Probably about ten years ago, my dad and I were in a second-hand bookshop in Montpelier, Vermont. It was called Rivendell and I don't remember a lot about it except that it gave me that shivery up-the-back feeling – back then I think I believed books could really contain magic, and I might find one that had an ancient map or a handwritten account of some forgotten crime in the margins.
My dad bought me a book he said he'd read as a teen – Mary Renault's The King Must Die. I was seriously into Greek mythology as any aspiring nerd should be at that age, and my dad told me the book was a retelling of the Theseus myth.
Then as now, I was pretty bad at reading books that were recommended to me. It isn't that I don't believe my friends and relatives when they tell me these books will be good – it's just an inexplicable gut reaction that as soon as I'm told to read a book it plummets to the bottom of my to-read pile. I've dutifully taken that book with me from home to college, to my first apartment, and all the others after it, because my dad gave it to me and because he'd once read it and liked it.
Well, I finally read it. I've been experimentally starving myself of fiction, because I find it hard to write fiction when I'm wrapped in someone else's world. For the last few months I've been reading nonfiction – a biography of Jim Thompson, and a fascinating tale of environmentalism gone wrong – but I've just sent my newest manuscript to my agent and sank my teeth into the first novel I could find: The King Must Die. What a craving.
I found something else inside, that made me remember my childhood longing for exciting relics: an old hotel card, from a place in Greece. Apparently someone in the sixties (when my copy was printed) took it on vacation with him – maybe even to travel the places in the book?
The King Must Die was exactly what I needed. It follows Theseus's life – told in his own words – from his childhood in Troizen through his various wars and heroic deeds, up to the point when he sails home from Crete to Athens but flies the wrong color sails. I found it a surprisingly sophisticated tale, too – not just in Renault's use of real archaeological evidence to make her world real, but also in the attitudes of the characters, many of whom espouse a violent misogyny which she then peels back to reveal a surprising amount of tolerance for people different from themselves. It's a potently masculine book without being woman-hating.
As I read, I wondered why this book would be obscure now, why no one else I'd talked to had ever heard of it, including my college writing and literature professors. It was a visceral book in a decade when books which were considered “literature” were becoming more metatextual, or – in some cases, to be perfectly blunt, deliberately boring. John Updike was writing about suburban ennui and Jack Kerouac was writing about youthful wild adventures...as a cultural commentary. The King Must Die has many excellent literary qualities that make it worth study, but it's also unapologetically entertaining. Unlike many of the other highly respected or controversial authors of the day, she didn't expect the audience to come to her, but instead took the story to the audience. It's not without substance, however; its most powerful message, and its most complex one, is in the title itself: the king must die, over and over again in different ways throughout the entire book, carrying with each death a haunting lesson about what it means to be a leader.
I love Salinger and Cheever and several of Mary Renault's contemporaries who wrote more “difficult” fiction – fiction you had to think about to get into, fiction that wasn't all about making you feel good and giving you a break from reality. It's funny to think of her book coexisting with theirs, though I imagine she was shelved with the juicy genre-fiction books that kept sales churning, and perhaps was found less often in the hands of stoned beat poets in coffee shops. It's definitely a flawed book – sometimes she tries to hard to be poetic and ends up being incomprehensible – but one that I hope doesn't fade to total disappearance.
Monday, April 1, 2013 at 07:50PM ;)
I needed to make something for dessert because a completely mysterious and unknowable force has been eating my chocolate bunny.