Going Greek I: Review of Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

A friend of mine, the one who could afford it, read Gates of Fire and it inspired him to visit Greece. A fellow blogger, about the best slinger of invective I know, lumped the genre as Sparta without the queer. And they're both right. The stand at Thermopylae is about as gripping as military history gets. It's a battle in which men stood up against a vastly superior enemy by sheer force of will and discipline and brains, and defended their continent at the expense of absolutely everything. On the other hand, you get the feeling that Pressfield is cherry-picking his history for twentieth century (© 1998) notions of nobility, using a twentieth century moral calculus. Which calculus is still pretty sketchy. Was Sparta right to coerce her neighboring city-states into alliance against the Persian threat? It seems to leave aside a lot of nagging moral question, and Pressfield, somewhat lazily, lets the circumstances justify his ethics. (In his less-good sequel Tides of War, the rights and wrongs are presented with a double helping of ambiguity. There was a lot less nobility to be found in the Peloponnesian War I guess.) In the present-day war environment, it feels a bit irresponsible to rush to embrace all that pathos, but what the hell, I enjoy watching football too.

When I settle into a story like this, the first thing the author must do is charm my tin ear for anachronism. That's not usually hard, but Pressfield plays it close. As mentioned above, half the book is neck-deep in the Spartan agoge and the narrator relates no hint of homosexuality. (Maybe he wouldn't have bothered? The modern taboos are what make me notice the absence.) Some really modern concepts sneak in too (trajectory equations, central nervous systems), but these are rare enough to be written off as mistakes. He confidently throws around enough steel to make me suspect everything I thought I knew about metallurgical history.

On the other hand, he offers up a good translation kludge to cover many of his inconsistencies, which is something I always appreciate. The narrator's story is ostensibly being interpreted for the Persian king in the final weeks of the invasion, and he (the teller) convincingly stumbles on words and concepts that lack a direct translation, which is a convenient way to communicate Classical ideas to the modern English reader. It also allows for some wiggle room for the language, so even though everyone knows that knights and squires are medeival creatures, it's a good shorthand for the relationsip between the Spartan Peers and their proteges. But translating context like this has its pitfalls, and Pressfield manages to drop a few bombs as well. Pikes and especially lances connote medieval cavalry (or anti-cavalry) tactics and are not good synonyms for spears. It fails as a comparison because we're already comfortable with what "spears" are. And while I'm sure you can repair any fabric this way, nicknaming weapons "darning needles" conjures up images of a socks-and-sandals fashion 2500 years before it hit the boomers.

The battle at Thermopylae is a story that tells itself almost in a sentence. Pressfield fills up four hundred pages with characters that will find their nobility on the battlefield as they face slaughter back-to-back. You've read it before: the defective kids make good, the noble captains die with dignity, the assholes find compassion and respect. It's compelling enough, but it seems to be missing a little something. Is it too reverent? The prose a little too purple? The story too standard? The narrator is driven by a vision of Apollo--I wish a little more had been made of that. Give me something beyond the drama. Drop in some nugget to churn up my thought juices just a bit little more.

Gates of Fire came close to pleasing me, but in the end, the hordes of negativity broke though the pass. I respect the effort.

Keifus

(I've meant to keep a Greek theme, but I just got Soldier of Sidon in from Amazon, and it looks like Wolfe has taken a detour from Herodotus to meander up the Egyptian Nile. It'll have to do.)

Going Greek II: Review of Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe

Soldier of Sidon is, like the two previous Soldier books, the story of a warrior cast into events of larger significance than himself. It's another first-person diary, and much more so than Pressfield's effort, Wolfe's narrator and his world ache with integrity from the get-go. He reports his story from the perspective of a simple man, using simple language. He observes the right things. Two short chapters into Sidon, and Gene Wolfe has managed to calmly grab the sense of place and of character that Steven Pressfield struggled to achieve in an entire novel. Wolfe makes it look easy. I am sure it is not.

The narrator's name is Latro, also called Lucius or Lewqys, meaning, with a wink, "wolf." It's more than vanity; the wolf also refers to the Roman wolf, describing Latro's place of origin (it feels strange to realize that the Republic was developing on its own contemporaneously with the famous Persian wars on the neighboring penninsula). Latro also takes the aspect (complete with club and euraus, that cobra headband in all the glyphs) of the Egyptian wolf-god Ap-uat during his time in that land. Ap-uat is the god of soldiers. Nice.

Latro, it should be said, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. He is the victim of a head wound, an old one by the time of Sidon, that has impaired his long-term memory.** He can learn languages, and has retained his soldier's skills. He can remember a scene or two from his youth, but all of his yesterdays are lost. The diary is to help keep track of his life, to explain in the morning who all these strangers are. His snap judgements about supporting characters (whom he frequently re-introduces, or equally frequently fails to recognize) offer an insight into their growth. It's a narrative balancing act--the reader can't be bored by the retelling it takes to make the memory scroll convincing. It's also challenging to follow at times, not unintentionally, but the story is there.

And a lot of story is there. A man who can't remember is a natural dupe of the gods, and they don't leave poor Latro alone. In Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete (the original volumes), Latro was caught in the divine squabbles that hung over the Persian wars, the plot of which the assidious reader was left to decipher. Latro walked among the famous as well as the holy, and it helped to have Herodotus handy to help understand where he was and what he was doing. (I did not and I was lost.) Soldier of Sidon manages to turn up some old friends, but leaves the great battles behind, traveling south through Egypt instead to encounter a whole new Pantheon. Without the weight of history (and without the translated place-names, a cool feature of the earlier books that is neglected here, presumably because Latro knows the language less well), the story was a little easier to get my brain around.

But don't worry, it's a good story.


Keifus

P.S. Reader beware. Wolfe evidently intends to conclude this one in another novel.

* Anachronism watch: there's one lousy passage, late in the book, in which Latro rides "stirrup-to-stirrup" with another soldier. Say it ain't so, Gene! The stirrup didn't come into common military use until the first couple of centuries AD in China, after which it gradually migrated west. It transformed heavy cavalry and made the more famous medeival versions of horse-fighting (jousting and whatnot) possible, making it possible to fight on horseback with far less skill. Stirrups may have been around for a while before, however (as a mounting aid probably) and some of the unofficial histories I've read ascribed it's use to the Assyrians as early as 800 or even 1000 BC. Could a fifth century BC Persian soldier have fit his horse with stirrups (the Persians did ride)? Just barely possible, and it's not like they were tilting lances while standing on them.

** Earlier, I'd written short-term memory was limited. No, that worked fine, but Latro lost the ability to put any of those in the long-term bank. I'd read awhile back (I think in a foreword to the other Soldier books) that Wolfe had chanced across some medical article describing this rare trauma. In some of his other novels, he created another suspect narrator with an allegedly perfect memory. Quite likely he was researching the subject. Latro makes a nice counterpoint to that other protagonist (and is far more likable).

Book Review Index

Since I bother to rate my enthusiasm for the books I review, it will be helpful to both of my readers to get a feel of my tastes. Here's the index since 2004, when I started keeping it. I omitted books that I either couldn't remember well enough or reviewed too poorly to re-grade. I also omitted most of anthologized shorts, and all of the world-events and opinion stuff I read when I am supposed to be working (and of course the technical stuff I read when I actually am working).

The grades reflect my subjective enjoyment more than any objective evaluation. (How else to explain how Conrad did so poorly? Tuan Jim just didn't have the snappy move-along plot I needed at the beach that summer.) The grades may seem to be on a curve, but I think that's less due to inflation and more to my care in choosing reading material.

Anderson, Poul Operation Chaos (B)

Bellairs, John, The Face in the Frost (B+)

Benford, Gregory Cosm (A)

Blake, Katharine The Interior Life (B)

Blish, James A Case of Conscience (A)

Bourdain, Anthony, Kitchen Confidential (B)

Brown, Dan Angels and Demons (C+)

Bujold, Lois McMaster Diplomatic Immunity (A-)

Carroll, Jonathon After Silence (A)

Carroll, Jonathon Sleeping in Flame (B+)

Chabon, Michael The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (A+)

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End (B)

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama (B)

Coatzee, J. M., Elizabeth Costello (A)

Conrad, Joseph Lord Jim (B)

Dahl, Roald The Roald Dahl Omnibus (B-)

Davies, Robertson, The Rebel Angels (A)

Daniel, Tony Superluminal (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Secret Country (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Hidden Land (B)

Dean, Pamela The Whim of the Dragon (B+)

DeLillo, Don Underworld (B+)

Eco, Umberto Baudolino (C)

Friesner, Esther Wishing Season (C+)

Gaiman, Neil Anansi Boys (A)

Gibson, William Idoru (B+)

Gibson, William Pattern Recognition (B+)

Gibson, William Neuromancer (B)

Goldman, Willian, The Princess Bride

Greene, Brian The Elegant Universe (B)

Greene, Graham The Power and the Glory (A)

Harris, Bob Prisoner of Trebekistan (B+)

Helprin, Mark Winter's Tale (A-)

Holman, Sheri The Dress Lodger (A-)

Juster, Norton The Phantom Tollbooth (A+)

Kay, Guy Gavriel The Last Light of the Sun (A+)

King, Stephen Wolves of the Calla (A-)

King, Stephen Song of Susannah (B+)

King, Stephen The Dark Tower (B+)

Kushner, Ellen Swordspoint (B+)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Telling (A-)

Levitt, Steven and Stephen Dubner Freakonomics (B+)

Lieber, Fritz The Big Time (B+)

McCarthy, Cormac The Road (A)

McEwan, Ian Saturday (B)

Mirrlees, Hope Lud in the Mist (A-)

Morrow, JamesTowing Jehovah (B+)

Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran (A-)

Noon, Jeff Vurt (B+)

O'Connor, Edwin The Last Hurrah (A)

Park, Paul Celestis (B+)

Park, Paul Soldiers of Paradise (A)

Patterson, James and Andrew Gross The Jester (C)

Powers, Richard, The Echo Maker (A-)

Powers, Tim The Drawing of the Dark (B)

Powers, Tim Declare (A)

Powers, Tim Last Call (A+)

Pratchett, Terry Maskerade (B)

Pratchett, Terry Soul Music (B-)

Pratchett, Terry The Wee Free Men

Pressfield, Steven, Gates of Fire (B)

Priest, Christopher The Separation (A)

Robbins, Tom Jitterbug Perfume (B+)

Roberts, Keith Pavane (B+)

Ryman, Geoff Air (A)

Saberhagen, Fred The Berserker Throne (B)

Stephenson, Neal Zodiac (A-)

Stephenson, Neal Snow Crash (A)

Stephenson, Neal Cryptonomicon (A)

Stephenson, Neal The Diamond Age (A-)

Stewart, Jon Naked Pictures of Famous People (B)

Stewart, Sean The Night Watch (B+)

Swanwick, Michael Bones of the Earth (B)

Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace (A)

Twain, Mark Letters from the Earth (B)

Varley, John The Golden Globe (A+)

Varley, John Millenium (B-)

Vinge, Vernor Across Realtime (A-)

Vinge, Vernor Rainbows End (B+)

Vinge, Vernor Tatja Grimm's World (C+)

Vonnegut, Kurt Cat's Cradle (A-)

Vonnegut, Kurt Jailbird (A-)

Westlake, Donald E. Bad News (B+)

Westlake, Donald E. Drowned Hopes (B)

Williams, Walter Jon City on Fire (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Blind Lake (A)

Wilson, Robert Charles The Harvest (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Spin (A+)

Wolfe, Gene The Knight (A-)

Wolfe, Gene The Wizard (A)

Wolfe, Gene Nightside of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Lake of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Calde of the Long Sun (B+)

Wolfe, Gene Exodus from the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene On Blue's Waters (A)

Wolfe, Gene In Green's Jungles (B)

Wolfe, Gene Return to the Whorl (A)

Wolfe, Gene Soldier of Sidon (A)

Zelazney, Roger Changeling (D)

Zelazney, Roger Damnation Alley (C-)