Books: "The Charioteer" and "Return to Night"

[teenybuffalo]

I've just read two Mary Renault novels in quick succession: Return to Night and The Charioteer.  Short version: I liked 'em.  They were sufficiently gripping for me to keep reading in fascination, even though not a lot was happening in the book, by my standards.  Sometimes she can certainly overdo the introspection, to the point where I howl, "Who

Comments

[teenybuffalo]

Haven't read it yet, but I'm obviously going to have to. sovay has told me it's good, and I'm now eager to read something more by Renault using female characters.

Ralph Lanyon may be vulnerable just like the other characters, but he's the one who manages to say, "TALK to him!", and that's when I really fell for him. The world needs more people like Ralph. You're 100% right about the clandestine relationships--just off the top of my head, Bagoas is the only character I can think of who can be fairly public with Alexander, if only because Alexander's private life isn't private.

In books set during the Blitz, it's easy to get rid of characters in sudden, tragic, convenient deaths by dropping a bomb on them. Renault does that with subsidiary characters in Return to Night, which I found kind of a cop-out, but she never does it in The Charioteer though I had expected it. I was happy about that.

[gaudior]

Many thoughts on Renault, but I haven't read her recently enough for any of them to be coherent, I'm afraid

[teenybuffalo]

Ah, QUILTBAG. I LOL'd when I first heard that one, but it's not the greatest for everyday use, is it.

OK, that makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for talking about it; this helps with a long-standing ambivalence. On one hand, what a useful word, but on the other hand I only tended to hear it used as an insult.

Pride & Joy, the local gay and lesbian bookstore and tchotchke shop, used to carry those paper notepads with a To Do list and a magnet on the back for sticking to the fridge door, and the stationery said across the top THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA. I expect they still have those for sale. I always kinda liked that.

[teenybuffalo]

They're well worth trying, at least. I don't like them nearly as much as her classical work, but still, Renault is good and fun even when she's in a setting I don't care as much about, you know? On the downside, they don't have the powerful ancient stories (or relatively recent classical stories/history) that drew me to her in the first place. On the upside, she's a very astute writer and it's fun to see her working in a fairly familiar background. If you do get tempted to read the modern stuff, I'd be interested to know what you think.

[the_termagant]

I've never liked contemporary Renault. She really lived in Ancient Greece, in a very real and potent way, so her contemporary work always feels like an odd back-to-front kind of historical fiction.

[teenybuffalo]

She really lived in Ancient Greece, in a very real and potent way

How d'you mean?

The modern novels are a lot less fun for me, because no one is slaying or poisoning anybody or enacting a myth or legend, or engaged in a book-length plot for dominance, but I still enjoy them in the same way I would enjoy mid-career Dorothy L. Sayers.

{Sooper Sekrit Message: You're here! You're OK! Hooray!}

[the_termagant]

I'm probably going to do a really bad job of explaining this, but here's what I've always thought about Renault

[teenybuffalo]

Seems perfectly eloquent to me, I'm glad you went into more detail. I'm completely in agreement with you that she seems to be "writing from Plato's sitting-room." Much as I now like The Charioteer, that narrative is way more distanced from the characters than is The Last of the Wine, which would be my nom for most fully developed classical novel (NOM NOM NOM).

A lot of The Charioteer is taken up with discussion of sexual orientation, most of it very self-loathing. The wonderful thing about novels set in classical antiquity is that Renault doesn't feel the need for that sort of discussion, because there is no need, because the characters live in a society where "eros" means m/m love, first and foremost. Must've been a beautiful, freeing feeling.