Volume 26, Number 1 · February 8, 1979
The Masks of Mary Renault
By Peter Green
The Praise Singer
by Mary Renault
Pantheon, 290 pp., $8.95
It is interesting to speculate what kind of critical reception The Praise Singer might have received had it not been the seventh in a sequence of immensely successful historical novels by that masked and devious illusionist Mary Renault (inevitably, a nom de plume). Her publishers have been touting her new work as 'a landscape of ancient history filled with the living substance of passions, politics, and poetry': though all blurbs tend to shoot for the moon, this one is more off-target than most. The ancient history is there all right, almost to excess: a kaleidoscope of the late sixth century BC, mugged up from Herodotus, Lyra Graeca, volumes of art history, and prosopographical treatises. But the passions, such as they are, remain flat and muted, the politics lack that frightful obsessive vigor which characterized every performer in the city-state pantomime, from tyrants to demagogues, and the poetry is for the most part absent. Since the narrator is Simonides of Ceos, the unofficial poet laureate of the Persian Wars, we get a lot about the business of being a poet, but all refracted through a rather dull and essentially middle-class view of life, and expressed in what C.S. Lewis would term drab prose.
Review, 3954 words
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