Latin Tudors

[ricardienne]

Book Review: Song of the Nile by Stephanie Dray. This is the sequel to Lily of the Nile, and takes Cleopatra's daughter, Cleopatra Selene, from young adulthood through her marriage to Juba, the client king of Numidia and the early years of her reign, as she negotiates with Augustus and tries to regain her ancestral throne in Egypt.

I am arguably one of the worst people for this book, because I care very deeply about a completely different, slightly overlapping set of trivia about this period and place. It is very hard for me not to judge this book on its depiction of Vergil, for example, (that sound you hear? The gnashing of my teeth). But I shall try to put that out of my mind, discussing instead things that are of general interest. (But before I do that, one more tiny nitpick: Dray has her characters call Parthians "the Parths" as, apparently, an ethnic slur. And this just doesn't work for me at all, because the Parthians are properly Parthi, that is, you can't shorten the name any further because it's already a monosyllabic stem! Even if Romans formed diminutives (whether affectionate or contemptuous) by shortening, which they didn't. Seriously, what's wrong with parthiculi or parthelli? OK, consider that nit picked. Back to our regular programming.)

The audience for this must be YA. But there's some pretty heavy stuff -- (semi-graphic) rape (of a minor), internalized victim-blaming, extremely messed up sexual politicking, the virgin/whore dichotomy, not to mention incest, but that's the healthiest relationship in the book, honestly-- and the complexities aren't morally signposted the way they usually are in YA. Either it's careless and irresponsible, or it demands a high level of critical thought from the reader.

I don't really know what spoilers one should give with historical fiction. On the one hand, yes, the broad outline is fixed. On the other hand, if you don't happen to be up on your history of the last couple decades of the first century BCE, the plot isn't really any more fixed for you than the plot of Hamlet or Oedipus the King is fixed for someone who isn't familiar with those stories. And it's no easier to find out whether Selene ever returned to Egypt than it is to find out whether Hamlet ever killed Claudius (and the former is a much more obscure piece of trivia than the latter!).


There is a wonderful review of this on Amazon, a genius review, that likens it to Star Wars. Aptly, because it doesn't really matter that this is historical fiction and that's science fiction. It's also a hilarious review, because we all know that historical fiction shouldn't (for some reason) be evaluated as if it were 'just' fiction and as if the author could control the plot. But arguably, the 'constraints' of history give historical fiction a lot of license: to break standard plot and character constraints on fiction, for example. To have as a protagonist the hereditary avatar of a goddess whose cult of kindness, freedom, and sex-positivity is persecuted by the ruthlessly self-centered Emperor and his Empire of Patriarchal Brutality, and for basically nothing to happen. Rome almost goes to war with Parthia and invades Meroe (but comes to terms in both cases); Augustus almost forces Selene to use her Isis magic to win his wars (but the wars don't happen); Selene almost persuades Augustus to divorce Livia and marry her (but at the last minute she rejects him). There are all of these extremely recognizable plot elements, staples of genre fiction, but they don't go anywhere, and they recede way into the background compared to the character study we get of Selene. Granted, this is the second book in a trilogy, and second books in trilogies are notoriously just treading water in any genre -- including ancient epic, by the way: all those duels in the middle of the Iliad, or the battles in the third quarter of the Aeneid. Or the random sailing around in Argonautica 2 after the Lemnian women (Argonautica 1) and before Colchis (Argonautica 3.

But Dray also has tried to make up for the lack of action and maybe the relative unfamiliarity of Augustan Rome qua setting for historical fiction by turning this into the the standard Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn plot, with Augustus looking increasingly like an obsessive and emotionally-stunted womanizer Henry VIII, while Selene plays Anne, as she realizes that she has to seduce Augustus with the promise of a son in order to get Egypt back. Dray carries this quite far, setting up an alternate history scenario in which Augustus divorces Livia to marry Selene, crowns her queen of Egypt, and, presumably, reopens the civil wars when he is opposed by Agrippa and Tiberius. Ultimately only Selene's personal growth, spurred on by her brother and lover Helios, and her growing affection for the kingdom of Mauretania, where she and her husband Juba have been set up as client kings, persuades her that a kingdom she hasn't seen since she was a child isn't worth compromising herself and what she values and plunging the world into another war. And thus history is saved. One very standard historical fiction plotline (the Tudors) is imported as a foil that keeps threatening to drag this historical fiction into alternate history -- kind of neat, or kind of derivative?

But let's talk about that Augustus and those Romans. One of the things that Stephanie Dray gets to do is force us to confront in full narrative form things that historians don't as a rule think about, because they just lead us to a black hole of OH {HISTORY} NO. Like that notice in Suetonius about Livia procuring virgins for Augustus, which resulted in the rape of Selene's servant Chryssa in the previous book, and plays into Augustus's rape of Selene early in this one. It's horrible and horrifying (and I actually had to put the book down for a bit after that chapter.) It's obviously salutary to remember just how alien/brutal/unpleasant the Romans were by modern standards (but again, it's a little dishonest to juxtapose them with main characters with anachronistically modern values in some of these areas), and how unexceptional rape and violence were, to the point that Selene seriously considers seducing, falling in love with, and marrying Augustus. Again, there's an interesting effect produced by how tightly we only get Selene's viewpoint, and how the compromises that she contemplates making don't involve questioning a lot of terrible, victim-blaming premises. Historical accuracy and all that, but Selene is in general such an infallible narrator that it's hard to get outside of her (1st century BCE) premises; they require an active, intelligent, critical reader who will question them sponte sua.

When I read Lily of the Nile, I was struck by a couple of things: first, that Selene was presented as an Egyptian princess having to deal with conquest by a foreign power, and not as a Hellenistic royal in a primarily Hellenized system: that is, an occupying powering in Egypt. The second was that with regards to Isiaic religion, a mystic, egalitarian, personal, soteric cult at odds with hierarchical forms of religious practice at Rome, Dray was basically following the same narrative that novelists writing about Christians in the early empire followed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Selene and her Isis faith are essentially sympathetic to modern readers: sexually and socially liberated, believing in gender and social equality, founded on personal devotion and kindness and abhorring most of the evils of the Roman world (slavery, violence, kyriarchy).

With respect to the first, Song is better at depicting Selene as a Hellenistic queen, but Dray completely avoids dealing with how the Egyptian and Greek sides of her identity cohere or might be in conflict (although there are a few places where the more complicated colonial situation intruded and could easily have been included). In regards to the second -- well, it's obviously almost impossible to get at what any ancient religion meant for its devotees, especially when it's appealing to those of low social status. But the tendency to associate some subset of ancient religion -- be it Isis-worship or Christianity -- with modern values generally bothers me. Because, while yes, from the Bacchanals to the Isiaics to the Christians, Eastern mystery cults did provoke crackdowns from the Roman state on the grounds that they fomented social rebellion, it's really unclear what that entailed. And it probably wasn't progressive social ideology as we understand it today.

Which leads me to the general issue I take with Dray: most of what we see makes sense as Selene's point-of-view. But there's no acknowledgement that she isn't necessarily a reliable witness to the social and political realities around her. Sure, of course Cleopatra Selene, a Hellenistic monarch, is going to think of poetry first and foremost as court poetry at the pleasure and propaganda of the monarch, but that doesn't mean that Vergil was actually taking his marching orders directly from Augustus. It makes sense that she can be indignant at Roman (mis)characterization of Egypt, take pride in her status as a 'civilized' Hellenistic royal, and at the same be contemptuous of "Eastern" luxury and servility. But this type of historical fiction tends to promote over-identification with the factual reporting of the protagonist, and it bothers me a bit that a lot of readers are going to come away with a flawed/incoherent view of this historical moment (also: Vergil).

Does that matter? Does historical fiction have an obligation to present the truth? A lot of its force and appeal as a genre comes from the way it can say "this really happened." Or rather, the way it claims to bring a period to life before our eyes. Is it fair to demand that it therefore give a clear representation of that period with all of its social and political complexities in accordance with the latest scholarly consensus? Probably not. I know.

Comments

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

I have not read this book, but this review is awesome.

it bothers me a bit that a lot of readers are going to come away with a flawed/incoherent view of this historical moment (also: Vergil). ...Does historical fiction have an obligation to present the truth?

I don't know, I think it does have such an obligation, and particularly YA fic where it may be the kid's first introduction to whatever-history-it-is. That being said, I'd be satisfied with an Author's Note saying "hey, so, Vergil wasn't really like that..." I think so not least because in thinking of all the historical fic I've read (mostly adultfic, they didn't really have historical YA as such when I was growing up), I could very well have ended up believing some very odd things if not for helpful Author's Notes pointing out the liberties they were taking with history.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

, I'd be satisfied with an Author's Note saying "hey, so, Vergil wasn't really like that..."

There is an author's note on the "factual" liberties (e.g. ages changed, figures who probably wouldn't have encountered each other, the relationship between Selene and Augustus). But otherwise, the author's note (as I think they tend to do in YA novels) is more about claiming accuracy in the depiction of the ancient world. The rhetoric is, "you might not believe it, but in fact it actually was like this!" And so I think that the main character's viewpoint is supposed to be taken as basically objective on the period, especially in things like "daily life" or background events. As you say, it's partly because YA novels have this element of teaching to them that I'm bothered : you can't ever take a single viewpoint character and claim that that character accurately and objectively understands what's going on around them, but it's especially pernicious if you are claiming to give a window into the past.

[achyvi.livejournal.com]

While I would totally give most authors a bit of a pass if they're not totally super up-to-date with whatever scholarly consensus is towards societal complexities etc., since not everyone has the time or interest to do that much delving, I feel like if you're going to go through all the trouble of writing historical fiction, you should at least make a genuine effort to make things as historically accurate as you can, especially if you're involving people who, you know, actually existed and/or are fairly documented. If you want to write fiction and take liberties, then write fiction with original characters and situations and go hog wild! The best example I can think of here is Dune, which has lots of aspects of Earth-like culture, but since it's not Earth, Herbert could do basically whatever he wanted with it and it works (or I remember thinking it worked; ymmv, of course). Or, I suppose, one could kind of meld the two, like what I remember from some instances in The Sandman and Books of Magic comics where historical figures were sometimes involved, generally in passing, but since the entire premise was not making any pretense towards being realistic, one didn't have the same expectations towards what said historical figures were supposed to be like.

I completely exclude romance novels from this, however. You can do your bookish smut however you want!

It would be interesting to see a YA novel that tackled an occupier mentality from that time period and from that specific social station. There are oodles with the whole Hewbrew/Egyptian conflict, natch, but it seems like Rome/Egypt is a viewpoint one doesn't hear too often. Or... now I dunno. Would that be interesting, or would it be a lot of political wrangling (which I know some people find interesting, but that seems a bit tediously cumbersome for a YA offering)?

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

I mean, again, I'm not a good audience for this book, which is actually quite well-researched and historically-accurate, as far as things go. But in the way that popular/high school history is way simplified and lags far behind what's going on in the academy, it's doing a pretty simplistic version of 1st century BCE society and politics, where I want something that tries to use narrative to go into exactly how complicated things actually are.

There are oodles with the whole Hewbrew/Egyptian conflict, natch, but it seems like Rome/Egypt is a viewpoint one doesn't hear too often.

Well, it's complicated, because (to my very rudimentary knowledge) there was a fair amount of cultural continuity (e.g. similar iconographic style, written traditions, priestly families) but after a lot of political instability in the first half of the first millenium BCE, Egypt was conquered by the Persians in the 5th century, then fell to Alexander and, when his empire split up, the Ptolemies, who (4th/3rd century) established a new capital at Alexandria and a Hellenic ruling class. The later Ptolemies were more "Egyptianizing" : trilingual inscriptions like the Rosetta stone, steles and statues in Egyptian style as well as Hellenistic-style statues and coins (the coins are 100% Greek, I think). So by the time of the Roman conquest in 30, "Egyptian" is probably going to mean quite different things for different people. Like in this book, I can totally get the main character thinking of herself as "Egyptian", but there would probably be other Hellenistic rulers and members of the ruling class who would feel that she/they were Greek and just ruling over Egyptians, and members of the Egyptian priestly class with still a different viewpoint. The Romans, to my knowledge, wanted to deal with, basically, the Greek infrastructure in Egypt, and so again that would make a difference in how individuals among the upper class thought about/presented their identities.

[achyvi.livejournal.com]

See, all that about the differing definitions of "Egyptian" seems like it would be really interesting! Of course, that seems like a very much constant difficulty throughout all of history, so maybe it wouldn't be so new on the face of it... but it'd still be cool. I definitely stick with my statement that it's definitely not a viewpoint one hears very often, and, now that I think about it, the whole idea of having to straddle multiple different spheres of societal constructs might actually be right up the typical teenage reader's alley.