Theseus is not, I think, a hero who tends to be valued by many modern fans of ancient myth; in the spiral of Minotaur and Naxos and black sails and Helen and Phaedra and so on, and in the sheer number of myths he has, he tends to come across as aggressive and arrogant and a misogynist. And unlike the similarly aggressive Achilles, he gets relatively little to recommend or explain him in the same way that Achilles's death-prophecy, eventual relenting within one narrative, and genuine grief over Patroclus can.

I wouldn't say that Renault makes Theseus sympathetic to modern tastes here-- everyone still has a specifically ancient quality, and they act in ways that we would probably now think of as callous-- but she doesn't try to 'redeem' him; what she does do is make him feel as real as possible. His arrogance is a youthful arrogance, his misogyny partially cultural (and partially still his own, too), his aggression befitting rather than excessive; but he is also clever, and quick, and feels deeply, and has what Renault calls a 'feeling for the underdog'. She dedicates herself to a recreation of the Bronze Age people within their own myths, including all the strangeness, callousness, and superstition that comes with the ancient characters, but without isolating us from them entirely.

I sometimes think she gets a little too caught up in the pursuit of the 'real' (in heavy quotes there, because we will never be able to achieve a true 'real' in historical or mythological fiction) when it comes to recreating ancient misogyny or tribalism or xenophobia, but it was never cynically done. Historical retellings of ancient myth can often risk feeling that way, in that they curl their lip at the silly ancient people and their silly made-up gods in the sky and their silly backwards customs, and try to recommend them to modern readers instead by pulling them out of their time. Renault tries to accept them as she perceives they were; harsh, strange, preoccupied with concerns that we would never now privilege. It's definitely a book that honours, genuinely likes, and is interested in the literature it comes from, which is not something I say for many mythological retellings.

Successful mythological or ancient fiction (like Lennon's Glorious Exploits and Le Guin's Lavinia) does dignity to the ancients; even if they will not have the gods walk onto the page like Homer and the playwrights did, there will be something, some immense power, something unexplainable, something superstitious, that makes the reader understand how and why the ancients attributed these happenings to an unseen god or gods. This is the case here, too. Unlike Renault I have relatively little interest in whether or not the myth of Theseus might have been 'real' in any capacity, but it doesn't matter, because this book still so vividly conjured the time from which the literature and the mythology came, and adapted the myth so nimbly. Her changes were clever, her prose was beautiful and otherworldly, her explanations for the why and the how so feasible, and yet keeping enough of the superstition to keep them plausibly the work of gods, too; for example, Theseus can sense impending earthquakes simply because some people can, but of course it is read as a blessing from Poseidon.

I really enjoyed this, and although I don't have The Bull from the Sea or the Last of the Wine, I might jump to The Mask of Apollo at some point for some more of her writing.

(Also, silly side note; I knew that Collins was inspired by the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for the Hunger Games books; I realised halfway through that it was definitely THIS book, not just the myth, and sure enough when I googled it it came up. The Cranes bit in this reminded me IMMENSELY of Sunrise on the Reaping. That this is a more successful book than SOTR is neither here nor there...!)

I love Shannon's world and prose, so I'll always wander back to the Roots of Chaos books when a new one comes out, because I really do enjoy the actual time I spend reading them, they're serious business fantasy immersion and extremely charming... but I do think I agree this felt sort of extraneous. It helped a bit that I haven't read Priory since 2020 and so my memory of the plot is honestly totally nonexistent for the most part, so I didn't think 'oh well, we were told this in Priory' as much as I otherwise might have done (it took me like the whole book to remember that Harlowe was IN Priory lol). But I still thought Melaugo's plot wasn't that necessary and her part of the story felt unfulfilled, and as if it stopped very abruptly despite technically having an ending; it was fun, but we could have done with swapping her out for a few more chapters of Aubrecht, this was too short to properly support three POVs. At this length it should really have Just been about Marosa to be honest, although imo the whole thing could also have functioned better as a collection of short stories, maybe even with some epistolary attached. I enjoyed being back in the world and I had fun with it, but on the whole I feel as if Shannon might have felt pressured in some way to put something out in the ROC world, considering it's been nearly three years since the last book and the new one doesn't appear to be anywhere imminent (which imo is fine, they're total beasts), but therefore it led to this; nice, but insubstantial.

(Also there are at least two mistakes in the paratexts of the Waterstones edition! A repeated footnote in Oderica the Smith and a missing capitalisation in the character glossary)

I really never know what to make of literary fiction like this; I often feel like I'm just having ideas sort of thrown at me constantly, and I like a lot of them, but there are so many!! And they are just constantly being delivered and delivered here! Almost every conversation is philosophising or musing through something; characters are of course foremost vehicles for exploring a narrative, but they do generally have to also be, well, characters, and towards the midpoint and the end I felt that buckled a bit. Akbar is a great writer though, and I thoroughly enjoyed his prose, there were segments I really thought 'ok, wow' about, especially his descriptions of people. I thought the split POVs were effective and on the whole didn't think we had too many; they could've overwhelmed Cyrus's but they didn't on the whole, and isolating it from his POV would have too much enabled the idea of a perfect martyr and a splash-less death, as Cyrus describes. So sprawling madly all over the place hitting all these people and all these famous figures is definitely the way, since many of the themes here are about rejecting or subverting exceptionalism (whether that be a personal incarnation of it, or how it's realised as a tool of imperialism or nationalism or racism). I do wish we'd seen Gabe again; I felt like we were going somewhere with him, but then we kind of just... didn't. I was increasingly compelled by Cyrus's relationship with Zee though, although I think just a scene or two more might have made it stronger.

This is very 'what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament' (see. SEE) but I definitely recognised at least three or four references to concepts that were or are popular as sort of thinking points or memes on Tumblr; Ea-Nasir, the healed femur as evidence of human society, wire mother, and I think maybe something about sonder as well? I didn't dislike them all (I really did like Ea-Nasir) but I definitely found them distracting, the same way I found President Incentive very distracting (but really that's probably just the fault of the current climate, and no one puts President Incentive in anything without expecting him to be distracting). I really wasn't sure what I thought of the twist, either; I sort of sighed and frowned but kept going, and it won me over a bit, but on the whole I think I would have liked it more if they weren't the same. An interesting book, a good read, even if I'm not totally sold on the ending; I'd like to go back through and sort of splash about in the prose a bit more. (And he's a great poet, to boot.)

'rain. Well not every day Can be a masterpiece. This one sails out and out And out.'

There are things I liked more about this than AOR; it had more of the surreality in character exchanges that her drama translations have, for example. I was less interested in the new characters than I was last time, but not to say I didn't enjoy them.

I like the inscrutability and surreality of Carson's work; I think it frustrates a lot of people to be unable to pull the author out of it, and I keep seeing pieces talking about how she's obstructive and unforthcoming and very private, but I often dislike autobiographical readings and psychoanalysis and I have a lack of interest in the author-celebrity. I do not need to know overmuch about Anne Carson the woman, just Anne Carson's work, and I think she may prefer it that way. ('But other / people's suffering you / want to boil it down / theorize it historicise it / make it go away.') I also like her irreverence when she handles her mythological references, and her disinterest in historicity. Emily Wilson seemed to think this a peculiarity when she reviewed Wrong Norma, but when so much of classics is people being insufferable about the 'the original Greek' I can't resist seeing it all slung around with passionate abandon, rummaged out of a box of references and held up to things which seem to have nothing to do with it at all. The real appeal of classical mythology for me is twofold; 1) the Iliad and 2) where it's all applied and referenced throughout the rest of literature (I think Katherine Addison said something very similar to this. she was right), so I can't be sorry when we suddenly spin off the road. It's where you go with it. That is to say, I liked this a lot. Complete with the ice bats and the grief and the five second prescience.