Books in Brief: The Persian Boy

The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault (Pantheon, 419 pp., $7.95). Fire from Heaven followed Alexander the Great to his twentieth year; now Mary Renault reconstructs the brief life of the “horseback king” to its end. The Persian Boy is a strange and beautiful novel in which Miss Renault drops the impersonal style of the earlier book and returns to the first person. The “I” here is Bagoas, a beautiful eunuch trained as houseboy and lover to the Persian king Darius, whom Alexander humiliated. Bagoas is part of a bribe-offering to Alexander from Darius’ beaten officers in return for their freedom. This much is known history, and the telling takes up a fourth of the novel. The rest is woven from suggestions of Alexander’s homosexual attachments—to Bagoas and to Hephaistion, the king’s friend from boyhood—that the old books never detailed. Miss Renault and her eunuch work a daring twist of the conventional approach of the historical novel, which has an intimate drama played out against a massive national conflict, and the author’s success is her ability to imagine herself inside the skull of this remarkable boy. Bagoas is a fly on the wall during the elaborate ceremonies of the Persian and Macedonian courts, rides along on the terrible forced marches, witnesses the battles, and tells of it all in a faintly antique language that never becomes “translationese.” Alexander “needed love as a palm tree needs water: from armies, from cities, from conquered enemies, nothing was enough.” Alexander intellectualizes his passion. “I not only travel the earth to possess it. I seek to know what it is, and what men are.” But his lover has the last speech of the book, as he kneels beside the dead king: “You were never without love; where you go, may you find it waiting.” d. crinklaw