Reconstructions

It seems that Mr Duggan soaks himself regularly in the details of an historical period, and then tries to reconstruct the people and their motives, remembering (and this is his great strength) that human nature varies little from age to age. I would recommend this book on King Alfred to any reader or any teacher. It is never stuffy and always credible. The battle sequences are most workmanlike. Yet I doubt whether Alfred’s weakness of the bowels really was the thing that most shaped his character.

Mr Kersh, in his fictional life of St Paul, runs more risks than Mr Duggan – King Alfred, after all, is not the first father of Christian theology. For two- thirds of the book I thought he was wildly off the beam; yet he finally convinced me that Saul of Tarsus might have been like that – neurotic, implacable, loaded with an arrogant scrupulosity. The fictional narrator is Diomed, Roman prefect in Tarsus, an experienced man with some humour and wisdom. He holds the book together and gives it its special bite.

Neither of these books has the trace of genius, the obsessive vitality of Mr Treece’s Jason – a jewel of a book, direct, poetic, and perfect in shape and style. Mr Treece has done what Robert Graves failed to do in his retelling of the legend of the Golden Fleece. He has reconstructed the mythological age in a way that is not only intellectually credible but also psychologically convincing. His Jason lives and breathes and walks, and so does every other character. More than this; one feels that the secrets of life which one hopes to find in the finest novels or poems are expressed by Mr Treece obliquely in this inimitable,page 517 barbaric book. What, for example, is the relation between the fate of the priest- king in the cult of Hera and the fate of those sons and husbands dismembered by the modern American matriarchy? I leave the reader to find other parallels.

1962 (267)