Rating: 4* of fiveThe Publisher Says: In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts. Born into a stern farming family on the island of Keos, Simonides escapes his harsh childhood through a lucky apprenticeship with a renowned Ionian singer. As they travel through 5th century B.C. Greece, Simonides learns not only how to play the kithara and compose poetry, but also how to navigate the shifting alliances surrounding his rich patrons. He is witness to the Persian invasion of Ionia, to the decadent reign of the Samian pirate king Polykrates, and to the fall of the Pisistratids in the Athenian court. Along the way, he encounters artists, statesmen, athletes, thinkers, and lovers, including the likes of Pythagoras and Aischylos. Using the singer's unique perspective, Renault combines her vibrant imagination and her formidable knowledge of history to establish a sweeping, resilient vision of a golden century.My Review: This book was a re-read, I feel sure, since I was hooked on her stuff in the Seventies...yet I felt curiously unfamiliar with the book. I recalled some scenes, such as Simonides returning from home to rejoin his master Kleobis in their Samian exile; I found a lot of the book to be less clear in my mind than most I've read before and choose to re-read.I put this down to the fact that as I was reading it in 1978 or 1979, I was disappointed that the main character wasn't gay and wasn't even very excitingly drawn. (Can you tell I was a youth who loved the Alexander novels, The Bull from the Sea, The King Must Die, The Persian Boy? Especially The Persian Boy, quite salacious!)But, in the end, as a fifty-year-old who's tastes have matured (ha), I liked this book quite a lot. It was a lovely tale of how the world has always judged others by their looks and not their deeds or talents. It presents itself as a harmless historical novel, and examines human nature minutely, unsparingly, and with what can only be called a jaundiced eye. Renault was clearly irritated at the follies of mankind. It shows in such lines as this, spoken by Simonides in his old age: "I have never desired young maids, preferrinig ripe fruit to green; maybe it is because I feared their laughter when I was a boy." (p262, Pantheon hardcover edition 1978)Still scared of the masses. Still subject to the fears and foibles of youth. Wiser? Renault is too good a writer to make you take her view. She tells her story, and leaves you to take her meanings.Sheer pleasure, friends, and all too seldom met, when a storyteller trusts you to read, and read again, and reach your own conclusions. Read it and conclude, and you won't be sorry. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I don't usually read historical novels. They can be riddled with inaccuracies or simply historically otiose. This book, however, really wowed me. Renault follows the life of the ancient lyric poet, Simonides. Our historical knowledge of Simonides' life is thin, so Renault has to fill in a lot of gaps. Sometimes the events she postulates are not evidenced by our historical knowledge, but they always seem plausible within the narrative, and often also justify their absence from the historical record (e.g. a young Simonides spent time on Samos during the reign of Polycrates, but was never noticed by the tyrant or invited to perform in his court).Large parts of the novel follow events that we couldn't possibly know, such as the details of his upbringing or his dalliance with common prostitutes. Other parts of the novel cover events that are the topic of much historical conjecture, such as the strange events surrounding the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Some familiarity with ancient history and literature makes this book more fun. Seeing Cyrus the Great, Pisistratus, and Anacreon through the eyes of the narrator almost rivals the joy of getting into the head of Simonides himself.The book gives a fair representation of many aspects of historical reality, and although it is based on scholarship that is dated by now, it still covers more than you might get from a survey of the 'great men' of the time. Those who read history usually read about the leaders and the generals, which this book doesn't ignore. But what does life look like for the traveling artist? Or for the lowly shepherd? What did an ancient festival mean to the participant? These are questions that this book tackles and its answers seem more meaningful than scholarly debates about the social function of ancient ritual.Renault makes her characters sensible to us by endowing them with many of the psychological and social characteristics that we identify with today. In some cases this may misrepresent the past. For example, a shepherd mentions sacrificing a goat for good luck in secret because he wanted to avoid reproach from his stingy estate owner. But how could you secretly sacrifice an animal? Once it is sacrificed, you would have a lot of meat to share with the community. Did he just discard the meat like a wasteful modern? It seems implausible that there were covert sacrifices of animals as large as a goat. This is a small critique though. More often the book succeeds in painting a picture of the ancient world that makes sense to modern eyes. And those are the only eyes that we can use to view the ancient world.
What do You think about The Praise Singer (2003)?
Renault has a beautiful way with descriptions of land and society, and effectively creates the social, political, and geographic climate of ancient Greece, particularly ancient Athens, in this novel. Her willingness to leave her hero in the dark is one of the ways she does this so effectively. As a poet, Simonides would have been hyperaware of the court's status, but not necessarily high enough to know all the secrets of the tyrants. It is this exchange of information, and the way Simonides collects and responds to this information, which make her rendition of the social setting so persuasive. The arc of Simonides' travel, which structures the book into sections by his geographic location, is also very effective, as the reader follows him in growing knowledge of the Athenian climate from his ignorant rural boyhood to favor and acceptance for his talent.
—Carrie Anne
I love Mary Renault and the work she had done as an historian and novelist.We, all of us, grow up within narrow confines of family, culture and class. The study of history and of cultural anthropology is a corrective to the limitations of our upbringing.Renault was a homosexual living in a time and place when that was not acceptable. She made a career out of writing about another time and place when it was not only acceptable but highly idealized. Beyond that, the intimate investigation of antique Greek civilization challenges a whole host of practices our time. Renault's novels bring not only these conventions to light, objectively speaking, but also engender sympathy for the persons who held such values. And she does so within the compass of historical plausibility. People may have been actually like this, people like ourselves...
—Erik Graff
Renault is an excellent writer. Before I read her biography of Alexander earlier this year, I'd never come across her, but she has a real knack for making history come alive. Ancient Greece isn't the easiest time to write about: the names are funny, lots of the places no longer exist, society has completely different mores and standards. It's a lot easier to make a good fist of the Middle Ages, for example. This book is the story of the bard Simonides and Renault fills out his life very convincingly and interestingly. Not much happens to him, and most of the large events happen elsewhere and simply impact on his life, which makes the fact that she's written such an engrossing tale so much more surprising. The only thing I'd criticise it for is that the ending wasn't too satisfying - I'd have liked a coda of some sort: we're introduced to Simonides in his old age and he remembers his life and then it's dropped when a big event happens and he's only about forty. I'd have liked a short chapter detailing the rest of his life, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable book.(#28 in my Year of Reading Women)
—Phil
