Rating: 4/5 ★ | 80/100 | A-
Official Summary:
"As The Golden Mean opens, Aristotle is forced to postpone his dream of succeeding Plato as the leader of the Athenian Academy when Philip of Macedon asks him to stay on in his capital city of Pella to tutor his precocious son, Alexander. At first the philosopher is appalled to be stuck in the brutal backwater of his childhood, but he is soon drawn to the boy's intellectual potential and his capacity for surprise. What he does not know is whether his ideas are any match for the warrior culture that is Alexander's inheritance. But he feels that teaching this startling, charming, sometimes horrifying boy is a desperate necessity. And what the boy needs most to learn thrown before his time onto his father's battlefields - is the lesson of the golden mean, the elusive balance between extremes that Aristotle hopes will mitigate the boy's will to conquer. In her first novel, Annabel Lyon boldly imagines one of history's most intriguing relationships and the war at its heart between ideas and action as ways of knowing the world. She tells her story, breathtakingly, in the earthy, frank and perceptive voice of Aristotle himself. With sensual and muscular prose, she explores how Aristotle's genius touched the boy who would conquer the known world. And she reveals how we still live with the ghosts of both men."
Review:
Well, this is an entirely new exercise in reviewing for me. Here’s why:
I studied Classics at University for 5 years and have been obsessed, specifically, with Alexander the Great for 8 and a half years. You might think this puts me in the best position to review this book, instead it probably makes it harder. In my head I have stored the historical facts (or as close as we can get to them, at least) of Alexander’s life, the written portraits of him crafted by our remaining primary sources (Arrian, Curtius, Plutarch, Diodoros), and, most prominently (for better or worse), my own image of Alexander I have built up over these last 8 and a half years. Alexander is of course the most carefully and solidly rendered image, but I also have my own versions of many of the other characters featured in this book. It also means I knew exactly what all the major plot points were going to be, and even how things would carry on after the book ended. So reading this book, and any book like it, is an entirely different experience than being introduced to a new world and characters and gradually unfurling plot of the author’s creation. I have even put off reading most fictional portraits of Alexander until now (other than my favourite book, Mary Renault’s “Fire From Heaven”), because reading an interpretation that clashes with my own is both unsatisfying and greatly annoying because I am a delicate flower. (For example: in most of them he’s straight, inspiring in me an unholy rage that is not good for my blood pressure nor for the poor, fragile book itself.)
The book is narrated from Aristotle’s first-person perspective, beginning with his arrival in Macedonia after having lived in Atarneus (on the coast of modern-day Turkey) for the last 5 years. There are also two lengthy flashback chapters, one near the beginning about his childhood in Stageira and Pella, and another near the end about his time in Athens at the Academy. Conveying the mind of any notable historical figure is a daunting challenge, the mind of a great intellectual in a time so removed from our own is surely a Herculean task. (See what I did there.) Lyon settles into the mind of Aristotle gracefully, both as it develops and as he is developing the minds of others. He is not portrayed as an unnaturally mature child obviously destined for greatness, not even as a man finished with his tutelage under Plato is he some great paragon of intellect we are lucky to see inside the mind of. He is an entirely human character no matter his age, with self-acknowledged faults and regrets, aware of his own limitations and not begrudging others for theirs. He even seems mundane at times, rendered in the unflinching detail of ancient everyday life. He is an enjoyable narrator, complex but accessible.
Obviously 6 years is a lot of time to cover in a book that doesn’t set out to be a sprawling tome, but I found time flew by far too quickly in this novel. While Aristotle’s life outside of tutoring Alexander was interesting and enjoyable, it is hard not to view a lot of it as words that could have been spent on what lessons between Aristotle and Alexander we might have been reading instead. Including Alexander as a secondary character offers as many challenges as having him as your main character does. A figure of his historical magnitude is inevitably going to pull focus, even from a figure such as Aristotle. I wanted him to appear far more than he actually did, not just because he was Alexander, but because Lyon did succeed in creating her own Alexander that was interesting and complex. Not a perfect princeling but not an incorrigible brat either. I very much enjoyed how she handled his precociousness and oddness (nobody achieves on the scale that he did at the age he did without being precocious and odd, at the very least as a child, if not always). In particular, the incident with the head of Pentheus during the Bakkhai was pitch perfect. The way Alexander and Aristotle spoke and thought of one another towards the end also portrayed a relationship that I felt I hadn’t seen in the relatively few lessons and interactions between them that we were witness to, and the story’s resolution lost some of its desired emotional impact because of it. It would also have been better for promotional material (such as the summary on the back) to describe the book as the story of Aristotle’s life, part of which involved Alexander, rather than as Aristotle’s quest to educate Alexander, which didn’t actually play a major role.
In terms of other characters, I was delighted we got to spend some time with Arrhidaeus, a figure we don’t get to see much of in fiction. Hephaistion not seeming to have a mind of his own by Aristotle’s assessment was predictable and boring, but I’m used to living of scraps when it comes to his appearances so at least he was there. I enjoyed Olympias’ character but her sole two appearances don’t allow for much assessment - though I do want an entire book like the one scene she and Alexander shared, giving each other shit. Philip was what you would expect him to be in the time his character was allotted, though the glimpse of him as a youth was well-drawn and entertaining. Lysimachus clashed entirely with the image I have of him informed wholly by “Fire from Heaven”, and I don’t know what to think about that at all, so I’m just not going to. Pythias was the one historical figure I have had nothing to do with previously, though very little is known about her anyway. I found her intriguing and realistic, a woman in age but very like a girl due to the restricted life her society allowed her. Of the notable original characters, Althea was absolutely hilarious; “Hey fuck you” will be my go to response from now on. Both Carolus and Illaeus were the perfect encapsulation of non-elite but not entirely common men of this time period, their life experiences and burdens, successes and vices.
One of the strengths of this novel is the use of the medical and physiological beliefs of the time, including those which we know about from Aristotle himself via his surviving texts. To hear someone considered one of the greatest minds to ever live believing scientific theories that seem outrageous to the point of silliness compared to our modern knowledge is a fascinating reminder of the history of knowledge and discovery, how many centuries we have laboured to understand nature, the universe, the human body, even our own minds. There are multiple instances of physical and mental illness that allow us to play “guess the modern diagnosis”, which I find particularly enjoyable. Similarly, the use of the knowledge of Aristotle’s surviving texts in varying stages of consideration and completion throughout the novel was well-done, as well as the works of Plato. The Forms always give me a good chuckle.
I enjoyed the way the prose was written to reflect Aristotle’s scientific mind, cataloguing details and theories about people the way he would take field notes on an animal subject. How formal the prose and dialogue of a historical novel should be is a divided topic; to give you an idea of where I stand: I verily enjoyed Philip repeatedly calling Aristotle a “dumb shit”.
Now, as a Classicist, I am academically obliged to point out historical errors not mentioned in the author’s note. Indulge me, I can’t help myself. This novel mentions books a lot, when Greece BCE had nothing even approaching a book made of paper. They had scrolls made of paper - which are mentioned once as existing alongside books - on which they recorded permanent texts. This is a kind of Ancient Greece 101 type of fact, so the fact that it was not only incorrect, but frequently mentioned was a constant annoyance. And just to be a smarty-pants: Aristotle once mentions satire, which was a genre title not coined until the second century CE, around 500 years later. And now to be really nitpicky and correct not even the book but just the author’s note - Lyon says the Hephaistion “died in battle scant weeks before Alexander” when he actually died of illness (likely typhoid) near the end of 324 BCE, around 8 months before Alexander. (He’s my favourite so you can’t expect me to just let factual inaccuracies about him slide, okay?)
I don’t have the mental energy to work out how a reader coming in to this novel totally new might enjoy it; someone that doesn’t already know the foundation of these “characters” so well, that doesn’t know exactly what the major plot points will be, how the novel will end, and what will come after. It’s well-executed, it’s accurate, it’s interesting and not at all difficult to read, especially at only (roughly) eighty-thousand words long. Personally, I’m reasonably sure it’s my first step in reading most of the Alexander fiction out there. Most of which, like I said above, I know for a fact will kindle unholy rage in me; some of them already have done without me even reading them.
Wish me luck.
Content/age appropriateness warnings: well it’s the ancient world and you probably know what they were like… swearing, character death, slavery, misogyny, prostitution, what we would call pedophilia, semi-explicit sex, war/bloody wounds/death, human and animal dissection, a severed head...
