Reading: The King Must Die

[white_hart]

The King Must Die is Mary Renault's retelling of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, presented as historical fiction rather than fantasy (i.e. with a non-supernatural Minotaur and all divine intervention kept vague enough that it could just be imagination). Renault sets the story around the time that patriarchal structures and the worship of the sun god were supplanting matriarchy and Goddess-worship throughout the communities around the Aegean, and one of the themes of the novel is the nature of kingship and the sacrifice of kings for their people, either as part of a ritual cycle, as in the societies that still follow the old religion, or, in the patriarchal societies, in time of great need. (There is a really odd passage near the end where Theseus muses that maybe one day the gods themselves will lay down their lives to allow a single greater god to come forward, seeming to foresee the rise of Christianity more than a thousand years later.)

I particularly enjoyed Renault's The Mask of Apollo when I read it a couple of years ago because I liked the narrator; I struggled a bit with The King Must Die to begin with, because Theseus comes across as an arrogant little sod and I found his delight in abusing and putting down the Queen of Eleusis, who he finds himself married to, and overthrowing Eleusis's matriarchal society in favour of a good honest patriarchy particularly hard to take. I was close to giving up on the book, but once Theseus is taken as part of the tribute from Athens to Crete I found myself enjoying it much more. I liked the depiction of the decadent Cretan society, too confident in its historical importance to realise that its time has come, and I thought Theseus's gradual realisation of just how little regard the Cretans have for their slaves from mainland Greece, seeing them as not much more than animals and certainly less than fully human, was well done. Theseus also grows and changes, and is much more sympathetic as the leader of the bull-dancers, committed to supporting his team and ensuring that they work together to survive life in the ring, than he was as a younger man.

Comments

[chickenfeet]

I really should read this again. It must be 45 years since I read it.

[lilliburlero]

It was the first Renault I read, and I was utterly wrongfooted: I was enjoying what I thought was an ironic send-up of a man semi-accidentally popularising patriarchy through his own raging Short Bloke Complex and then I found out a bit more about Renault's actual politics and thought oh, hang on.

[white_hart]

Yes; obviously there's not a lot of space for authorial disapproval in a first-person narrative, but I've read enough Renault to suspect that she was firmly in the patriarchy-is-good camp (which I suspect was the general view in the 50s anyway; the beginning of the novel also reminded me a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Mark of the Horse Lord, which deals with a similar conflict and also sees the patriarchy as the "good" structure). The weird bit at the end where he foresees the coming of Christianity also seemed to be implying linear progression from matriarchal rites to patriarchal polytheism to the patriarchal monotheism of the Christian era.