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In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts. Born into a stern farming family on the island of Keos, Simonides escapes his harsh childhood through a lucky apprenticeship with a renowned Ionian singer. As they travel through 5th century B.C. Greece, Simonides learns not only how to play the kithara and compose poetry, but also how to navigate the shifting alliances surrounding his rich patrons. He is witness to the Persian invasion of Ionia, to the decadent reign of the Samian pirate king Polykrates, and to the fall of the Pisistratids in the Athenian court. Along the way, he encounters artists, statesmen, athletes, thinkers, and lovers, including the likes of Pythagoras and Aischylos. Using the singer's unique perspective, Renault combines her vibrant imagination and her formidable knowledge of history to establish a sweeping, resilient vision of a golden century.… (more)
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I put this down to the fact that as I was reading it in 1978 or 1979, I was disappointed that the main character wasn't gay and wasn't even very excitingly drawn. (Can you tell I was a youth who loved the Alexander novels, The Bull from the Sea, The King Must Die, The Persian Boy? Especially The Persian Boy, quite salacious!)
But, in the end, as a fifty-year-old who's tastes have matured (ha), I liked this book quite a lot. It was a lovely tale of how the world has always judged others by their looks and not their deeds or talents. It presents itself as a harmless historical novel, and examines human nature minutely, unsparingly, and with what can only be called a jaundiced eye. Renault was clearly irritated at the follies of mankind. It shows in such lines as this, spoken by Simonides in his old age: "I have never desired young maids, preferrinig ripe fruit to green; maybe it is because I feared their laughter when I was a boy." (p262, Pantheon hardcover edition 1978)
Still scared of the masses. Still subject to the fears and foibles of youth. Wiser? Renault is too good a writer to make you take her view. She tells her story, and leaves you to take her meanings.
Sheer pleasure, friends, and all too seldom met, when a storyteller trusts you to read, and read again, and reach your own conclusions. Read it and conclude, and you won't be sorry.
Renault's imagined life of the poet Simonides begins with young Sim's wretched early days as little better than a slave in his harsh father's house. When Sim gathers enough courage to beg a traveling singer to apprentice him, his life takes a dramatic turn for the better; at last he is able to give voice to the words and music he has been hiding from his family. I like the small authentic details that Renault always brings to her historical fiction; she always provides the reader with a whole world to wander about in. And I like that she doesn't (in Josephine Tey's words) "write forsoothly;" her characters converse in modern English, with just the occasional soupcon of antiquity.
Unlike other Renault protagonists, Simonides is straight, not gay; I find that Renault is more skilled at creating romantic tension with her gay or bisexual characters. Still, Simonides' relationship with the beautiful hetaera Lyra is handled with grace and tenderness, and in any case, it is clear from the get-go that the poet's driving force is not love, but the quest for immortality through his art. A lovely novel.
I wouldn't put The Praise Singer in the first tier of Mary Renault's historical fiction with the novels mentioned above, but it's heads above most historical fiction you can find on shelves. And in a way you could see this as a prequel to The Last of the Wine. While that dealt with Athens during the the Peloponnesian War, this is mostly set in Athens during the beginning of the Persian War. The central title figure, Simonides, is a real historical figure, an important lyric poet who wrote the famous epitaph for the 300 Spartans who fell at Thermopylae: Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. The Praise Singer is a great portrait of the early Classical period.