Away with the Pharaohs
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The Guardian 20 March, 2004
The House of the Eagle by Duncah Sprott, (480pp, Faber 12.99) is the first instalment in what its author has predictively titled "The Ptolemies Quartet",
a sequence of historical novels that will follow the arc of the Pharaohs through 12 generations from the death of Alexander the Great to the fall of Cleopatra. Sprott's publishers are talking him up as the natural successor to Robert Graves and Mary Renault, both prose magicians who were able to feel their way into cultures which, from the outside, seemed pretty much unreadable: a scattering of signs, surfaces and hot sand. On the evidence of The House of the Eagle, Sprott has that same wondrous ability to shape-shift, merging his authorial voice with that of Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of writing and wisdom, who watches from a distance as the rough-and-ready warriors of the ruling Ptolemy dynasty set about turning themselves into living gods.
The point - and Thoth is very clear on this - is that the Ptolemies are Greeks from Macedon, and entirely alien in outlook, habit and custom to the Egyptians over whom they rule. Boy love, for instance, is their norm, to the point where sex between a man and woman starts to seem slightly seedy, a self-serving way of building dynasties through the production of heirs, spares and marriageable girls. When anyone from this odd, rotten family does try to follow their heterosexual hearts it nearly always ends in tears, not to mention banishment and bloody murder. As teen-agers, Ptolemy Keraunos and his half-sister Arsinoë Beta do the deed, are sent in punishment to opposite corners of the Mediterranean, but still manage to end up 20 years later as husband and wife, with ghastly consequences (both Aristotle and Sophocles hover over Sprott's text like gloomy godfathers).
The Ptolemies, in Thoth's astringent view, are a degenerate bunch. When they are not oiling up each other's muscles, they spend their time decorating favourite crocodiles with priceless jewels, fantasising about their daughters' breasts and simultaneously bargaining with and ignoring their native gods. Homer it is not. Still, they prosper wonderfully, with the patriarch Ptolemy Soter moving from mere Satrap - a glorified salaryman - to Pharaoh, a divine being who will quite possibly live for ever. Sprott is brilliant on the texture of this transformation. The Ptolemies may have followed the breeze from sticky Memphis to coastal Alexandria, but nothing can stop the constant drip-drip of sour-smelling sweat, stinking up the andron where the men live and beading the upper lips of the women who weave and wait in the cellar-like gynaikeion . Everything about this world is available to Sprott: there is no spatter of diarrhoea, cure for sea sickness (swallowing lizard juice), private thought or public bluster to which he does not have access. Just like his alter-ego Thoth, Sprott is an all-knowing pedagogue, able to shrink time and space to make his thick-headed audience understand how one thing leads to another.
The really blistering achievement of The House of the Eagle, though, is the way Sprott manages to keep his readers engaged in the story while disciplining himself to write in a prose style that might be described as "translation-ese". Think back to the very best Latin-to-English exercise you ever managed, and you will have the flavour of how Sprott sounds. For instance: "At first Demetrios tried to storm Rhodes from the landward side, but for some curious reason he did not trouble to close off the harbour, so that Ptolemy was able to send in supplies from the seaward side, his fleet now being fully repaired." The idea of reading nearly 500 pages of this relentlessly flattened narrative - hardly a metaphor or simile in sight - might seem unappealing. But after the first few pages something extraordinary happens, and you find yourself lulled by the story's relentless onward push. Horrific events glide by, all the more ghastly because they barely ripple the surface of the prose. When Keraunos is punished with anal rape, or Arsinoë Beta threatened with being eaten by a horse, or vultures peck contentedly at endless dead eyes, the shock is all the greater because Thoth's sing-song delivery never skips a beat.
For all its feigned transparency, this is a supremely knowing book. Besides the obvious influence of Graves and Renault, you will find nods to Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet and something of the ambition of Midnight's Children . And then, of course, there are all those Penguin translations of Greek and Latin texts half-remembered from school, with their slightly jerky rhythms (there are only so many ways of rendering an ablative absolute into elegant English). Don't, though, be put off by the density of the book's hinterland. The House of the Eagle slips by like a bad dream that leaves you feeling still shaken in the morning. And that is meant as the highest compliment. (Reviewed by Kathryn Hughes)
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