Tag: Amarna Period

The Amarna Period: Why the hiatus?

May 18, 2014

I ran out of books and works that seemed, for lack of a better word, fair to criticize.  There is no shortage of Amarna Period novels published on Amazon and/or Smashwords.  There is also a good deal of . . . well, of this kind of a thing.  But there is so little that is critically valuable to say about such things.  The word “sucks” is not, I am afraid, critically valuable in all matters.  People love a good hatchet-job, of course, but hatchet-jobs are only required when there is some kind of need to punch upward — to debunk nonsense before it gets very far. 

I am looking for more books and works to review as part of the fictional historiography of the Amarna Period.  I am particularly interested in the Broadway musical Nefertiti, which died quickly and was briefly resurrected about ten years ago, but I can’t get ahold of a good cast recording.  But until I find something worth mentioning, I must keep my lips closed.

The Amarna Period: Akhnaten, by Philip Glass (1984)

March 7, 2014

Due to my old-fashioned habit of putting CDs in wallets and then saving those wallets with my college mementos, I found my copy of Glass’s Akhnaten, and I was able to give it a listen while working today.

I remembered why I didn’t take to it years ago — I got tired of the four notes.  Thank you!  A little Philip Glass humor for you, there.  Now that that’s out of the way, I have to admit that I appreciate the work, but as a Glass piece, not an interpretation of the Amarna Period.

Was there ever a composer better named than Glass?  His pieces are so clear, cool, prismatic.  Akhnaten functions as a splendid example of his work, and an excellent listen when you are otherwise occupied.  As a retelling of the Amarna Period, however, it is ultimately unsuccessful.  Due to the use of ancient languages for the singers, which sounded so cool to me when I ordered the CDs, the cast are cut off, remote from the listening audience.  They are as much as singing bas-reliefs or statuary themselves.  Yet the music is distinctly modern, lacking influence from middle Eastern styles that might themselves echo ancient music, so they lack even this verisimilitude.  Moreover, the stylized retelling of the story lacks any touch of madness.  The tangled, suffocating family tree of the Pharaohs must serve as a major element of any retelling of the whole story of Akhenaten’s reign.  Without this human folly, Akhnaten is almost divorced from the heart of its subject.

The Amarna Period: Out of the Black Land, by Kerry Greenwood (2011)

February 6, 2014

One of my problems is that I am an essentially kind person. Or, to put it more baldly, I am a complete creampuff. I have found many more novels and short fictions of the Amarna period than I can bear to review. They are generally self-published and redolent of Dark Intrigue and romance and so forth. I don’t like to punch down. There seems little point in informing the world that a terrible self-published historical novel is in fact terrible. Most of everything is terrible. The world is awash in godawful books. A review that pans a book should at least have a reason for panning that book. The reader should require warning against the book for some reason – the book is overly publicized, perhaps, or the author is pushing forth a series of ideas that only seem to stand up.

Why do we write historical novels? Why do we read them? People want to see the past as it truly was – or rather, they want to see it as they believe it was, which is generally through a quartz-thick lens of their own historical perspective, from their own point in time. What fascinates me about reading and reviewing historical fiction is the possibility of finding an author who uses their own historical perspective transposed skillfully onto an extrapolation of the past. Mary Renault, for example, used a certain bitter British toughness to bring the ancient world to life in this way.

Out of the Black Land has an extremely promising beginning, with a sweet, well-drawn gay romance that will center the rest of the book. The gay romance does in fact have a basis in what we know of Egyptian society. What doesn’t is most of Greenwood’s other ideas. She rewrites the Amarna period to feature a female-only cult of the Phoenix, led by Nefertiti. In the book, the Atenist religion is otherwise misogynist, and Akhetaten was a terrible place to be a woman. Of all the strange conjectures I’ve read about the period, this seems the least likely. The book furthermore suffers from that odd slipperiness of characterization that appears when an author posits that people can just go right on ahead and have sex with people they like, of any gender or status, and be happy to forget about it later. It does not measure up.

This is the sort of ridiculous book that is a delight to read, easy to eat up, and for that reason alone I might recommend it. It certainly got me to try Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher detective series, which was fun right up until I got sick of the Honourable Mary Sue running rings around all the policemen in Australia. Again, we cannot best history. We can only do our best to see it as well as our perspective allows us.

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.

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.

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.

The Amarna Period: The Maya Papyrus by Richard Coady

December 8, 2013

The Maya Papyrus by Richard Coady is an ebook available for only $3.20 at present.  I decided to buy it before I finished the sample.  At one point in this book, I was paging through my Kindle with one hand while stirring pasta sauce for dinner with the other.  That, my friends, is engaging fiction.  
In this novel, Akhenaten is shown as a madman, at first a pitiful, acromegalic child and then a cruel, bitter man, reliant upon secret police and a culture of fear.  Coady has a gift for depicting the inner lives of men torn by duty, and doubting the heavens.  In Yuya, particularly, he creates an affecting portrait of a man worn down by the demands of his position.  Coady also excels at action scenes, and at the everyday shoves, barks and bites of daily life in ancient Egypt, the bitter and the sweet.  The brief but affecting time spent with Hittite royalty, including the ill-fated Prince Zannanzash, was also excellent.  Coady’s depiction of Tutankhamun as a complex character, not a naif, is also not something I have generally seen in fiction of this time.  
The framing device is an old friend, the confessional false document (by which I do mean a plot device, and not a fake ID).  Personally, I am very fond of false documents, and write them all the time for my own fiction, but they slip easily into anachronism, especially so for ancient times.  We lack documentary evidence for a first-person narrative of candor and descriptive ability until much, much later, which is why that whole bicameral mind business got any traction.  Still, as I say, I enjoy false documents more than otherwise, and expect them to have some flaws.
Where The Maya Papyrus falls down is in the plotting.  At nearly every turn in The Maya Papyrus, the Most Villainous Thing is done by the Most Villainous Character.  Eventually, you think, the Most Villainous Character can’t possibly get away with the Most Villainous Thing again, can he?  And he does!  More brazenly than he did the time before! 
Half of the characters don’t have much agency to begin with, because they’re women – a very strange notion to have about the Amarna Period, or about ancient Egyptian women in general.  Every single woman in this book is either passive or insufferable.  Only one woman in Coady’s book seems to have any driving ambition of her own, and that is Thuya, the mother of Tiye and Ay.  She is depicted as a domineering nag whose only concern is for the propagation and power of her family.  To be fair, that is probably an accurate assessment of her, and of most highly-placed women at any given royal court.  
But why is Thuya the only woman in this book who decides to want anything?  None of the royal women in this story – not the prominent Tiye, not the smiting Nefertiti, not Ankhesenamun who plotted to place a Hittite prince on the throne beside her* – has a single idea about governance or religion on her own.  All of them, according to Coady, originally came from one or another of the men beside her.  To imagine that this happened in the Amarna Period, out of all eras of Egyptian history, is to cut yourself badly on Occam’s Razor.  
Nonetheless, I recommend this book, and I dare say I’ll go with Coady’s next as well, which is to be set in ancient Greece.  If you need to read an absorbing, intrigue-packed book about ancient Egypt, and you need to get it right now on your iPhone, this one is here for you.

—–
* Unless she didn’t do that, but in that case, either Nefertiti or her daughter Meritaten probably did it.

The Amarna Period: Nefertite, regina del Nilo (1961)

December 7, 2013

To start with: I will admit I am That Guy.  I am a lady, but nonetheless I am That Guy who, at any given ancient historical film, says, that’s not how it worked! They were using clay tablets for that, not papyrus or The nemes headress was for royalty only or She didn’t marry him, she married… In any case, it’s irritating of me.
For this movie, I hardly want to bother.  Sure, it’s a wildly inaccurate retelling of history, but then the flaxseed pita with American cheese I had for lunch is a wildly inaccurate sandwich, and who cares?  The point is not to be accurate; the point is to get the job done.
This 1961 film from Italy (see it here if you want) is a basic sword-and-sandal movie of the time.  I am reminded of what TV’s Frank once said about the TV movie Stranded in Space: “Let’s face it: People need to kill time – it’s human nature. And for anyone watching TV on the night it was first broadcast, Stranded In Space did indeed kill time. A whole two hours!”  That is what Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile did – killed time, provided jobs, put butts in seats, moved the economy along in its own little way.  Myself, I cannot say I do as much.
The plot centers on Tumos, a sculptor – there was a historical Thutmose the sculptor in the Amarna Period, which suggests that someone involved at some point read a book.  In any case, Tumos the sculptor is naturally best friends with Prince Amenophis, but what Tumos does not know is that Amenophis is going to marry the woman he loves, and she doesn’t know that either, and she also doesn’t know that she’s going to become Queen Nefertiti, because her evil father, whom she doesn’t know is her father . . .
Anyway, it is ridiculous throughout, and not in a campy or delightful way; it all becomes fairly dull in the middle.  Vincent Price does show up to do some quality Vincent Pricing as the High Priest, though, so there is that.  Interestingly enough, you can see that they couldn’t bring themselves to cast anyone who looked like Akhenaten as Akhenaten, and went with the basic ’60s-man looks of Amedeo Nazzari, who maybe had a longer chin than most guys, but only if you squinted.
In conclusion, if you want to experience being a sick child at home sometime in the late 1960s watching the matinee show that was the only bearable thing to stare at on one of the three channels you could get, Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile is indeed one of your options, but I don’t particularly recommend it.

The Amarna Period: an ongoing fictional historiography

December 7, 2013

Like most anyone who asked themselves why King Tut was only ever a boy-king, I have had a fascination with the Amarna Period of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty since small times.  I’ve decided to seek out novels, films, or other literature dealing with the crisis of the Amarna Period – that is, the late reign of Pharaoh Amunhotep III, his son Akhenaten the religious reformer, and his succession – and review them.
There are a great deal of books, many of them bad, some of them merely outdated, and I dare say I will never get tired of them.  Personally, I think there should be more films.  Why don’t we see nearly as many screen depictions of the Amarna Period as we do, say, the Tudors?  I should think it offers as much, if not a great deal more, to appeal.  Instead of poorly-bathed white people in badly heated castles, all backstabbing each other for the attentions of fat, rotten old Harry, you can have bright sun and golden palaces and characters in various states of bejeweled shirtlessness.  You can even examine the same disputes over the power of Church in State.  Is Akhenaten a mystic visionary or a tyrant, a Mad King Ludwig or a Kim Il-sung?  Is Nefertiti a politician or an opportunist – an Evita or an Imelda?  Is Ankhesenamun a pawn, a traitor, or in control of her own destiny?
All these things, we are in no position to know, and barring further discoveries, we never will.  That is why they will be endlessly examined in fiction, and why I will endlessly read about them.  What draws me to read and to write historical fiction is that, where we do not faithfully tell the stories of the past, we are telling instead stories about ourselves; and those, though inadvertent, are no less of interest to me.