The Persian Boy!

Our book today is Mary Renault's 1972 novel The Persian Boy, perhaps her masterpiece and certainly one of the greatest historical novels ever written. At its heart is the story of the young Persian eunuch Bagoas, who features as the briefest footnote in the actual historical accounts we have of Alexander (many of which qualify as historical fiction themselves, but never mind ...). Quintus Curtius Rufus mentions that Bagoas, owing to his exceptional beauty, was first the bed-toy of the Persian King Darius and then the bed-toy of Alexander himself, but we don't hear much more of this boy. There's mention that Alexander's Macedonian troops approved of their leader's choice in teenage boys, and there's a story indicating that preference might have made Bagoas arrogant and pettily vengeful toward Persians who had once offended him. Alexander was not besotted with the boy, despite many latter characterizations to that effect (Oliver Stone's ill-starred recent movie, in which the director's biggest mistake was casting Colin Farrell instead of Tom Hardy, being only the most visible) - indeed, both here and in her excellent The Nature of Alexander, Renault makes a strong case that Alexander was only besotted with two living beings in his entire life, and one of them was a horse (the story of his taming of his dangerous mount Bucephalus is lovingly retold, both in The Persian Boy and in Fire From Heaven):

The old beast threw up its head and whinnied loudly; you could see, then, it had been a good horse once. Suddenly Ptolemy, running like a boy, took its bridle from the Mardian, and loosed it. It broke into a stiff-legged canter, all its foolish fripperies jingling; made straight for the King, and nuzzled against his shoulder.

The King stroked its nose a time or two. He had been standing, it seemed, all this time grasping an apple, and with this he fed it. Then he turned round with his face pressed to its neck. I saw that he was crying.

There seemed nothing, now, with which he could still astonish me. I looked around at the soldiers, to see how they would take it. Beside me, two weathered Macedonians were blinking and wiping their noses.

Through Bagoas' eyes, Renault tells the story of Alexander's march ever eastward, of the hard-fought campaigns and perilous desert-crossings, and of the increasing tensions among Alexander's own men, many of whom had signed on to plunder Persia but were less keen about trying to subdue the entire known world. The horrible culmination of those tensions was Alexander's impulsive murder of his life-long friend and general Kleitos on a night when both of them had typically had too much to drink. It's a dramatic moment worthy of a Jonson or a Dryden, and Renault portrays it gripplingly:

"Here's Kleitos!" he shouted. "Here I am!"

He had come back for the last word. He had thought of it too late, and would not forgo it. It was his fate to be given his wish.

From the doors behind him, a guard came in doubtfully, like a muddy dog. He'd had no orders to keep out the Commander; but he did not like it. He stood spear in hand, looking dutiful and ready. Alexander, checking his stride, stared unbelievingly.

"Listen, Alexander. Alas, ill rule in Hellas ..."

Even Macedonians knew their Euripides. I daresay everyone there but I could have completed these famous lines. The gist of them is that the soldiers do it all, the general gets it all. I don't know if he meant to go on.

A flash of white went to the door, and turned again. There was a bellow like a slaughtered bull's. Kleitos clutched with both hands at the spear stuck in his breast; fell and writhed grunting; jerked in the death-spasms. His mouth and eyes fixed, wide open.

It had been so quick, for a moment I thought the guard had done it. The spear was his.

It was the silence, all down the hall, that told me.

Alexander stood over the body, staring down. Presently he said, "Kleitos." The corpse glared back at him. He took the spear by the haft. When it would not come, I saw him begin the soldier's movement to brace his foot on the body; then flinch and pull again. It jerked out, a handspan deep in blood, splashing down his clean white robe. Slowly he turned it round, the butt on the ground, the point towards him.

Ptolemy has always maintained that it meant nothing. I only know I cried "No, my lord!" and got it away. I took him unready, as he had done the guard. Someone reached over and carried it out of sight. Alexander sank on his knees by the body, and felt over its breast; then covered his face with his bloody hands.

"Oh God," he said slowly. "God, God, God, God."

The sheer confidence embodied in that single word 'presently' is amazing to me. Not one author in a hundred would even see that dramatic opening, much less have the wisdom to so perfectly understate it.

Of course, the novel's also noteworthy for its anxiety-free portrayal of homosexual sex and love, something it shares in common with all the rest of Renault's historical fiction set in the ancient world (or even in the present: her novel The Friendly Young Ladies is a remarkably clear-headed portrait of a contemporary lesbian couple - only The Charioteer dabbles heavily in self-loathing and persecution). In this case we're presented with a muted version of that kind of love - since Bagoas is telling the story, we're never directly privy to Alexander's love, physical or otherwise, for his best friend Hephaistion, although we get plenty of deft and even funny sex-interludes between conqueror and war-trophy:

Alexander took a fancy for me that night. The wound [A. had recently received] opened and I was covered in blood; he just laughed, and made me wash in case the guard thought I'd murdered him. The wound felt easier, he said; no physician like love. It is true that when dry they often fester.

Every single page of The Persian Boy shines with accomplishment and crackles with near-perfect storytelling, and I can attest to the fact that it's just as thrilling on the fiftieth reading as it is on the first. Virtually everything this author wrote is fantastic (for the explicit 'theme' of male love, I think The Last of the Wine is more tender and more true than this present book, but it also lacks the epic resonance), they each deserve their own entry here at Stevereads, but this one stands out even in such distinguished company. I can't urge you strongly enough to take it down from your shelf and finally give it that long-intended read. You'll be glad you did.

Alexander and His Nature!

Our books today are two slam-bang fantastic biographies of Alexander the Great: Peter Green's masterful 1970 volume Alexander the Great and Mary Renault's more emotional, empathetic 1975 volume The Nature of Alexander. Both books do a superb job of assembling and presenting the known facts of Alexander's life and times (they remain the two best works on the subject ever written in English, by my reckoning), and they quite unconsciously form very illuminating counter-points to each other. Unlike many historical subjects, Alexander can bear this kind of multiplicity of interpretation - not only are the accounts of his life less than we would like, but those facts were hospitable to legend even while Alexander was alive - indeed, even while he was still a boy. Then as now, there's a very pleasing sense that none of these accounts might be right - or that all of them might be right at the same time.

Green, the intense classical scholar, treats his sources with rigor and his subject with a cold kind of equanimity:

I have tried, insofar as the evidence would allow it, to strip away the accreted myth, and discover the historical Alexander of flesh and blood - no easy task. His true genius was as a field-commander: perhaps, taken all in all, the most incomparable general the world has ever seen. His business was war and conquest. It is idle to palliate this central truth, to pretend that he dreamed, in some mysterious fashion, of wading through rivers of blood and violence to achieve the Brotherhood of Man. He spent his life, with legendary success, in the pursuit of personal glory; and until very recent times this was regarded as a wholly laudable aim.

Whereas Renault, a novelist who wrote two great fictional works about Alexander, is far more impressionistic, far more willing to extrapolate the personal, lived reality of her subject, as when she imagines his death-scene:

Ever ready to die in war, he must long have been prepared to die in pain, and resolved it should not diminish him. The exhaustion must have shortened his last hours, but it is unlikely at this stage he could have recovered. The necessary suffering he accepted in return for what had been essential to him all his life: to be equal to his legend; to be beloved; and to require it extravagantly, regardless of expense. Whether sustained by pride, by philosophy, by belief in the immortality of his fame or of his soul, he met his end with not less dignity, fortitude and consideration for others than Socrates himself. And he, till he drank the quick painless hemlock, was a healthy man with a long, fulfilled life behind him; Alexander carried it through with a great design in ruins, and in the distress of a mortal sickness.

Our two editions in question today - the Praeger version of Green's book and the big Pantheon hardcover of Renault's - were part of a very welcome trend in the 1970s toward larger, profusely illustrated nonfiction books. Green's photo editor and Renault's have ransacked the ancient and modern worlds, providing slightly differing versions of virtually every image even remotely associated with Alexander (mercifully, both these books being from the '70s, neither one features the sight of Colin Farrell in eye-liner). I like this approach much more than the current crop of hardcover works of history with their marooned little sheaf of photos stuck in the middle. Both these books are visually fascinating, which is always a welcome bonus.

But the true draw is the prose, of course, in both cases - sharp, intelligent prose from both authors, but employed to very different ends. Green wants us to shed the accretion of myth and soft track-lighting that has accompanied Alexander for two thousand years. He never misses an opportunity to cut the diminutive conqueror down to size:

Like most personally austere leaders, he had an ill-disguised contempt for humanity in the mass, and seems to have felt he could manipulate his troops as he pleased simply by indulging their grosser appetites.

Whereas Renault, being more than a little in love with her subject, wants her readers to love him too and is willing to defend him even sometimes against the weight of fact, as in her characteristic aside about his wanton sack of the great palace at Persepolis:

This action is know today by people who know virtually nothing else about him (and who remain more impressed by this outrage to an empty building than by the living holocausts of Coventry and Dresden); fit retribution, if he deserved it, for a man who cared intensely about his good name.

I just the other day re-read both these books back-to-back, and I came away all the more impressed with each of them despite their enormous philosophical differences. Both are readily available in scads of editions (although I happen to think these two are the prettiest), and each in their own way would have pleased Alexander's erratic egotism, although he'd have been shocked by how much both must necessarily indulge in conjecture. He had a horror of being unknown to the future, and reading how different these two intelligent, well-researched treatments of his story are, you suddenly realize just how fragile that story is.

Sick-bed comforts!

Sometimes, when you're not feeling all that good, only a certain type of old friend will serve. When you're walking around town or waiting at an airport or trying to pretend you're not at a poetry reading, your best old book-friends are just who you want to help you out - for me, these are my big guns, the unchanging voices I listen to over and over (I'll spare you all the list, especially since its names are fairly obvious by this point).

But when you're feeling sick, when you're laying on the couch swaddled in blankets and basset hounds, those very best book-friends feel wrong. You worry that in your present condition, you'd be wasting their time (yes, I know that makes no sense - book-people aren't very sensible). No, in such miserable circumstances, you reach for a different kind of friend entirely. Voices at once more casual and more comforting.

My list of such second-tier book-friends is very, very long, but this weekend I reached for five that will serve very well as a thumbnail for all the rest:

The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse is, I suspect, on many and many such a list as this one, and deservedly so: absolutely nobody writes more cheering-up books than he does, and this 1938 classic is, in my opinion, his single best. I have the paperback with the J. C. Leyendecker cover, and this weekend I smiled again to read the adventures of hapless, good-hearted Bertie Wooster and his all-knowing valet Jeeves. The Code of the Woosters involves a vicious little dog, a disastrous flirtation with the M-word, a touchy French cook, and a ghastly little cow-creamer, but no matter how dire the circumstances seem to be, nothing serious is of course ever at stake, as you can tell from the caliber of curses Bertie's feisty Aunt Dahlia calls down upon her foe:

May green flies attack his roses. May his cook get tight on the night of the big dinner party. May all his hens get the staggers. May his cistern start leaking, and may white ants, if there are any in England, gnaw away the foundations of Totleigh Towers.

Strong stuff, as Bertie comments, and I trust I may not be misconstrued when I say the book is full of it.

The Daughter of Time - Naturally, when bedridden, there's nothing that answers quite so well as a murder mystery (I once had an old friend who used to contrive being bedridden, solely to stimulate this feeling); they feel so neat and controlled right when we ourselves are feeling anything but. And this 1951 staple of the genre is quite possibly the best murder mystery ever written, despite being so preposterous it ought to provoke appreciation only for giggles, not craft. It's the story of Inspector Grant, who's laid up in the hospital with a broken leg but can't stop investigating - so he turns his deductive powers to one of the greatest mysteries of British history: what happened to the Princes in the Tower? Did Richard III have his nephews killed so that he could seize the throne? Grant spends a great deal of time reading books of history, and it's a testament to Tey's narrative ability that she makes it all as exciting as a Glasgow car-chase:

He [Grant, of course - the book is very nearly a one-man show] reached for More's History of Richard III. It had as preface a short life of More which he had not bothered to read. Now he turned to it to find out how More could have been both Richard III's historian and Henry VIII's Chancellor. How old was More when Richard succeeded?

He was five.

When that dramatic council scene had taken place at the Tower, Thomas More had been five years old. He had been only eight when Richard died at Bosworth.

Everything in that history had been hearsay.

And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than any other it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Well, OK - that does prompt some giggling, but still - it never fails.

Probably understandably, most nonfiction won't work in circumstances like the ones we're talking about here, but the books of Stephen Jay Gould are happy exceptions - probably because they're largely composed of short columns he wrote for a smart popular audience during the heyday of Natural History magazine, so they're primed to entertain. The first of these volumes, 1977's Ever Since Darwin, has been one of my go-to sick-books for thirty years now, mostly for bright-eyed segments like this one on the growth of the human brain:

But what about our preoccupation with ourselves; does anything about the history of vertebrates indicate why one peculiar species should be so brainy? Here's a closing item for thought. The most ancient brain cast of a primate belongs to a 55-million-year-old creature named Tetonius homonculus. Jerison has calculated its encephalization quotient as 0.68. This is, to be sure, only two-thirds the size of an average living mammal of the same body weight, but it is by far the largest brain of its time (making the usual correction for body weight); in fact, it is more than three times as large as an average mammal of its period. Primates have been ahead right from the start; our large brain is only an exaggeration of a pattern set at the beginning of the age of mammals. But why did such a large brain evolve in a group of small, primitive tree-dwelling mammals, more similar to rats and shrews that to mammals conventionally judged as more advanced? And with this provocative query, I end, for we simply do not know the answer to one of the most important questions we can ask.

The King Must Die - This brawny 1958 historical novel by Mary Renault is now a staple of school reading assignments, so who knows but that it might not become immortal, but my affection for it dates to well before it achieved such deification - although really, like with Wodehouse, I'll reach for any Renault when I'm feeling under the weather. This novel tells the story of wily young teenager Theseus, recasting all his mythological adventures from Edith Hamilton into a authentic-feeling evocation of pre-historical Greece. Renault is a pleasingly subtle writer, and that subtlety is stamped on every page of this great book, including the end of a riveting scene where young Theseus hosts the slightly older king Pylas at an outdoor feast and incites the curiosity of his followers as the night winds down:

The fire crumbled; the ashes grew red and gray with a few sparks of gold; the dogs mumbled their bones full-bellied. As it grew quiet, we leaned and fell to whispering; I could seem more than one of my Minyans lying awake to watch if he would make love to me. We agreed together to press for war that autumn rather than wait for spring ... He laughed and promised. Then we slept; I on my face, because my back was sore. Next morning when we all set off home, he gave me his gold-rimmed cup as a guest gift. The Companions stared, and wondered if they had stayed awake long enough.

See the joy of the intellect at play there? See the winking hints, so entirely adult in a genre that produces so much pap for children? We're told a practical reason why Theseus sleeps face-down, but no other reasons are excluded; we're told his Companions wondered if they'd stayed awake long enough not to miss some lovemaking, but we're not told they didn't miss something - Renault assumes there are some things her readers might like to decide for themselves. It's entirely refreshing, especially when you're curled on a couch lost in effluvia.

Collected Sonnets - that state of being lost in effluvia is conducive to a bit of self-pity, and when you're feeling so inclined, nothing quite caps things off like somebody else's self-pity. And nobody strikes that old lachrymose note quite as beautifully as the great second-rate poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her performances of these sonnets had to be seen to be believed, but even the unaided works drape down upon the reader like a fine shroud:

Not that it matters, not that my heart's cry

Is potent to deflect our common doom,

Or bind to truce in this ambiguous room

The planets of the atom as they ply;

But only to record that you and I,

Like thieves that scratch the jewels from a tomb,

Have gathered delicate love in hardy bloom

Close under Chaos, - I rise to testify.

This is my testament: that we are taken;

Our colours are as clouds before the wind;

Yet for a moment stood the foe forsaken,

Eyeing Love's favour to our helmets pinned;

Death is our master, - but his seat is shaken;

He rides victorious, - but his ranks are thinned.

See? "Our common doom"? I feel better already.

A Gay Fiction Trio!

A young acquaintance of mine who's not yet a writer recently made a comment about the book of a young acquaintance of mine who is finally a writer, saying "the book is a successful example of gay fiction" - which naturally got me thinking! What is gay fiction? What constitutes a successful example of the sub-genre? If it's just the presence of lots of men in close homoerotic relationships, we'd have to include everything from Gilgamesh to The Lord of the Rings - so it can't be that alone.

It seems to me all gay fiction has one thing in common: consciously or unconsciously, it mirrors some aspect of what it's like to be gay at the time it's written. The challenges, the fears, the pleasures, most often and most effectively the neuroses ... all these things are reflected, distorted, blithely discarded, exaggerated in an attempt to give gay readers someplace to go with the part of the reading desire that wants to identify with some image of themselves.

(That desire - to find a place in a book that comfortably resembles a place inside you - actually animates a great deal of fiction, of course; the genres that cater only to that can rightly be called escapist and gently barred from the highest ranks of literature, since those ranks are reserved for books that attempt - again, successfully or not - to sow discomfort in the reader. The best reading is, after all, telepathy - with all the disruption and self-annihilation that implies)

So it must be admitted - even by those of us who like the sub-genre - that most gay fiction is purely escapist these days: boy meets boy, boys get it on, boys rest for a few minutes, boys get it on again, straight boy tormentors get either tormented or boy-seduced, boys get it on some more, etc. The amazing thing about this deplorable state of affairs, the thing that no scoffers should allow themselves to forget, is what a triumph it is for gay fiction to have reached the point where it can be mindless fun. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to find a book like Dorm Porn or Cowboy Lovin' (or Beantown Boys) in a mall bookstore; fifty years ago it would have been a crime. Today, a gay boy lucky enough not to live in a bigoted (i.e. rural) area can walk into such a bookstore, hand over the money he earned turning tricks, and buy - over the counter, as it were - a wide selection of books that present him, at long last, with pure gay escapism. Many Bothans died to bring us to such a point - it's not a thing to be lightly dismissed, however silly the actual content is.

The journey to that point - where both escapist titillation and deeper, more thoughtful reflections are possible in the light of day - is a 20th century thing. The twenty-three centuries before that were far too thick with religious prohibitions and social stigmata for any Western writer to risk an open reflection of gay desires or problems. You have to go back to fourth century Athens to find men openly loving men and suffering no bigotry for it (and jumping forward to the 20th century, you could find that same lack of neuroses in the magnificent novels of Mary Renault, which got away with it by being set in that time The Last of the Wine may very well be the most idyllic portrayal of gay love ever written); after that, it's the rack and the stake and psychology and 're-education camps' ... until Stonewall, Tales of the City, and Brokeback Mountain. Until now.


Even as recently as 1970, most gay fiction found it unimaginable that gay relationships could be legal and open - but there was one famous trailblazer who at least imagined they could be happy. Gordon Merrick's exuberantly written, erotically charged novels would look like anomalies no matter when they happened, but coming as they did at the very beginning of the so-called sexual revolution and claiming all the freedoms of that revolution for homosexuality, they often seem nothing short of revelatory. In 1970 Merrick published The Lord Won't Mind, the first of his books to feature his perfect gay couple, Peter and Charlie. The boys first meet in this book, at the leafy, accepting home of an eccentric (Merrick code for 'loves the gays') aunt, and they've no sooner shaken hands than they're up in their bedrooms, stripping off each other's clothes and pounding away. Merrick's endless descriptions of sex are hugely entertaining for their unflagging enthusiasm, but the real appeal of the books - especially in 1970 - was in their free, healthy attitude toward it all, perfectly captured by Peter and Charle's first post-coital conversation:

"Haven't you ever done anything like this before?" he [Charlie] asked. Peter rolled his head on the pillow in negation, his eyes still closed. "My God, I can't believe it. With your looks, I should've thought everybody would be falling all over themselves after you."

Peter opened his eyes. Tears were in them, and a reluctant, ambiguous plea. "Have you done it before?" he asked.

"Well, sure. Hundreds of times."

"How did you know I was - Did you know it was going to happen with us?"

"I didn't know. I thought it might. I hoped it would."

"I guess I did too, from the minute I saw you, but I tried not to think about it. You're going to have to show me. I don't know how to act. You're going to have to teach me everything."

"That won't be any great hardship," Charlie said with a chuckle. "Just do anything you feel like."

To put it mildly, the world of Charlie and Peter was an utterly unattainable dream for most gay men in the 1970, and to be fair to Merrick, things don't stay quite so perfect for our heroes in later chapters and later books. The specter of bigotry isn't entirely absent from Merrick's books, but confronting that spirit directly, dissecting it, simply isn't on his agenda as a writer. He's more concerned with giving his readers great heaping helpings of wish-fulfillment, sunny days and infinite orgasms with hardly a social restriction in sight.


What a different world presents itself only eight years later, in Andrew Holleran's rightly venerated gay fiction classic Dancer From the Dance! This is surely the greatest novel about unfulfilled gay yearning ever written, with Malone, its beautiful, doomed central character standing in for every key frustration of the age. Holleran's book is a quintessential New York novel, and all through its pages, we get glimpses - glimpses of the kind New York endlessly provides, then and now: handsome businessmen on their way to work, whole lives repressed beneath their cookie-cutter features, swaying pretty boys staggering happily home at dawn from a night gyrating away at dance parties in the city's secret corners, perhaps that one young guy with the evocative face, sitting on a park bench as you crane your neck to see him through the window of your crowded passing bus. Holleran takes us inside the hollow, tortured life of one of those glimpsed young men, Malone, as he at first tries desperately to be 'normal' (i.e. straight) and then abandons himself to the downward whirl of the city's sexual underside. Needless to say, Malone himself is full of yearnings - always for something simpler than he is:

"Isn't it beautiful?" Malone would exclaim as we drove past the girl doing handstands on the lawn, a young woman walking a flock of children down a dappled sidewalk. "Why don't we take a house here next summer instead?" But he knew we wouldn't, and he knew he wouldn't, for even now the drums were in our blood, we sat forward almost hearing them across the bay, and the van raced on through the streets so that the driver could hustle back for another load of pleasure-seekers, so bent on pleasure they were driving right through Happiness, it seemed, a quieter brand of existence that flourished under these green elms. We kept driving right through all that dappled domesticity, like prisoners, indeed, being moved from jail to jail imprisoned in our own sophistication. The truth was the town reminded Malone of his days at boarding school in Vermont; the sight of a football arcing across a green wall of woods made him sigh with a passionate regret. He always looked like a student who has just come in off the playing fields, eyes glowing from an afternoon of soccer. He always looked like that, even in the depths of a subway station, on the dingiest street in Manhattan.

There's plenty of light in Dancer from the Dance but no warmth; this is nostalgia without sentiment, the careful, loving remembrance of unpleasant things. In writing the great pre-AIDS gay novel, Holleran was forever memorializing a setting in which empty carnality was the only substitute available for all that dappled domesticity the narrator affects to scorn.

Shift forward nearly forty years, and what do you find in bookstores? A new series from Running Press called "M/M Romance" - historical romance novels set in a wide variety of time periods (but not, so far, fourth century Athens) featuring love between men ... almost Running Press' commentary on the lack of societal challenges facing such love in contemporary American settings (if this is indeed their rationale, they need to spend more time in Anytown, U.S.A., where there's still plenty of challenge in two men openly loving each other). It would have been perversely pointless to publish such books in 1970, or 1950 - why take a cultural impossibility and compound it? But now, when every high school has a GLBT "alliance" and half the states in the country favor legalizing gay marriage, there's a certain element of dramatic excitement derived from setting stories in ages where homosexuality was almost invariably punished with death.


These "M/M Romances" (an unfortunate series title, not only because it looks weird but also because no male/male passion in the history of the world has ever burned as hot as male/M&M's passion, and what's the point of reminding your readers of that fact, except to make them hungry?) are strongly written and fairly well researched. The one set during the English Civil War has some howlers, but "False Colors," set during the so-called "Georgian Age of Sail" in 1762, has been more soundly fact-checked. It's the story of prim, straitlaced John Cavendish, commander of the HMS Meteor, who begins to have passionate feelings for his Lieutenant "Alfie" Donwell and fights those feelings for convincingly-portrayed cultural reasons. The book's author, Alex Beecroft, lets his nautical metaphors rather sweep him away during some of the stormier interpersonal scenes, but on the whole the characters ring true, especially over-rationalizing Cavendish, who encounters Alfie after the latter has been imprisoned and almost lets his desires overcome his discretion:

Jealousy provided a thousand bitter words. You didn't give me a chance! You were gone before I had time to think. You knocked down the foundations of my world and then disappeared! What did you expect of me? And more base than that - a petty cry of pain of which he was ashamed, but could not silence: Do you know how much I've given up for you? Swallowing, he pushed them back down into the darkness, concerned instead for the man before him. Alfie's every gesture spoke of endurance, empty of joy. He stood patient in the limpid light, quiet, placid as a horse well broken to the bit. Words died on John's tongue, inadequate.

There was no prudence in the way he worked his fingers into Alfie's fists. When they opened, obediently, he lifted them, one after the other, to kiss the palms. Pure folly, a risk to name and fame and life itself, but oh, it felt so right. He hauled down the false colors under which he had been sailing all his life, and exchanged them for true.

As you can see, we've skipped right over Andrew Holleran and circled back to the over-the-top lush confessionals of Gordon Merrick. Only False Colors isn't painting an idyllic picture of what can't happen in the present day (where, in the modern British navy, Cavendish and Alfie could probably have a shipboard wedding) - it's taking us back two hundred years so its story of gay love can feel illicit and dangerous again. It's hard to know whether or not to call that progress, but one thing is noteworthy: when Running Press first distributed these books, they were coded for the normal, sprawling Romance section of retail bookstore chains. Weeks later - no doubt after vocal commentary from customers and bookstore staff - several of those stores moved the books into the expected ghetto for such fare, the dimly-lit recesses of the Gay & Lesbian Section ... but for a while there, the respectable soccer-moms of Columbus and Grosse Point were seeing sultry Commander Cavendish right alongside their ravished heiresses. And that is a kind of progress.

A Heaping Helping of Historical Fiction!

A list has been suggested, called for, even implored, and we here at Stevereads never turn away from a good juicy list. We consequently fired off the appropriate memos and admonitions to the pertinent research departments, telling them to postpone our upcoming Best and Worst Books of 2007 listings (and, it need hardly be added, cancel their own squalid Holiday plans, which were never all that important in the first place), and we've come up with a list - not a definitive list, since such a thing would be beyond the scope of even this site, but a meaty list all the same. Here are thirty-odd kick-ass historical novels, books which, should you encounter them on the bargain carts at the Strand, will suck you in and keep you enthralled from first page to last. These are some of the best books historical fiction has to offer, offered in no particular order:

1. Child of the Morning by Pauline Gedge - the evocative tale of the great Egyptian pharaoh Hatchepsut, a woman in the ultimate man's job.

2. Clodia by Robert DeMaria - a bouncy, chatty novel about Catullus in Republican Rome; the history here is rock-solid, and even the sensibilities are almost perfect.

3. The City of Libertines by W.G. Hardy - another great novel of Caesar and Catullus and the fall of the Roman Republic.

4. The Emperor's Virgin by Sylvia Fraser - a lively, literate look at the lamentable reign of the Roman emperor Domitian.

5. I, Claudius by Robert Graves - well of course this book had to appear on the list, even though it basically sucks as a work of fiction, because it's so successfully anecdotal and conversational - reading it feels like coming to some kind of historical-fiction home.

6. Gold for the Caesars by Florence Seward - chronicling the sad reign of the emperor Domitian - and the new dawn of the military emperor Trajan.

7. Mr. Midshipman Easy by Captain Frederick Marryat - a rattling good naval yarn set in the Napoleonic, although this place could equally be given to any of Captain Marryat's novels, all of which are as fine and stirring now as when they were written.

8. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth - set mostly in colonial America and featuring a wildly tangled plot and a hilarious, scandalous version of Captain John Smith.

9. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian - another novel set in the Napoleonic era, but this one is like nothing else on this list, as odd and scintillating historical novel as we here at Stevereads have read in many a year.

10. The Antagonists by Ernest Gann - the gritty, heavily detailed story of the first century Roman siege of the Jewish fortress Masada.

11. Entered from the Sun by George Garrett - the greatest of George Garrett's three great historical novels, and also the best novel about Christopher Marlowe (beating even Anthony Burgess' twilight work Dead Man in Deptford) ever written, even though Marlowe appears nowhere in it.

12. The Kingdom of the Wicked by Anthony Burgess - a panoramic view of the first century, centering on a fledgling Christianity and a fumbling, corrupt Roman Empire, this is basically the Acts of the Apostles as written by a chain-smoking drunken word-besotted genius.

13. The Right Line of Cerdric by Alfred Duggan - a richly realized novel of Alfred the Great, by far the best fictional treatment of that enigmatic figure - although all of Duggan's works could stand here with equal justification.

14. The Alexandrian by Martha Rofheart - of all the innumerable novels written about Cleopatra, this is the best, the one that comes closest to capturing accurately the characters of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and Marc Antony.

15. The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey by John Dickson Carr - the veteran mystery-writer turns his hand to historical fiction spread lightly on a bed of tightly-researched fact, all revolving around the mysterious death of Edmund Berry Godfrey, which was used by the odious authors of the so-called 'Popish Plot' to further their witch-hunt. Never was such a horrible disgrace so engagingly written-of.

16. Three Years to Play by Colin MacInnes - A really good, vigorously archaic novel of Shakespeare, full of 'thees' and 'thous' and enough no-longer-current contractions to satisfy the most romantic among you. Sorry, amongst ye.

17. Shakespeare by John Mortimer - Here is John Mortimer, creator of the immortal 'Rumpole of the Bailey,' writing the novel to a mini-series that never amounted to much despite starring Tim Curry and a roster of other notables. This is the best, most sensitive novel about Shakespeare ever written.

18. The Man on a Donkey by H.F.M. Prescott - Quite simply the greatest Tudor novel yet written. Not to be missed.

19. The Conspiracy by John Hersey and The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder - no sense dealing with these two books separately; they're both highly enjoyable, they're both epistolary, and they both deal with the people and the events leading up to the assassination of Caesar.

20. Imperial Governor by George Shipway - the feelingly-narrated story of the sorry folk who were unlucky enough to be in charge during Boadicea's ill-fated revolt against patriarchal Roman rule.

21. The Sheriff of Nottingham portrayed in 'Robin Hood Prince of Thieves' by a ham-on-wry Alan by Richard Kluger - a thoroughly unpretentious and involving look at the man most of you will know as the villain who plagues heroic Robin Hood (inimitablyRickman, gleefully snarling lines like "no more table scraps for widows and orphans - and Christmas is cancelled!") but who features in this book mainly as a good man with the singular misfortune of being an English official in the reign of King John.

22. Jem (& Sam) by Ferdinand Mount - a fun and frolicsome (and bounteously intelligent) Restoration romp starring Samuel Pepys and our main character Jem, an actual historical personage and lineal ancestor of our author, who is here utilizing a lifetime of learning to have his fun.

23. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - calling this magnificent work the best western ever written automatically demeans it, even though such a statement is nothing less than the truth. In fact, this story of two redoubtable Texas Rangers leading a cattle-drive from Texas to Montana is one of the most instructive and powerful novels written in America in the 20th century. Alone of all the books on this list, it's required reading for all Americans.

24. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara - an electrifying, kinetic recreation of the Battle of Gettysburg, in which the entire cast North and South (all of whom, unprecedently for historical fiction, are actual historical figures) are brought completely to life.

25. Romola by George Eliot - the great novelist tries her hand at Renaissance historical fiction, with generally admirable results. The Italian Renaissance still hasn't received the great fictional epic it deserves, but Romola comes closer than any of the other contenders.

26. Salaambo by Gustave Flaubert - Another famous novelist trying his hand at historical fiction, in this case the theater of ancient Rome. Flaubert here is at his most gaudy and melodramatic - you'll feel guilty reading it, but you'll eat it up nonetheless.

27. Deus Lo Volt! by Evan S. Connell - Here one of America's greatest writers throws himself into the tone and mindframe of the great Crusade chroniclers - a supremely odd concoction that at first had its packagers calling it history and now has them styling it as fiction, although in reality this remarkable book isn't quite either. Connell has been subverting genres his entire career, and this amazing book is no different. Read it and be amazed.

28. The Winds of War/ War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk - this two-volume opus is the final word on the 20th century prewar era (with all of the war thrown in).

29. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault - Almost her best novel and certainly her longest, the heartfelt story of Bagoas, the Persian castrati who was captured into the train of Alexander the Great and, according to our lady

30. The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault - We end with Renault's best work, a thoroughly adult and intelligent love story between two men, taking place against the tumultuous backdrop of the Peloponnesian War. This is first-rate, beautiful writing combined with impeccable historical research to yield a book you won't want to end.

a book-list!

Sooner or later, I'll get around to posting a sooper-dooper ultra-definitive historical fiction list, one that will guide you all in every time-period and every seeking mood. But in the meantime, I thought I'd fire off a quick sub-list of baubles to tempt the mind's eye!

1. Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault - certainly all her historical novels (except Funeral Games alas) would be on my sooper-dooper list, but I thought I'd plug this particular book, about the pre-Great years of Alexander ... it's crammed with very fine, very delicate, very KNOWING prose that only gets deeper the more you know about Alexander.

2. Clodia by Robert DeMaria - a very good evocation of Republican Rome and the passions of young love-smitten Catullus.

3. The Right Line of Cerdic by Alfred Duggan - a meticulous and ultimately stirring novel of Alfred the Great (the only British monarch to retain that 'the Great,' although I can think of four others who deserved it entirely more)

4. The Physician by Noah Gordon - a rattling good yarn about a boy who grows into the medical profession (such as it was) in 11th century England ... no great writing, but enough potboilery to fill the rainiest afternoon

5. The Emperor's Virgin by Sylvia Fraser - a surprisingly deep and well-written book set against the backdrop of the reign of Domitian, a genuine little find of a book (the operative word being 'find' in the verbal sense, since even the Internet has its limits)

6. The Floating Book by Michelle Lovric - set in 15th century Venice (which is VERY accurately evoked, wonderfully so - when I get around to it, I'll also be posting a 'Venetian fiction' list too), but revolving around a precious manuscript of the aforementioned Catullus. The prose is a little on the purple side, but the book is a delight.

7. Bloody Season by Loren Estleman - here we have writing of the very first order, in a novel about the OK Corral gunfight and its aftermath. Estleman is fantastic, most of his book are hugely worth reading, but this one just might be the best one.

8. Germanicus by David Wishart - a smart, sassy take on the events surrounding the death of Germanicus - events so well covered in Robert Graves' I, Claudius that you'd think the mine was played out ... and you'd be wrong! Wishart is funny and gleefully anachronistic, and somehow it all works ... snap him up before his American importer loses heart and decides to pull him from your Barnes & Noble shelves.

9. Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo - a huge, ample historical novel about the title character that manages to be hugely moving if you stick it out to the end ...

10. Well, I started with a book that needs no trumping, one that would be on my sooper-dooper list anyway, and I'll end with one the same: George Garrett's Entered from the Sun, which desperate publisher flacks have always said is a novel about Christopher Marlowe. In reality the novel - stirring, intelligent, hugely beautiful - is about a handful of lives for one reason or another torn apart by the DEATH of Marlowe (who never appears in the book). It's (of course) out of print, but it's well worth your attention.


And there you have it! A quick run-down of 10 really good historical novels! I WILL write up the sooper-dooper list sometime soon, but in the meantime, these will have to satisfy you, thou legion of hungry jackals!

More lists to follow!