The mouth still feels weird, but the dentist said everything looks fine, which made me think it’d be better by now. And I suppose it is better, just very slowly… look, I’m getting tired of this. So I’ve been brushing and flossing and mouthwashing because that makes it feel a bit better.
I finished The Egyptian–which inspired this Note (although originally I had a completely different topic)--and apparently the English translation is hundreds of pages shorter than the original Finnish? Which is wild, because the book is five hundred pages. What the eff!
The Historical Epic Tour
Alright, so I read The Egyptian by Mika Waltari, which is one of the famous historical epic novels. The story is about Sinuhe, an Egyptian physician living before and during the reign of the heretical pharaoh Akhenaten. Not only does the story involve several real-life historical figures who were around Egypt at the time, but also others, as Sinuhe travels beyond the borders of his home country to the lands of Syria, Israel, and Crete.
This book reminded me of several other novels I’ve read over the years, which fall into a subgenre that, for the lack of a better term, I’m calling ‘the Historical Epic Tour’. It is a historical fiction story in which the protagonist in a certain period of history doesn’t just live in that period, but travels far and wide, meeting different historical figures and having a hand in the events of history, one way or another. The Egyptian is a pretty good foundational example of this, though it’s far from the only one. Off the top of my head, there’s Aztec by Gary Jennings, Creation by Gore Vidal, and Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill.
Unclear if Shogun by James Clavell would fit here–it kind of fits the mold, but while almost all of the characters are based on historical figures, the names have been changed.
[I suppose several Assassin’s Creed stories also fit in here, though those are video games so we’re not counting them.]
The problem that I see come up–at least, it came up when we covered Someone Knows My Name in my grad school course–is that people are going to say, “Wait, isn’t it really unlikely that this one person encounters everyone important to the historical setting in a limited human life?” And, uh… yeah. Sure. But this is fiction. Interesting fiction with stakes is going to have some unlikely things happen so that the author can tell a story. I suppose that’s why serious “literary” types prefer “literary fiction” in which everyday people faff about while nothing big happens.
I’ve also noticed that the amount of people’s complaints of the unlikeliness of a protagonist being involved with so many big events tends to be related to how familiar they are with the events and people in question. We in the US are fairly aware of things going on in the American Revolution, so stories set around that time (like Someone Knows My Name) tend to flag a lot of people as unlikely, whereas when you’re unfamiliar with, say, Mesoamerica before and during the time of the Spanish Conquest, you’re probably not going to be bothered by the main character of Jennings’s Aztec running into a bunch of famous people because to you, none of them are famous people.
Though you probably shouldn’t read Jennings’s Aztec regardless because Jennings is a perv and injects weird and gross sex shenanigans wherever he can in the story.
I don’t think it’s inherently that much of a problem if you have the character run into a lot of famous people. It’s part of the appeal of the genre, but it’s also fine if you have a way to justify it. Creation has our protagonist, Cyrus, going all over the ancient world meeting several historical figures related to the development of ancient religions and philosophy. Which, yes, on the face of it is unlikely (not just because Vidal gets the dates for Zoroaster’s life wrong), but the author justifies it by having a protagonist that’s A) an official emissary of the Persian Empire and B) someone explicitly interested in religion and philosophy. The man wants to know the ultimate truth of the universe, where everything comes from, and that drives him to seek out answers from whoever he comes across–of course he’s going to be led to leading figures on those questions.
I suppose it’s a matter of setting up the character as being someone well-connected, or plausibly becoming so as the story goes on. Yeah, stories don’t have to be about privileged people and it’s nice to emphasize the lower classes, but if you want the guy (or gal!) to plausibly go around and meet the big name people of the time, you’ll probably give them some social or financial status to give them a reason to do so.
And when this sort of story is done well, it gives you a lot of perspective you may not have had. Creation gives you the story of several religious traditions from an outsider; it also gives you the Greco-Persian Wars from a Persian, which is not usually how it’s seen by people in the US and Europe today (the story actually kicks off with a framing device of Cyrus complaining about how much Herodotus gets wrong). Likewise, something like Aztec is Mexica politics and the Spanish Conquest of Mexico from the point of view of an actual indigenous person, and Someone Knows My Name is about events around the American Revolution told by an enslaved woman (which makes her an exception to the idea that you must have a privileged person as protagonist for this to work).
It’s such a cool thing to do! I enjoy when an author does it well–I want to see so many more of these out there. They’re not rare, exactly, though you’re more often going to see straight dramatizations of one person’s life, or a Secret History story or something like that.
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