Wow! This is great. ( )

For sweeping glorious romance of the highest calibre there is none greater than The Bull from the Sea. The story of Theseus, the great Athenian, famed for his bringing together the Greeks under his rule, encompasses great love, sacrifice, betrayal, hatred and revenge. Like the great Greek plays it shows the lives of a hero, driven by fate, through great love to great misery. Theseus, Pirithoos, Hippolyta, Hippolytos, Akamas and Phaedra are all drawn masterfully, becoming unforgettable characters in a great drama. Spectacular story carefully crafted into a pageturner by Mary Renault. The highest recommendation. ( )

The Bull from the Sea maintains the narrative charm of The King Must Die and continues the tension of the fall of goddess worship and the rise of the patriarchal sky gods. Theseus remains an interesting narrator, and Renault avoids forcing him into the role of a flawless hero, or brutish lug.

The greatest flaw of the book is the lack of narrative cohesion. The plot skips about on a whirlwind tour of the legends surrounding Theseus, frequently with little connecting material to relate the episodes to each other. ( )

The sequel to The King Must Die, this book picks up almost exactly where the last book ends. It covers the rest of the legend of Theseus, combining the original legend with Renault's blend of imagination and historical research.

This is probably the weakest of Renault's books that I've read. The pacing of the book - cramming most of the life of one of Greece's most famous legendary heroes into less than 250 pages - means that Renault was always going to need a strong and clearly defined character in order to carry the book without it feeling rushed and uneven. Theseus never comes across to me as any of those things. In fact, he never even comes across to me as remotely likeable. There was a coldness and a remoteness to the character that I can't recall encountering when reading her Alexander trilogy, for instance. It's as if Renault was trying to create a real man from an archetypal hero, and got stalled halfway through the process.

Overall, she handled the conversion from myth to novel well, providing some plausible and fairly realistic expectations for parts of the legendary cycle. The rest of the historical aspect shall be passed over in silence by me, mostly because I can appreciate that at the time Renault was writing, much of what she was saying was still accepted as historical fact. (But it's not, it's really, really not! 'Shore People'! Matriarchal religion being replaced by the patriarchy! Mycenaeans in 1500BCE!) I was more than a little irked by her representation of some aspects of gender history/interaction. I can buy that, since this novel was from Theseus' viewpoint, - and he was a pretty typical example of a Bronze Age male raised in a patriarchal society - that he would have no problem in ascribing a woman's anger to the fact that it was her 'moon time.' I had much, much greater problems with the representation of Hippolyta; not that Theseus would think of her as he did, but that a woman who was supposedly raised as an independent and self-sufficient Amazon would have thought and acted as she did, and would have what seemed to me to be a high level of internalised misogyny. It made me very, very uneasy reading those sections.

I think I'll be re-reading the Alexander trilogy long before I pick this one up again. It's not a bad novel; it just didn't really do so much for me. ( )

The Bull from the Sea picks up Theseus's story from where The King Must Die ended, his return to Athens from Crete, and follows his adventures until old age. As the story spans so many years, it seems to lack the central focus the year as a bull-leaper that The King Must Die has, we have wars, life with Hippolyta, life after her, Phaedra, Hippolytos, etc. I can understand why I felt bogged down with the book on my first attempt years ago, this time it seemed to flow better. ( )