch the character. The thing was, it's internally consistent, in that Theseus is exactly the sort of guy who would have a double standard. "It's okay for me to kill a sacrifice-king, but not her, because I'm me and she's her. Also, ZOMG SHES A HOR." Sort of thing. Anyhow, it tallies with his established character, though that doesn't make Theseus any less of a butthead.
The Bull From The Sea , the sequel, is an unavoidable down trip, because it's about the middle and end of Theseus' career: family tragedy upon disaster upon horrible mistake on Theseus' part. I'm glad I read it, but it didn't excite and annoy me like The King Must Die.