Author: Mary Renault
Cover Artist: Mejuto
Publisher: Arrow Books
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: November, 2003 (New Edition)
Fire from Heaven is the first book in Mary Renault’s celebrated trilogy about Alexander the Great and it is followed by The Persian Boy and Funeral Games. Together, these three books cover Alexander’s childhood and adolescence, his adult life and the aftermath of his death and Renault’s novels, which were first published in the 1970s, have long been viewed as the definitive historical novels when it comes to Alexander the Great. Due to this reputation I came to Fire from Heaven with rather high expectations – expectations that sadly weren’t fulfilled.
Fire from Heaven covers Alexander’s childhood in Pella, the main seat of the Macedonian court of his father King Philip. Alexander is the son of Philip’s queen Olympias, who hates her husband intensely, even to the degree that she claims Zeus as Alexander’s father. From a very young age, Alexander is thus placed in the centre of his parents’ incessant battle for power. His mother keeps him close and allows him to participate in her Dionysian rites. She manipulates him throughout his youth, trying to control him when he grows older and leaves the world of the women. As a young teen, Alexander and a group of his peers are taught by the philosopher Aristotle and as he learns state- and war-craft he moves closer into his father’s orbit, yet his father will not recognize his worth, which becomes a source of frustration for Alexander. One of the most significant episodes relating to the relationship between father and son is when the teenage Alexander saves his fathers life, something that Philip refuses to acknowledge. The ending of the novel corresponds to the time when Philip was assassinated and Alexander became king, before he embarked on his grandiose wars of conquest.
Renault’s novel was, as already stated, somewhat of a disappointment. After having read all the praise I must admit that I was very surprised to encounter a quite spare and dry prose, an undiscriminating use of multiple POVs and a rather meandering plot that only began to shape up towards the end. One could argue that the meandering nature of the plot could be grounded in an attempt to represent Alexander’s childhood and adolescence in an impressionistic manner, but this is belied by the extremely dry prose that at times sounds like it belongs in a history book instead of a novel.
Another point of critique is Renault’s representation of the young Alexander. It doesn’t take long for the reader to discover that Renault hero-worships Alexander. She depicts him as a very beautiful and precocious child, extraordinarily talented at all he does. He doesn’t really have any character flaws and is altogether too annoyingly perfect. All in all, it is too difficult to empathize with the characters, which, combined with the rather dry style put the reader at a distance to the narrative and its characters.
Renault’s strong point is undeniably her profound knowledge of the Ancient world’s history, culture and mindset. Like fantasy writers, historical novelists have to create a non-existing world, in this case the world of the past from its diverse textual and archaeological remains. Renault obviously knows the Ancient Mediterranean world like the back of her hand, and she re-creates it in an immersive style. This means that the novel presents the reader with this ancient world and its assumptions without comment or explanation. The immersive historical narrative simply assumes that the world it depicts is the norm not only for the protagonist but also for the reader. This aspect makes Fire from Heaven a rather difficult book for the reader who doesn’t have much knowledge of Macedonia and Greece during Alexander’s lifetime.
On the other hand, the immersive style allows Renault to present an intriguing and imaginative attempt at a late Hellene mindset might be like, sometimes to a disturbing effect such as the underlying misogyny and racism that marks the narrative. This corresponds, of course, not necessarily the author’s viewpoint; rather it is rooted in the historical mindset she depicts. It is well-known that the Greeks looked down on all outsiders as “barbarians” and that love between boys and men where valued higher than the relationships between men and women since women were deemed to be vastly inferior beings.
What I found most fascinating about this manner of representing a historical mindset from the “inside”, so to speak, was they way in which Renault manages to convey the sense that there was no real separation between history, myth and reality in the antique Hellene mindset. Stories from myth are seen as real historical occurrences and Alexander constantly mirrors his own self in figures from myth. He and his mother constantly compare him to Achilles and Heracles, the semi-divine heroes of Homeric legend and Greek mythology – interestingly enough, this particular aspect of Renault’s work is strongly present in Oliver Stone’s filmic epic Alexander (2004).
Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven, first in her celebrated trilogy of Alexander the Great, offers an intriguing but also dry reading experience that mostly will appeal to connoisseurs of ancient history.
Trine D. Paulsen
