I've just updated the sidebar on what I'm currently reading. Just to mention the most recent series by Conn Iggulden. If you haven't read his historical novels you might want to have a look. Well over a year ago I read The Gates of Athens, the first in his new series on Ancient Greece, begins with King Darius on a punitive expedition to the Greek city states. Failing to subdue them he vows to raze the Greek cities and so the scene is set for the battle of Thermopylae. The sequel, Protector, is set some years later when Xerxes has succeeded Darius and goes to fulfil his father's vow to punish and finally subdue the Greeks. The largest army and naval fleet ever assembled marches and sails in overwhelming numbers. The rest is history.
Which is why Iggulden is such a gripping novelist. He makes it his business to know the history, to imagine within the context of the times the politics, the cultures, and the characters. The detail of social behaviour, ancient values, military strategy, social structures from slaves to senators, the early days of democracy - its benefits and dangers; all of this woven into a narrative in which the main circumstances are already given, but which becomes a story of flesh and blood people, struggling to find and hold on to their foothold on life. It's a story of Empire and power, the collision of cultures and ideologies, and the outcome would shape the destinies of West and East.
Amongst the tests of Iggulden's skill is how far he captures the varying contexts and scenes. I've recently re-read the biblical stories of Esther and Daniel. Iggulden makes you feel the fear and awe of coming anywhere near King Darius and his son King Xerxes. One of primary levers in these novels is the contrast between absolute power which cannot be questioned, and communal decision making with all the messiness of rhetoric, persuasion, political positioning, voting alliances and all the other curbs on power of a fledgling democracy.
All of this makes for novels driven by urgency, two forms of political ideology on a collision course. Having read Iggulden, I'm aware that the biblical accounts take on a deeper texture as the minds and motives of these ancient emperor kings are imagined and portrayed with considerable weight of research behind them. It's an interesting thought, the historical novelist as background reading for getting a better sense of the biblical text. Especially as in this case, when both Esther and the first half of Daniel are themselves told with the literary skill and imaginative freedom that is creative with the facts and the circumstances in ways intended to strengthen the faith of the faithful.
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