quigonejinn | (no subject)

Primary sentiment: AHAHA OH MY GOD, IT'S BOOK-LENGTH "THE PERSIAN BOY" FANFICTION.

I mean. Look. This is not a bad thing. I love that damn book so much, and Renault is such a motherfucking captivating, amazing, pivotal writer for historical fiction. If you write fiction set in the classical world in the first person about the Greeks/Macedonians, let alone first-person GLBT-themed material about some of the very characters she uses, well, what the fuck, right? I am the last person to talk shit about an author for writing the version of "Funeral Games" that I can actually finish without being way too motherfucking upset by ten pages in, when Stateira reads the forged letter by Roxane, because MY HEART IS SO UTTERLY SMASHED.

But it also says something about the book that the first thing I did after finishing was google up some Jo Graham, and the first line of the first answer to the first interview that I read has her talking about how much she loves the Persian Boy.

It explains a lot about the book, really. I mean, the book's sharpest moments are (i) when you realize that Lydias and Bagoas are the mirror images of each other, and that Graham has (cleverly) set the whole story up so that you realize the compare/contract in this one single conversation, and (ii) when Lydias's beloved horse dies as a funeral sacrifice for Hephastion. All the other parts of the book -- stealing Alexander's hearse, fighting against the other regents, even the protagonist getting hurt or whatever -- sort of pales next to these two really, really beautifully constructed moments.

Good book, solid book. It's the best out of the three by a long margin, and it is really, genuinely, seriously good. It's richly imagined and invested-in by the author through and through. She really is on top of the Renault technique of vividly and emotionally describing something or just a moment, then moving away to heighten the reader's sense of being stunned. And the sex is pretty damn well-done. Like, really, unembarrassingly good and hot and inappropriate for having come over the Kindle while stepping off the commuter subway. And it's about sisters, even if Iras is

The biggest beef that I have, though, with the book* is the way it tries to make it feel like the values of Alexandria/Cleopatra back then are the values of right-thinking, Liberal-in-the-Enlightment-sense people today. I'm deeply suspicious of that sort of thing in fiction because it, you know, sort of devalues cultural differences and suggests (but does not necessarily mean) that there is some sloppy thinking and research on the part of the author. It's particularly notable in light of how Jo Graham's work draws on the tradition and style of Renault, who very much didn't believe in that sort of thing. In Renault, eighty-five percent of the glory of the legends she is re-telling has to do with the fact that they were about profoundly alien cultures. They are nothing like you and me. You'll never see Ekbatana or Babylon. You'll never see the court of Darius. The people, the moral values, the ethical system, similar on the surface, similar in result, but deeply different in between, and strange and wonderful because of it. Renault used her superlative writing to bring the mountain to you, to make you feel that difference and love it. It's probably her greatest gift as an author.**

Graham sort of brings you to mountain, and it's like, oh, yeah, the Egyptians believed in tolerance. They also let people from all over live in Alexandria, and oh look, here's a bit about how the Egyptians knew all about using rubbing alcohol to disinfect just like we did! They knew about hygiene and clean water! They knew that the world was round! And it comes up agian and again, and Graham wants so badly to show you that (i) she has done her research, and (ii) the Alexandrians are just like us! And by the time you get to the descriptions of Horus being held by a benevolent, but sad Isis, all I gotta do is squint just a little and tilt my head to the side, and we're (not unintentionally) looking at a statue of Madonna and child.

What I'm trying to say is this, i think: I don't walk away from Graham's books with the sense of looked into something alien and found something beautiful by their terms, rather than mine. I do with Renault.

* STOP HATING ON ROMANS D:

babel, stop laughing.

** And her greatest weakness, actually, because then she wanders off into long digressions about Bacchic ritual and Maenad dances and black Attic pottery and every fucking stone on the mountain of making the alien other very vivid to you, and you're like, fuck, lady, all I really want to do is read about Hephaestion fucking Alexander in the sunshine. Why you gotta cockblock like that?

No, I lied. This is my real beef with the book: WHERE THE FUCK IS MY CLEOPATRA/CHARMAIN SISTERCEST? HOLY LORD OF GOD. I mean, dude, Graham has Charmain lubing and fingerfucking Cleopatra as prep for offering her virginity to Gnaeus Pompey. Charmain is in-book canon massively bisexual. They are both Ptolomies. Antony's wife goes to Cleopatra at one point and offers to go down on her.

I ask you where is it. Where is it