Creation

"It’s set around about 450 BCE. It tells the story of a man, a courtier in Persia, a grandson of the prophet Zoroaster, who is the best friend of Xerxes. Gore Vidal was one of the great historical novelists. His Julian is a masterpiece in its evocation of antiquity. What I found with Creation was that the court of Persia is brought to life with such vivacity and such colour, but with such feasibility, as well. Vidal has clearly read the historical sources. He must have looked at the art and architecture. The story is crafted so carefully. The realia, the indicia of daily life, is echoed so well. But the bigger questions, the big what-ifs of Persian history, are handled beautifully too. He’s also aware of things we talked about earlier, that the Persians didn’t craft their history in ways that we do in the West. He indulges in that, he delights in that, of storytelling within stories. It’s a really fantastic book in its evocation of Persian life. The hero travels to India and to China as well, which is very feasible. We know that the Iranians had very strong links to India in this period and it’s also very feasible that they had contacts, via middlemen, with China. It’s a sweeping epic story. The hero not only knows Darius and Xerxes, but also gets to meet the Buddha and Confucius. It’s a philosophical adventure story, if you like. Very feasibly. The Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama) lived in India sometime in the 5th to 4th century BCE; Confucius was absolutely a contemporary of the Achaemenid kings. Vidal has this interesting story, which is the warp, and then the weft of it is this really fascinating take he has on the fact that these great religious thoughts were happening at the same time across the Middle East and the Far East. So Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Confucianism were all flourishing, or budding I should say, at the same time. So he’s pulling together this idea that the ancient world was very interconnected, not just through trade routes, or through warfare, but also in forms of thought and theology. It is a little ahistorical, since Zoroaster was probably circulating his teachings around about 1000 BCE, not 450 BCE—that’s just a little bit of a nudge he gives to ahistoricicity. But otherwise it is this wonderful adventure story with a kind of theological mesh that’s woven into it as well. It’s a very good read."