Ancient Evenings

A startling work of creative imagination.

Norman Mailer - love him or hate him - had a mastery of the language that very few could rival. It is apparent in all his works, including "Ancient Evenings", which takes place at a variety of Egyptian locales, from royal dinners to family barge rides, from distant mining camps to tombs. Much of the story is told in flashback, much of it recited by a ponderous old man. The highlights of the book are:
a) Mailer's immense knowledge of the age. I adored Ancient Egypt as a study topic when a student, and still I'm not sure how much of this is verified/historically theorised truth, and how much is Mailer's imagination. Either way, he creates a world in which every cultural nuance and spoken show more idiosyncracy feels foreign and yet genuine;
b) That sense of magic - speculative fiction, I guess we'd call it now - that allows us never to be sure what is real, without ever succumbing to the dreaded "fantasy"; and
c) yes, it is true: Mailer's ability to tell those lecherous tales while rarely coming across as just a perv.

As others have said, this book will beguile or disgust: sodomy and incest (sometimes both!) are high on the agenda, and Mailer is as unapologetic as his characters.

I would never call this book my favourite, not by a long shot: like many works, I appreciate it as much intellectually as I do viscerally. For instance, Menenhetet speaks using a lot of similes and analogies, often quite ponderously. It makes reading this book a tougher experience than one would like, but this is a genuine part of the character and his culture, not a flaw in Mailer's writing.

In the end, this is a work that won't speak to anyone. It's highly idiosyncratic, explores many abstract or challenging themes, and takes no pains to explain itself until it feels the time is right. However, by the same token, the novel refuses to pander to cliche or the simple answers, and is one of those amazing books where - by the time you're reading the final chapters - you realise how strange and incomprehensible they would be to the uninitiated, yet they make perfect sense to you. "Ancient Evenings" makes you work for your reward, and in this case the reward is a fantastic and unsettling portrayal of life in Egypt under the Pharaohs, and of a world so far removed from our own. The final chapter is startlingly beautiful, and puts my previous favourite literary ending - that of "The Great Gatsby" - to shame. Lovely. show less

I can only tell you my experience of the book.

It was knocking on the door of greatness. The beginning was staggering, and I was floored by the musicality of its sentences, its startling imagery, and the depth of thought that made these ancient Egyptians remind me, as others before me, of aliens in a science fiction novel – that is, the past is an alien world. I was having an encounter with this novel, like you have with extraterrestials or great beasts. This reached its pitch with the Battle of Kadesh, whose inspirations were the Old Testament and the Iliad, and where Mailer, in the whole chapter devoted to the battle, gives his sentences the rush and rhythm of chariot wheels. Awesome battle scene.

So far, with me, he hadn’t put a show more foot wrong. Thomas Mann went wrong in Egypt with the ornate style, for me: I loved his first Joseph books but in Egypt I sank into the sands of his Biblical loquacity. But Mailer, as Old Testamenty as he, hadn’t spent a word too much, he was music to my ears. Then I hit the Book of Queens. It was atrocious, and the novel never clawed up from that low – until perhaps the last five pages.

As for the sex content. In the parts I admired, I didn’t feel it was gratuitous or ill-done. I’ll thank him for his lessons in unhealthy psychology. Once I read a book – which I won’t even link to, because I hated the book and thought it bad history – that told me how common in the ancient world was war rape, man to man: as a further vanquishment of a defeated enemy. So, there’s much oneupmanship in here, where they use such methods to humiliate and see who’s ahead of who. It’s effing unhealthy, like I say; nevertheless, when I read that aforementioned nonfiction I was disturbed and disgusted, whereas Mailer doesn’t set out to disturb and disgust me and he didn’t. When he has a humiliate-the-captive scene entirely from the point of view of the unapologetic perpetrator, I felt I was given insight, in the way fiction can.

None of what I’ve just said goes for the latter part of the book, where sex is stupid, gratuitous and features women. I had already noticed that he never has women raped. Is that pushing it, even for him? I had to wonder. But in these stretches you soon notice every single woman is a sex addict, and... spare me. It’s worse than I can say. The music is lost too, since he’s thrown discipline to the winds; and the Egyptians aren’t aliens now, they live in your closest daytime soap.

He took ten years to write this, as he lets us know at the end. Maybe he had a brain explosion along the way. show less

The ka of Menenhetet Two, a young Egyptian nobleman, is born into the afterlife, where he meets his great-grandfather, Menenhetet One. Menenhetet One helps Menenhetet Two to remember a day when he went with his parents and Menenhetet One to visit the Pharaoh Rameses IX. During that visit, Menenhetet One was persuaded to tell of his previous lives, for he had learnt to reincarnate himself by magic and was now on his fourth life.

The core of the book is Menenhetet One's story of his first life as a royal charioteer under Ramses the Great in the build up to the battle of Kadesh and then as a guard for Ramses's concubines and Queens. Menenhetet One is not an attractive character but we do come to care about him and his audience as he ttells show more he story.

Mailer has managed to create a cast of characters with a truly different outlook on life rather than 20th century characters in fancy dress.He gives us a rich sensory experience of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Together with the complex narrative structure, all this means the book needs to be long, but it could be trimmed by cutting down on at least some of the sex scenes, which manage to be many and varied without being particularly interesting for the most part. show less

This novel is a heady re-imagining of the magical perspective of the Pharaohs, full of intense, smaller narratives ranging from the quotidian to the mythic. I recently noticed that Wilbur Smith had written more volumes in his ancient Egyptian series, but I'd rather spend the time re-reading Mailer's monumental book.

Oh, what the fuck, Norman. You've completely lost it.

I respected The Naked and the Dead very much. A true epic of the Pacific War, no question. This is something by a different person entirely. Now, in his later career, he just seems to be fascinated with shit - literally. The historical novel about Hitler seemed to have too much rambling rants about piss in it. I refuse to read too much into his personal life, but this almost seems fetishistic.

Aside from that, I've always had a fascination for the mythology and history of Ancient Egypt, and it takes special effort to make this seem boring. What a waste.

OK, it's a stinker in some ways, but because it evoked a strong feeling of the time and place and of the mysterious, magical religion so effectively for me, appealing to all the senses, I'm not ashamed to be fond of this book.

I recently completed my 4th or 5th re-reading of this book. My familiarity with the characters and their environments allowed for an enriched reading experience and did not detract in any way. Mailer wrote with such precision and care that I expect to have an even deeper experience the next time I pick this book out of my shelves. Like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer often elaborates on a specific subject for pages or even entire chapters, but because I am so immersed in the world he has created, I find that level of detail illuminating.