Funeral Games

I found this book in my school library first ("Persian Boy" and "Fire From Heaven" apparently not being there.) While Alexander is dead by chapter 1, and I've never read the books in which he is portrayed alive, I was amazed by Mary Renault's skill in preserving his spirit throughout the novel, so that in a sense Alexander really is a character, though he was already comatose from the start.Also, the high stakes and level of the manipulation by the people reaching for the throne was so much more detailed and elaborate than can be matched in the fantasy genre I usually prefer. Fact is stranger than fiction.It stood out to me that while virtually all the characters hated each other, they were all portrayed very well and I felt I understood their emotions, motivations, and their nuances. Thankfully, the author kept from the very tempting habit of villainizing one or another. The body count was high, but each character had a moving, highly-individiualized death without splurging into Fiction Plot Device Kill-offy Mode that many authors tend to march into. (You know, falling to your knees and screaming, "NOOOO! " or "YOU KILLED MY BROTHER! " and that sort of stuff.) Overall, an excellent read, even for your non-obsessed casual reader.

Alexander may be dead in chapter one, but his spirit looms large in the pages of this book, as indeed it must have done in the world immediately after his passing. This book is a stunning and breathtaking journey through the ten or twenty years following Alexander's death - a time when men who would be king, and indeed women who would be queen, play for the known world as though it was a chess board. It is a measure of the strength of Alexander's personality and force of will, that the only legitimacy these players can claim is that they knew, or loved, or eventually just knew someone who knew, the man himself; and in the end it's not enough for any of them, they're all found wanting by the only judges who matter: the common men of the army Alexander led to the ends of the known world. This book makes me cry every time I read it, not so much for any of the characters themselves, though their pain is real, but for the world at that time. There is just so much chaos, and Mary Renault shows brilliantly how fragile the constructs of human civilisation really are - removing the man who held it all together with little more than a smile and a forceful but attractive personality, sends the whole thing tumbling down.

Being an fan of this particular period of history, and having read the Persian Boy, I was prepared to be critical of Funeral Games. Instead I found it absorbing, historically accurate (as far as I could tell) and a fairly dispassionate set of observations on the demise of Alexander's empire. Again it's Bagoas who narrates, but Alexander is gone, and so is Hephestias, leaving the crown for the taking. Pawns and would-be kings abound, and queens as well. A must-read for anyone interested in the period, or in really great political fiction.