The Amarna Period: The Last Heiress by Stephanie Liaci (2011)

January 18, 2014

Another idea that people share about the Amarna Period is a great sympathy for Ankhesenamun, the girl-queen. She does not get quite the popular press of her husband Tutankhamun, on account of lacking his golden tomb, but the vague outline of a tragic figure is clear to whoever reads a little of her history. Married to her father, made to bear him a little girl that died, then married to her half-brother and robbed of him a few years later, without any living children to protect her position. In the past few years, DNA testing has established that we have (probably) found the mummy of Ankhesenamun. The mummy’s head has gone missing since its initial discovery. Liaci’s novel of Ankhesenamun explores an intriguing suggestion – what if her head went missing so easily because it had been severed?

Although Liaci’s novel uses the first-person-view-of-royalty device, which I’ve mentioned I don’t care for, I was nevertheless drawn in and kept to the end. Unlike other authors I’ve read so far in this little project, Liaci actually addresses the chronic disorders and ill health of Tutankhamun, and to a certain extent, of Ankhesenamun. She depicts Tutankhamun as constantly struggling to be a mighty warrior, pushing his body to its limits and hiding his disabilities. He is also fascinated with the military, which is highly plausible and poignant. Would World War I have happened if Kaiser Wilhelm had not suffered from a mangled arm all his life?

 She also ignores Tutankhamun’s health and youth where it is convenient, in order to transform the relationship between Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun into a conventional romance. A wounded, fiery heroine and a gentle, patient, mature lover – hardly likely in such a strange, sad situation. Ankhesenamun was three years older than her husband. They married at about nine and twelve. Although they no doubt had a bond between them, this is a little young for the story of sweeping-off of feet that Liaci tells. In this book, the couple consistently interacts as if they were in their mid-twenties, not their tweens.

There is some high-octane villainy near the end, melodramatically done but historically plausible. I appreciate Liaci’s clever use of the historical context of Ankhesenamun’s desperate plea for a Hittite husband. All in all, I would definitely read another Egyptian novel by Liaci. I hope to see more recent Amarna novels that use the DNA and forensic information to tell this bizarre story.

The Amarna Period: A God Against the Gods by Allen Drury (1976)

January 14, 2014

Upon looking into the matter, I find that Allen Drury is not the man I would have expected to write a novel of ancient Egypt. He was an American journalist, anti-communist, and prominent observer of the Senate, whose most famous novel Advise and Consent was a dark Cold War tale of legislative intrigue. According to Wikipedia, he was a prolific author of nonfiction and the kind of novels that used to come in big chunky yellow-edged squares, mostly on contemporary American subjects, but also science fiction and two novels of ancient Egypt, of which this is one.

And yet – how could this not be someone I would expect to write a novel of ancient Egypt? That covers anyone. Anyone who wants to write, who can sling some prose together, who was ever enchanted by a glossy coffee-table book of the wonders of ancient Egypt considers themselves eminently qualified to whomp out such a novel. For proof, I direct you to the entire Kindle historical fiction section.

This is not necessarily a terrible thing, when it is combined with genuine talent and followed up with diligent research. Drury appears to have written a good deal of dreadful, sexist, didactically anti-Communist political fiction, but those flaws and obsessions do not map directly onto his work in A God Against the Gods, with the exception of homophobia. Drury did his homework as best he could with the information available to Egyptology in the 1970s, although anachronisms slip through here and there.

The novel itself is an engaging read, even though it relies on a device I no longer trust – the thoughtful first-person narration by powerful figures. You get this with a lot of period pieces about royalty – “I, Cleopatra,” and so forth. It certainly isn’t bad in and of itself – recently, I have enjoyed Juliet Grey’s Marie Antoinette trilogy, which uses just this device. But it’s frequently used with a lack of imagination as to its very premise, viz. and to wit, why should these people be so smart? Why should princes and princesses – the privileged, the powerful, the carefully blinkered – make engaging, descriptive, lyrical narrators? Can you see someone writing a purple historical novel from the sensitive, nuanced viewpoint of a Kardashian sister? How much more of a soul was Nefertiti? How do you know?

Drury’s book uses this device, with repeating and differing viewpoints, which to me at least mitigates the artificiality of the device by calling attention to it. The book makes a decent read, to be sure, but it has dated considerably in its information and its craft. At the last the book leaves the reader hanging for its sequel, as it ends with Akhenaten and Smenkhara having declared themselves double Pharaohs and consorts, to the horror of all. (This is certainly a theory in circulation.) I am unsure if I will check out the sequel, Return to Thebes, but I am tempted to, which is at least some kind of recommendation. All in all, I consider that it is probably one of the more broadly scoped and lucid Amarna novels, but not necessarily the best.

“This Is Hell,” Elvis Costello

December 16, 2013

As I said, I have not been well.  Moreover, I have let it put me in my own small, hot, terrible place.  When depression has the upper hand, I stop listening to music.  I do not mean to, but I do.  When in the grip, music seems unsafe.  You hardly dare to enter the song’s world, to relax, to accept, to sing along.  For the first time in days, possibly weeks, I am deliberately listening to a song.

Why is this song not all over Youtube?  Why aren’t there countless covers and animated videos?  It is a little masterpiece.  When I was sixteen, I heard this song in my father’s truck, when it was fresh, and I knew then it would never let go of me.  Even then, I could tell that the lyrics described the curse pronounced upon us all.  I was the kind of girl who believed she had never really been young, and therefore would never really be old.  In its tiny way, I think it helped me learn that this was not so.

It’s not the torment of the flames that finally sees your flesh corrupted;
It’s the small humiliations that your memory piles up –

—–
* Or, to be precise, the second time, because I listened to “Can You Picture That” a whole bunch of times.

The fractal horror of other people’s lives on the internet

December 16, 2013

Sometimes I stumble upon the opinions of someone so far to the wall, so dogmatic, so cruel and blinkered that I fail to get angry. Instead, I feel a sudden well of empathy, even of sympathy, for someone who must have suffered terribly at the hands of the kind of people that I myself have been privileged to be able to trust. Imagine being injured so badly that you cannot imagine a relationship between human beings that is not entirely poisoned and made hollow by power dynamics. I am reminded of what a good friend once said: early abuse effectively makes people feral.

**cough** #radfem #mra #tumblr is made out of hellparts

The Amarna Period: The Twelfth Transforming by Pauline Gedge (1984)

December 15, 2013

Here is the thing about not allowing your children to read grown-up books: it is not possible for you, also, to possess these books. If your child is a reader, then there is no shelf high enough and no place secret enough for them. I know, because I climbed up there. I was a lazy child and often overweight, but I climbed bookshelves like a monkey for my parents’ Stephen King* and Anne Rice** novels and – once I was done with my own age-appropriate books about Egypt – for Pauline Gedge’s The Twelfth Transforming.

I was ten when I first read it. For years, I reread it over and over, until the thing fell apart. Since it was out of print by then and I did not feel a need for another copy, I had not reread it in years, until now. As such, rereading it has told me more about the contrast between reading at ten and reading in one’s mid-thirties than about the historiography of historical fiction.

What makes Gedge’s book remarkable at the outset, to a typical reader, is the immediate and casual acceptance of incest. Pharaonic incest was practiced in order to protect the purity of Egyptian royal blood, which was regarded as literally divine. It is not clear to us whether incestuous marriages were meant to strengthen a pharaoh’s claim to the throne, or to keep royal blood (and royal claimants) out of lesser families by making sure that the sisters and daughters of a pharaoh were not free to marry and have children with anyone else. In any case, the first few pages of Gedge’s novel make it clear that this is a narrative where all members of the family are sexual rivals. It is startling and repulsive.

That is, it is now. When I was ten, I accepted the incest in this book without question. This had nothing to do with the thankfully decent world that I lived in as a fifth-grader. I never even contemplated it as such. Egypt was simply the past. The world of the book was what it was, and I had no place to question it, nor any need to.

Could I let myself be such a reader now? Today, I have a hard time reading most anything without the internal critic asking: what are we being told to accept here? Is it accurate? Is it probable? Is it pushing an agenda against some gender or race or creed? Am I, in short, being taken for a fool by some rat-bastard typist who has issues with his/her ex?

No, I can no longer do without that voice. I can never be such a carefree reader, so full of wonder, as I was when I was ten. On the other hand, I also thought that John Maddox Roberts was a good fantasy author back then; so in all such losses there is some gain.

Gedge’s novel is as rich as a rum cake. She specializes in producing a decadent, highly scented picture of the royal and noble houses of Egypt, a place you could imagine losing hours in languid drunkenness, as her characters often do. The story is one of royal intrigue and dissipation, of naivete and madness, not of ideas or of love. Egypt itself is depicted as a mass of cowlike laborers, either working or suffering, invisible to the main characters of the story.

When I was a girl, I was immediately interested in Queen Tiye, the viewpoint character, and sorrowful for her sorrows, simply because she was the queen. Now, on rereading, all I see is a woman who loved only power, who failed to be a mother to her children and was surprised and angry when they grew up to be either spoiled past bearing, or insane, or both. Did Gedge herself see that? It is hard to say.

The whole novel, as evocative and carefully written as it is, makes one feel slightly sick. Someone who read this novel without any prior interest in ancient Egypt would no doubt consider the whole wretched thing well lost to the Persians.

—–

* Which I read right away. I did not have to wait for Tim Curry for IT to give me sleepless nights.

** Which were boring and annoying and I could not see the point. In fact I have yet to see it.

Have not been well lately

December 14, 2013

Better today.  A snowy, delicate day here in the Boston area.  I went to the MFA.

The history of the Amarna Period is a suffocating, sick-making thing to read too much about.  I did not go there to spend time on the Egyptian part of the Ancient World exhibit, although, inevitably, I did anyway.  This piece struck me particularly — the funerary shroud of Tasherytwedjahor.

It is not royal.  It is not what old-fashioned art historians, the kind that I grew up reading,* considered “any good.”  It is syncretic, lacking coherence, full of life and use and real belief.  It is refreshing and sweet and poignant.

—–

* I was a lonely and unlikable child.

 

The Amarna Period: Die! Akhnaten Die! by Joshua Norton (2008-2009)

December 11, 2013

What historical fiction is for is not, in fact, to tell the story of what happened in the past. It is for telling the story we want to hear – about the way we believe things were among men and women in a plainer, starker time, when we were not prevented from ourselves. The more keenly an author or artist realizes this, the better.

Die! Akhnaten Die! is a set of 20 consecutive woodcuts that retells the story plainly, wordlessly, in a mythical Wild West. It is as simple and bare as possible. Here, the story told is Man against the Gods, a skeleton-headed rabble of undead. Man succeeds, then Man is destroyed, and all must burn.

Go and see it; it will take you no time at all.  It is, I think, going to be my favorite of however many of these works I come upon.

This is a cat photo on the internet

December 10, 2013

Image

My mother sent it along.
I miss the cat, I do.  What I didn’t realize I missed so much is the sight of the spines of those books.  Those books have been in and about my parents’ house since I was a girl.  
Eyelids of Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men, by Alistair Graham.
Fevers, Floods and Faith: A History of Sunflower County, Mississippi 1844-1976, by Marie Hemphill.
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942, by John W. Work et al.
The Northern World: The History and Heritage of Northern Europe, by Fell and Wilson (eds.)

It is a privilege to have such a home somewhere to miss.

The Amarna Period: La reine soleil (2007)

December 10, 2013

Here’s something I can’t review, because I can’t get ahold of it in English. But isn’t it beautiful?

The use of electric blue eyes against dark red skin immediately reminded me of the hero of my favorite cartoon as a child, Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. That was also a French cartoon (Les mondes engloutis) with a great deal of eclectic history, including obvious influence from Amarna-period Egyptian design. I was desperately obsessed with it as a girl, and although it wasn’t of course nearly as good as I remembered, it was certainly good enough to have an impact on another generation of animators. The Youtube comments are full of vicious arguments about whether the blue eyes are evidence of whitewashing by the animators. For now, I will try to believe the animators were thinking of Spartakus.

Although the plot of this one is supposed to be based on a Christian Jacq novel, I have a hard time imagining how faithful it could be. The one Jacq novel that I have tried was dense and chewy, hardly a thing of animated splendor, but I haven’t been able to read La reine soleil in English. The few reviews I find in English suggest it’s more effervescent.

This movie features Ankhesenamun (called Akhesa) as an off-brand Disney princess of the Spunky variety. Tutankhamun is the foil/love interest. There’s magic and moonlight chases and it all looks like good fun. It would not be good fun in the least if a swaybacked young Tutankhamun was hobbling around on a walking stick, as we know he did, instead of climbing into hollow statues and running across rooftops and similar. I’m also interested to see how exactly the movie handles a romance between half-siblings, which the two of them most likely were – but my guess is, it doesn’t.

In any case, it looks lovely, and I would probably even sit through it in French (which I do not speak) if I could get a legal copy. That’s what I did when I bought a bunch of DVDs of Les mondes engloutis. I told you – obsessed.