Alexias wrote:This is probably off-topic, but the essay doesn't give a literary critique of the novel. I'd be interested in your views on this.chris_taylor wrote: the author doesn't understand enough about story mechanics & dramatic structure to fully grasp why "The Persian Boy" worked as a story where Oliver Stone's script failed.
There are several published writers here and they are more qualifyied than me to offer a litary critique. But I've always admired Renault's technical brilliance and felt that readers preconceived ideas about Alexander and/or homosexuality prevented her being given the credit she deserved as a writer.
Personally, I think that the Persian Boy should be a "must read" on the curriculum of every course on dramatic storytelling for any medium - radio, film or novel. For those interested, I outline why below, using choice of main character, plot, characterization and language to illustrate what I mean.
Choice of Main Character:
When writing a story of a historical character after his/her death *from the point of view of that person*, then the hero must undergo a crucible prior to the events that made them famous and the story must end before those achievements start. Its inherent in the laws of dramatic structure formulated by Aristotle in their simplest form: every must have a beginning, a middle and an end.
"Alexander set out to conquer Asia and then he died" isn't a story. It has no middle.
"Alexander set out to conquer Asia, but he had to overcome his army's resentment to succeed" would be a story, but that's not what happened.
"Alexander set out to conquer Asia through Verschmelzungspolitik, but everyone else wanted war" would be a story, but that's not what happened neither.
"Alexander wanted to conquer Asia through war, but he failed because he didn't learn it was morally wrong" would be a story, but that definetely didn't happen.
There is no evidence that Alexander ever questioned the morality of what he was doing: for all we know, he pursued his goal from start to finish unchanged. He is the archetype of a hero whose moral values do not change, no matter what size the obstacle you throw at him. In other words, he had no character arc.
So the Renault needed to solve two problems: separate the dramatic function of the protagonist from that of the main character, ie the person through whom the reader experiences the story - and then find that main character an arc strong enough to withstand a relentless battering by none less than Alexander the Great.
Out of the 800 or so characters listed in Heckel's "Who is who in the age of Alexander", there weren't many candidates for the role: few were close enough to have had enough first or second-hand knowledge of all the events that required telling. Of those few, many died before Alexander - and the laws of structure dictate that a main character can't die before the story is over.
The best potential candidates were Olympias, Philip Arrhideus, Roxanne, Stateira, Oxyathres, Bagoas and Barsine.
Of those, Olympia and Roxanne character arcs weren't any more arc'ed than that of Alexander and both would have been difficult to portay sympathetically. Stateira and Barsine had too little personal contact with Alexander to make them credible witnesses to Alexander's personality, and their more traditional role as women precluded them from being witnesses to his wars.
That left the 3 men: a brother who came to power as a result of Alexander's death, the blood relative of an enemy and a eunuch lover. All three would have been perfect choices: as historical figures, they weren't well fleshed out, so their characters could be made to suit their dramatic function and their real life positions gave plenty of material for internal and external conflict.
That Renault chose Bagoas was both inspired and couragous: it allowed her to use the element of a love-story, but at the cost of alienating a large section of a potential audience. It's to her (and her publisher's) credit that she stuck with it.
As a result, she wrote a timeless love story. Those who think that's too far fetched may try the following: change Bagoas into a poor peasant girl, cut out the sex and change Alexander into a dashing prince who can win wars without really killing anyone. What's left is the bare-bones story mechanics of a Disney fairy tale. Same skeleton, different fleshing out.
Oliver Stone was hamstrung by Hollywood sensibilities (as well as copyrights), so he couldn't use Bagoas to tell his story. He could have used Oxyathres or Philip Arrhideus, but they were very different characters and no one has written Alexander's story from their point as yet. It would have meant writing a script from scratch that rivalled Renault's achievements. Oliver Stone is a master director, but script writing is a very different skill. He picked Ptolemy and it predictably failed.
"Ptolemy set out with Alexander to conquer Asia and became King of Egypt instead" is not a story and no amount of pyrotechnics will fool an audience into believing otherwise.
Characterization
All we know about Bagoas is that he was a beautiful teenage eunuch who went on to became the lover of both the Protagonist and the Antagonist in a war over world dominance.
A completely absurd, but a fairly standard story premise - the script for every James Bond girl since Ursula Andres. Fun to watch, but everyone knows it just doesn't happen in real life. Yet if we are to believe the sources, that's exactly what Bagoas did.
That presented Renault with not one, but two problems: the normal dramatic template for Bagoas' role wasn't going to work - Bond-girls and Cinderalla archetypes are not credible as real-life characters. She had to invent a character who was so radically different from the archetype that the audience wouldn't get confused AND make him credible in the role history cast him in.
She did it with an amazing psychological insight.
Bagoas was a Eunuch, ie he survived castration. No anaethetic, no antibiotics, no blood transfusions. His scrotum was simply hacked off. Anyone who has seen what that means in practice will understanad the reality hidden behind those simple words "He was a Eunuch". If you haven't seen it, trust me, you don't want to know. Renault was a nurse during the war and she knew. Her first hand experience of injury leaps off the pages of all her writings.
Having survived castration, Bagoas survived the court intrigue under Darius and went on to become his lover. He survived the death of his king and his empire, and the upheaval of the transition to a new world order. He went on to become the lover of the next king and succeeded in remaining in his favour, despite the xenophobia of Alexander's generals and his army. He even may have succeeded in winning them over a little bit: the army insisted Alexander kissed him in public.
To survive and thrive against those odds required cunning, egoism, ruthlessness and opportunism. Once no longer required for survival, none of those traits are pleasant, but he must have had a redeeming quality that endeared him to the two most powerful men of his time, who were themselves enemies. The quality Renault chose was "loyalty".
Whether a reader likes the Persian Boy or not, it is difficult to argue that using the combination of character traits, Renault managed to create a character who could credibly have achieved a feat that was improbable to the extreme.
Plot:
Once Renault had determined the main character, the main problem was to find ways of telling all of Alexander's story without changing historical reality. As Bagoas didn't meet Alexander until 4 years into an 11 year campaign, not an insignificant problem. And the ups and downs of historic events don't normally match the rise and fall of the beats as required by dramatic story-telling. Mediocre writers solve the problems by shifting narrative focus, competent ones by sacrificing historical accuracy.
Renault went about it in a different way.
a) she invented ways of how the main character would have known about events he would not have been present at. In the process, she killed two birds with one stone: it allowed the reader to become familiar with the story world without breaking narrative focus: 7 months of the siege of Tyre all related through gossip and hearsay scoured from the streets of Babylon and at court, and yet we get a good sense of the skill and relentlessness with which Alexander pursued his goal. By the end of the chapter, Renault's oneliner has the same devastating effect as Alexander's final assault.
"And then Tyre fell."
b) she re-weighs the meaning of each event by viewing it through the lens of her narrator. Alexander's victory at Gaugamela isn't described in terms of military genius, or its significane for world history. In fact, it isn't described at all: we experience it through the effect it had on the city of Arbela and the life of a eunuch in the bizarre world of the Persian court. Yet the reader is left in no doubt as to what happened on the battlefield spelt the beginning of the end for Darius.
c) she wraps the core narrative (Alexander's campaign) into the outer story of Bagoas writing his book. This flashback-narrative allows her to complete the arc of her main character in the present.
This narrative complexity is held together by a dramatic framework of awe-inspiring perfection: no matter which analytic tool you choose to take it apart - Aristotle, Campbell, Vogler, Truby, Aronson, Dramatica - its always turns out flawless. All the beats, in all the right places. Always.
Language
The Persian Boy is written as an autobiography of the main character. To make that credible, the historical Bagoas had to be taken into account: he was a native Persian speaker, who wrote his (fictious) book in his second language, with all the subtle mistakes / idiosyncrasies / idiomatic changes that it would have entailed.
Renault had to capture the interplay of his (fictious) character, language and culture, imagine how that would have filtered through into a second ancient language and then convey it the subtleties in English vocabulary, syntax & grammar, while still making it all intelligent to a modern day reader.
The opening lines of the Persian Boy are worth quoting:
"Lest anyone should suppose I am a son of a nobody, sold off by some peasant father in a drought year, I may say our line is an ancient one, although it ends with me."
By modern standards, syntax and vocabulary are very odd, but it's easy to imagine that this how a proud Persian eunuch living 2500 years ago would have started a book about himself. Once you've followed so far, that opening line no longer sounds odd, but self-evident.
But to understand how much skill has gone into crafting those lines becomes apparent when listening to the dialogue in Oliver Stone's Alexander. The movie had a budget of $ 15o million dollars and that still wasn't enough to find a scriptwriter skilled enough to make the audience forget that everyone on screen was talking in the wrong language.
Chris.