The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
Mar. 1st, 2022 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI simply have to keep reading Mary Renault novels, I said to myself—why, I haven't even tried any of the historicals yet!
I read The Last of the Wine (1956) last week, under eerily similar circumstances to those in which I first read The Charioteer six years ago; and this was appropriate, really, because in some respects The Last of the Wine is rather like what would happen if all the Greek bits in The Charioteer, up to and including the title, declared independence and went off to start their own book in their own setting. It has a lot to say about Greek philosophy and the nature and meaning of love, and those inevitable horses; many of the main characters are real figures from Sokrates's* circle and Plato's writings, now seen as people in their historical context.
But The Last of the Wine is also very different from any of the Renault contemporary novels I've read so far in that its plot, rather than consisting largely of the interactions and relationships of the characters, is formed of quite a few years of real ancient Athenian history as the characters experience it; and the whole thing is much larger in scope as a result. While the ideas and sensibilities are very much Renault's, it felt sometimes as though the plot and setting had wandered in from a Rosemary Sutcliff novel. The various elements of the book sit oddly alongside each other; reading it was a strange experience and I'm still not quite sure what to make of the whole thing.
The story, then, follows our first-person narrator (another major difference from the other Renault books I've read, by the way) Alexias, a young upper-class Athenian living during the Peloponnesian War, from his mid-teens to his late twenties, concentrating especially on: the character of Sokrates and his influence on Alexias and others; Alexias's experiences of war, from being thrust into combat at a young age as the Spartans threaten Athens, to later naval warfare and a horrible famine caused by a siege; and Alexias's relationship with his lover Lysis, as it develops and changes in the context of both philosophy and war. Rather like some Sutcliff novels, much of the general sense at first as I got further through this book was of so much happening, on and on. Perhaps I tried to rush through the book too quickly—something else Renault and Sutcliff have in common is writing styles that are engaging enough to read quickly fairly easily but nonetheless dense enough that this probably isn't a good idea; I felt the same about Sword at Sunset, and perhaps both books would benefit from a slower re-read.
And at first, I felt that all this massive amount of action—the various turns and changes of the war and the different parts Alexias takes in it, the political drama of Athens as democrats and oligarchs fight for control of the polis, the games and the gods and the large cast of philosophers and the complicated family relationships, etc. etc. etc.—was making it difficult for me to feel really engaged with the emotions of the book and the central relationships in the same way I have with all of Renault's contemporary novels so far. (It is also really rather grim in places, and too much grimness in a book tends to lead to me backing off emotionally as a sort of defence mechanism, which probably didn't help). Despite the first-person narration, the characters all felt at much more of a distance. But I'm not sure about that now; I keep thinking about Alexias/Lysis and the Sokratic ideas, and re-reading over bits of the book that struck me the first time, and the more I do the more I find myself caring about them; I was rather emotional typing up that quote above about the horses. I think this book is going to stay with me, after all, and I'm sure it will greatly benefit from re-reading.
One very important feature of the Ancient Greek setting from Renault's point of view is of course that she now gets to write m/m relationships in a setting where they're accepted as a normal part of society; this is quite a dramatic change from The Charioteer and something I was looking forward to about this book, so I was surprised by how much it didn't work for me. I did enjoy the early bits about Alexias's and Lysis's courtship (they get together after impeccably-honourable Lysis helps Alexias with some problems he's having with other, less delicate suitors; then they sit under the trees together and talk for hours about their pasts and philosophy and so on, and you know very well what I think about that kind of thing, Renault, and it's very sweet); but I was not at all happy with how things progress later on. The trouble, I suppose, is that m/m relationships may be socially acceptable in ancient Athens but permanent, primary m/m relationships are not, and the characters still exist in a context where it's expected that the relationship will run its course and they will happily give each other up and get married at the appropriate age; there is a certain amount of rather beautifully-written grief over this but ultimately they accept it and do seem pretty much happy to part, and really, for all the vast difference in social context that was upsetting in more or less the same way something like John Halifax, Gentleman is upsetting, and I don't think the book engaged with it in a way I would have found satisfying. (Also, both characters have multiple less-serious relationships with women while they're together—despite both being jealous of each other's girlfriends!—which rather undermined things for me). I'm also still not sure how much I actually like Lysis; certainly he's kind and very honourable, but there's a streak of taking everything on himself which I did not like so much, although perhaps that's an inevitable part of those Greek lover/beloved relationships. Finally, there's the stuff about the nobility of Platonic (Sokratic?) love and the inevitable debasement of introducing sex into the relationship, which is obviously far less fraught here than it was in the extremely homophobic twentieth century but which is still not exactly a sensible idea, in all its philosophical complexity; it's handled rather ambivalently here and Alexias doesn't seem to agree with it entirely, but it's all very vague. The whole thing is very vague, actually; apart from the sex being even more extremely implicit than in The Charioteer, many of the important scenes between Alexias and Lysis are more summarised than shown, and I'd have liked a bit more focus on them. Anyway...
From that point of view, I also thought the shape of the ending was a bit odd. See, early on in the book I thought Lysis was going to die at the end, because that would be the obvious way of resolving the conflict otherwise caused by that inevitability that the relationship won't be permanent; the book even opens with what looks very much like foreshadowing involving the uncle after whom Alexias was named and his own beloved. Later on, as the relationship changes and also the history gets more pointed, I went, ohhh no, I see, it's going to end with Sokrates's death, isn't it??? But, no—Lysis does die and Sokrates is still alive at the end, although there's a bit of foreshadowing of what's going to happen to him not very long afterwards. And so I felt that Lysis's death was neither one thing nor the other, emotionally; it comes far too late to be the noble, tragic dramatically-satisfying alternative to the change and loss of his former relationship with Alexias, which is already firmly lost by that point, and while they are still close and it is very sad, I felt it didn't really achieve very much narratively, and wasn't nearly as upset as I really ought to be when Mary Renault kills off one of the main characters at the end of a novel. She doesn't even do that in The Charioteer, the ending of which is a thousand times more heartbreaking.
Oh, and there's also the Oedipus complex kink, of course! Alexias's mother died when he was very young, but he has a stepmother; unlike e.g. Mrs Fleming she's really a pretty nice person, and I liked her, but unfortunately Alexias is more or less explicitly in love with her, and this causes problems. At one point Alexias's father (who is an incredible piece of work) accuses him of having a relationship with her and fathering his own actual half-sister, and Alexias runs away into the mountains (he's a runner; you've got to put that carefully-practised ideal Athenian athleticism to good use...!) and is torn with anguish because it's not true but it might as well be!!!, and then he meets a statue of an impossibly-attractive god which turns out to have been modelled on his father. It's always good to know that some things in Renault novels don't change.
The book also has a rather enjoyable sting in the very last paragraph, which wraps up the framing device of Alexias's narration; and confirmed me in my decision to read this book first of the historical novels, because I think it will be a very interesting experience going on to Fire From Heaven next...
*Renault is pedantic about Greek spelling and pronunciation, hence Sokrates. I was quite glad of this, if only because Lysis sounds silly if you try to pronounce it in English, being merely a piece of cell biology jargon. She does allow Plato rather than Platon, however. Anyway...
I thought, "Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces."
I read The Last of the Wine (1956) last week, under eerily similar circumstances to those in which I first read The Charioteer six years ago; and this was appropriate, really, because in some respects The Last of the Wine is rather like what would happen if all the Greek bits in The Charioteer, up to and including the title, declared independence and went off to start their own book in their own setting. It has a lot to say about Greek philosophy and the nature and meaning of love, and those inevitable horses; many of the main characters are real figures from Sokrates's* circle and Plato's writings, now seen as people in their historical context.
But The Last of the Wine is also very different from any of the Renault contemporary novels I've read so far in that its plot, rather than consisting largely of the interactions and relationships of the characters, is formed of quite a few years of real ancient Athenian history as the characters experience it; and the whole thing is much larger in scope as a result. While the ideas and sensibilities are very much Renault's, it felt sometimes as though the plot and setting had wandered in from a Rosemary Sutcliff novel. The various elements of the book sit oddly alongside each other; reading it was a strange experience and I'm still not quite sure what to make of the whole thing.
The story, then, follows our first-person narrator (another major difference from the other Renault books I've read, by the way) Alexias, a young upper-class Athenian living during the Peloponnesian War, from his mid-teens to his late twenties, concentrating especially on: the character of Sokrates and his influence on Alexias and others; Alexias's experiences of war, from being thrust into combat at a young age as the Spartans threaten Athens, to later naval warfare and a horrible famine caused by a siege; and Alexias's relationship with his lover Lysis, as it develops and changes in the context of both philosophy and war. Rather like some Sutcliff novels, much of the general sense at first as I got further through this book was of so much happening, on and on. Perhaps I tried to rush through the book too quickly—something else Renault and Sutcliff have in common is writing styles that are engaging enough to read quickly fairly easily but nonetheless dense enough that this probably isn't a good idea; I felt the same about Sword at Sunset, and perhaps both books would benefit from a slower re-read.
And at first, I felt that all this massive amount of action—the various turns and changes of the war and the different parts Alexias takes in it, the political drama of Athens as democrats and oligarchs fight for control of the polis, the games and the gods and the large cast of philosophers and the complicated family relationships, etc. etc. etc.—was making it difficult for me to feel really engaged with the emotions of the book and the central relationships in the same way I have with all of Renault's contemporary novels so far. (It is also really rather grim in places, and too much grimness in a book tends to lead to me backing off emotionally as a sort of defence mechanism, which probably didn't help). Despite the first-person narration, the characters all felt at much more of a distance. But I'm not sure about that now; I keep thinking about Alexias/Lysis and the Sokratic ideas, and re-reading over bits of the book that struck me the first time, and the more I do the more I find myself caring about them; I was rather emotional typing up that quote above about the horses. I think this book is going to stay with me, after all, and I'm sure it will greatly benefit from re-reading.
One very important feature of the Ancient Greek setting from Renault's point of view is of course that she now gets to write m/m relationships in a setting where they're accepted as a normal part of society; this is quite a dramatic change from The Charioteer and something I was looking forward to about this book, so I was surprised by how much it didn't work for me. I did enjoy the early bits about Alexias's and Lysis's courtship (they get together after impeccably-honourable Lysis helps Alexias with some problems he's having with other, less delicate suitors; then they sit under the trees together and talk for hours about their pasts and philosophy and so on, and you know very well what I think about that kind of thing, Renault, and it's very sweet); but I was not at all happy with how things progress later on. The trouble, I suppose, is that m/m relationships may be socially acceptable in ancient Athens but permanent, primary m/m relationships are not, and the characters still exist in a context where it's expected that the relationship will run its course and they will happily give each other up and get married at the appropriate age; there is a certain amount of rather beautifully-written grief over this but ultimately they accept it and do seem pretty much happy to part, and really, for all the vast difference in social context that was upsetting in more or less the same way something like John Halifax, Gentleman is upsetting, and I don't think the book engaged with it in a way I would have found satisfying. (Also, both characters have multiple less-serious relationships with women while they're together—despite both being jealous of each other's girlfriends!—which rather undermined things for me). I'm also still not sure how much I actually like Lysis; certainly he's kind and very honourable, but there's a streak of taking everything on himself which I did not like so much, although perhaps that's an inevitable part of those Greek lover/beloved relationships. Finally, there's the stuff about the nobility of Platonic (Sokratic?) love and the inevitable debasement of introducing sex into the relationship, which is obviously far less fraught here than it was in the extremely homophobic twentieth century but which is still not exactly a sensible idea, in all its philosophical complexity; it's handled rather ambivalently here and Alexias doesn't seem to agree with it entirely, but it's all very vague. The whole thing is very vague, actually; apart from the sex being even more extremely implicit than in The Charioteer, many of the important scenes between Alexias and Lysis are more summarised than shown, and I'd have liked a bit more focus on them. Anyway...
From that point of view, I also thought the shape of the ending was a bit odd. See, early on in the book I thought Lysis was going to die at the end, because that would be the obvious way of resolving the conflict otherwise caused by that inevitability that the relationship won't be permanent; the book even opens with what looks very much like foreshadowing involving the uncle after whom Alexias was named and his own beloved. Later on, as the relationship changes and also the history gets more pointed, I went, ohhh no, I see, it's going to end with Sokrates's death, isn't it??? But, no—Lysis does die and Sokrates is still alive at the end, although there's a bit of foreshadowing of what's going to happen to him not very long afterwards. And so I felt that Lysis's death was neither one thing nor the other, emotionally; it comes far too late to be the noble, tragic dramatically-satisfying alternative to the change and loss of his former relationship with Alexias, which is already firmly lost by that point, and while they are still close and it is very sad, I felt it didn't really achieve very much narratively, and wasn't nearly as upset as I really ought to be when Mary Renault kills off one of the main characters at the end of a novel. She doesn't even do that in The Charioteer, the ending of which is a thousand times more heartbreaking.
Oh, and there's also the Oedipus complex kink, of course! Alexias's mother died when he was very young, but he has a stepmother; unlike e.g. Mrs Fleming she's really a pretty nice person, and I liked her, but unfortunately Alexias is more or less explicitly in love with her, and this causes problems. At one point Alexias's father (who is an incredible piece of work) accuses him of having a relationship with her and fathering his own actual half-sister, and Alexias runs away into the mountains (he's a runner; you've got to put that carefully-practised ideal Athenian athleticism to good use...!) and is torn with anguish because it's not true but it might as well be!!!, and then he meets a statue of an impossibly-attractive god which turns out to have been modelled on his father. It's always good to know that some things in Renault novels don't change.
The book also has a rather enjoyable sting in the very last paragraph, which wraps up the framing device of Alexias's narration; and confirmed me in my decision to read this book first of the historical novels, because I think it will be a very interesting experience going on to Fire From Heaven next...
*Renault is pedantic about Greek spelling and pronunciation, hence Sokrates. I was quite glad of this, if only because Lysis sounds silly if you try to pronounce it in English, being merely a piece of cell biology jargon. She does allow Plato rather than Platon, however. Anyway...
