Why Reading Mary Renault Right Now
Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea

I’ve been thinking about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. While London burned each created a mythical world out of whole cloth which still provides entertainment, escape, and possibly even hope. Tolkien’s Hobbit books and Lewis’s Narnia books have already outlasted the troubled and troublesome "thousand-year Reich" which brought death and destruction to so much of the world.

A third, lesser-known British writer who came of age as the bombs fell on England was so busy as a nurse during the war that her own escapist literary monument had to wait until the fighting was over.

Though she had already published several mainstream novels before the war, Mary Renault (1905-1983) moved to South Africa in 1948 where she soon started a second writing career. For reasons that aren’t clear (her lesbianism? the emotional scars of war?, escapism?), Renault turned her attention to ancient Greece and during the last three decades of her life produced a unique body of historical fiction.

Renault’s eight Greek novels are the closest thing we’ll have to a time machine until some 21st century Steve Jobs comes up with a real one and some 21st century Bill Gates "appropriates" it for the mass market. Scholars harp on and nit-pick about various details of ancient Greece which they claim Renault got wrong. No matter, because what she got right, absolutely convincingly right, was an entire vanished world.

Turn off the TV, pick up The Mask of Apollo and suddenly you’re in Greece and Sicily in the 4th century BCE following the career of a middle-aged actor performing the great plays of the Golden Age.

For a bigger cultural jolt, try either of the two books about Theseus (he of the minotaur and the maze on Crete), The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, from an even earlier age that saw the creation of the remarkable, long-lived stories and legends that we know as Greek mythology.

How about a bit of philosophy? The Last of the Wine lets you hobnob with Socrates himself, right up to the infamous cup of hemlock.

The Praise Singer serves up the life of a poet whose life and work put the artifice of modern, ragtag, pseudo-academic versifiers to shame.

Renault’s magnum opus is the Alexander trilogy: Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games. It’s all here, from Alexander the Great’s birth to his death: the kingship in Macedonia, the takeover of the Hellenistic world, the conquest of Persia and Egypt, the still-incredible march to India, with, lest we forget, a long foray into what we today call Afghanistan.

A word about sex: Did Renault have a homoerotic agenda? A fascinating, even a worthwhile question, but as with questions about Shakespeare’s sexual orientation, it is finally of secondary importance. Clearly her primary agenda was the work and the vast world of Mediterranean antiquity that it so vividly and successfully embodies.