The Persian Boy

"This may be up there in my top three novels of all time. I read so much, that’s really saying something. Renault wrote a trilogy about Alexander the Great , and The Persian Boy is the second book in the trilogy. It’s told from the point of view of a young boy who is only 16 years old. He’s called Bagoas. He is a courtesan in the Persian court, to King Darius, the hugely powerful leader of the Persian empire at the time. Alexander conquers that great empire and takes Baghdad. Bagoas is now in the hands of the invading army and finds himself having to live with these barbarians. What I love about it is that I absolutely trust Renault’s historical research, her academic skill with all the facts and culture of the time. The language, the dress, the customs, the food—everything. You trust her on it, and you can feel it, you see it, you smell it. To use Bagoas as her central character is brilliant because he’s an outsider. Outsider narrators are a wonderful way to bring you, the reader, into the story because they are discovering it on your behalf. He’s been used and abused since he was just a boy. He was sold as a slave. He was castrated. It’s so visceral and so grim. You’re deeply invested in him as a character. You want him to be okay. You want him to be looked after. You don’t want him to have to go through any more grim times. He has considerable antipathy for these people when they first turn up, because he’s been inculcated in the court, but after a while, like the rest of us, he is won over by Alexander’s charisma. “We all read fiction because it’s a fantastic way to escape from our heads” You fall in love with Alexander through Bagoas. To write charismatic characters is a really hard thing to do, but my God, she’s good at it. You absolutely feel that Alexander the Great is that incredible, young, charismatic leader that he clearly was. The heartstrings are so pulled when Bagoas falls in love with him. There’s Hephaestion on the scene as well (Alexander’s great love) and his jealousy. Alexander also has to marry in order to keep the succession going. Poor Bagoas. His heart is being pulled all over the place, and he’s being taken on campaign, from one huge battle to another. You get all that amazing, epic scenery, and events, and visceral violence, and then you get all the tender stuff as well. It’s a masterpiece of historical fiction."

"I’ve put them not in order of date of publication, but in chronology of when they were set. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault is the earliest. Looking at them now it strikes me that they were all published in quite a narrow window between 1960 and 1972, with Mary Renault the last to be published. It was obviously a golden age of fiction, but that wasn’t in my thinking at all when I picked them. The Persian Boy is the story of the last seven years of Alexander the Great’s life. It’s told through the eyes of Bagoas, the Persian boy. What it does superbly well, and makes it stand out from almost any other historical novel, is the way it recreates not just one ancient culture, but two, because you’ve got the Macedonians viewed through the eyes of a Persian. It works. Both are utterly convincing. It’s also an incredibly clever technical device, and one from which I’ve learned an awful lot. Because Bagoas, the Persian boy, is a eunuch, and a concubine at first of the Persian king’s and then of Alexander’s, he’s an outsider to the Macedonians. So the Macedonians are strange to him. The things they do make him think, and he comments on them. It’s an incredibly clever device. What happens all too much in historical fiction is that you have two Romans, they’re both Roman senators, they walk out of the senate house and then, in the fiction, they turn to each other and explain in great detail how the Roman Republic works. But they would have already known how it works: why do they say it? Having this device of the outsider as a main character gives the novelist the chance to actually tell the reader things and show the reader things without it seeming laboured and forced and never veering into the dreaded ‘info dump’, which often crops up. “They’re often similar to us but, at the same time, they’re as alien as a tribe in the Amazonian jungle” Another fascinating thing about The Persian Boy is her hero. Bagoas is a eunuch. He’s had a very bad life. He is a concubine of two kings. He’s the antithesis of the traditional hero of a historical novel. He’s not brave, he doesn’t have a great sense of justice. He’s actually rather cowardly, rather sneaky. He is, in many ways, not a terribly likeable person. But somehow Renault manages to make him intensely sympathetic to the reader. It’s not just because he’s had such a bad start to his life. He does have redeeming qualities: his loyalty and his love for Alexander make up for all the scheming, the plotting and the weakness. So I think that’s another great strength of this book. I’ve read this book twice, first when I was a schoolboy at an English public school. I found it quite disturbing because it was the first book I’d ever read that dealt with male-male sexuality. And published in 1972—I mean, back then, to be openly gay was a very rare choice and a very brave thing to do. So I think now we have to remember that this was a very daring novel. It explores sexuality. This is something the classical world is very good for. A lot of fiction has used the ancient world to explore contemporary issues of sexuality—but through the lens of Greece or Rome, not Macedonia or Persia. That’s another thing that makes this book stand out."