[PREV - SLOW_JUNG] [TOP]
June 14, 2010
Having heard that "Harold Lamb" was a "*great*
historical novelist!", I went looking through
my stacks, and found a copy of "Cyrus the Great"
lurking amongst the paperbacks.
This is an attempt at doing a high quality
job, with a lot of respect for accuracy
or at least verisimilitude.
The handling of character is good enough,
and the actual focus of the novel, the
the source of the tension in the story, It is not a "man who
is the fear that the main character may learned better" story,
not be able to overcome his character flaws. precisely, but a "will
he learn in time?" story...
However, Harold Lamb is not
quite able to overcome the If you want to talk
distance between the character about the human
and the reader. He does not condition or the
have a delicate hand about human tragedy, that's
conveying the background detail it right there... a
needed to understand the story. race between wisdom
and death.
He sometimes needs to
resort to what amounts
to footnotes embedded
in the text as
parenthetic remarks to
explain to the reader
what he's getting at.
And what he *is*
getting at is often In particular, he has a
antithetical to the desire to rationalize
function of the story myth down into it's
as a story. historical sources.
The young Cyrus and
his crew blunders into
a grass land full of
nomads who ride horses
like they were born in
the saddle, like
they're part of each
other -- and we are
told that this mutates
into legends of
Centaurs -- he finds a
tomb of warriors
defended by troops of
their widowed women --
and we are told that
this story mutates
into the legend of the
Amazons.
It strikes me as entirely
plausible that these legends
have sources in stories such
as this... but has Lamb put
his finger on the right
stories? How would you know?
So these "explanations" are
essentially "explanatory myths",
a grounding one sort of myth
in another, which may have it's
own biases.
(Is it important to Lamb that
his Amazons are warriors by
default rather than desire?
"Rosie the Riveteers", not
actual matriarchs?).
We like prosaic, mundane
explanations, but prosaic
and mundane are not
always correlated with
truth.
It would also seem
plausible to me that the
actual "sources" of these
legends may be extremely
complex and unknowable.
Noah's flood need not
be a distant memory
of an actual flood.
--------
[NEXT - UNDERKNOWN]