“Scholars will note,” writes Annabel Lyon in the
Acknowledgements section of her novel The Golden Mean, “that I have
omitted the philosopher Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle, who is thought
to have accompanied him to Macedonia .” She goes on, equally formal: “Scholars will
note, too, that I have delayed Speusippus’s death for the sake of narrative
convenience.” And then: “Scholars will
turn purple over my sending Aristotle to Chaeronea .”
As a novelist myself, I would probably be disappointed if a
blogger quoted from my Acknowledgements page, but I started here because the
tone is unmistakably Lyon—at once attentive to details of the ancient world but
not without a humor that is often funny, frequently witty, and always indelibly
in the voice.
The Golden Mean follows Aristotle’s years spent
tutoring Alexander the Great. The
premise alone is delicious in the number of great historical figures it
implicates. But where many might shy away
from humanizing such larger-than-life men, Lyon not only
confidently and clearly re-imagines the ancients, but she does so in the
first-person voice of Aristotle himself.
Aristotle comes across as earthy, curious, well-meaning, and plagued by
a sadness the great philosopher himself doesn’t understand. Lyon gives Aristotle
these qualities with a light, confident touch that is truly appealing—facts are
never belabored; the characters populating Aristotle’s life are vivid and
varied; the audacity of going inside the mind of an ancient is never
acknowledged but simply done and done well.
Although I devoured historical fiction in my adolescence
(Ann Rinaldi was my favorite), I rarely read it now. I confess to a bias, inspired partially by the
manifesto of the titular character in Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, that I distrust a writer who cannot see
the nobleness of her own time and must instead turn to portraying other
eras. I suppose I’ll sound like a
narcissist, and a rather pretentious one at that, when I say that I read
literature to gaze in the mirror it holds up to life, but the books that feel
like they truly matter, the ones with ballast, are those in a realist mode that
treat the world contemporary to that book’s author. While I can’t say The Golden Mean fits
this bill, I nonetheless recommend it as a thoroughly and persuasively imagined
romp that, at its best, contains a thought-provoking richness. For example, the Golden Mean is Aristotle’s
idea that perfection lies between extremes, and Lyon
works this philosophy to good thematic effect. Above all, I didn’t sense that Lyon
turned to the ancient world because she can’t see nobleness in our own time but
because she sees in the ancients a vibrant humanity.
If you read and enjoy The Golden Mean as I did, you
may want to check out the novel Lyon herself calls “excellent”: Mary Renault’s
novel Fire From Heaven, which takes the same premise of Aristotle
tutoring Alexander the Great but tells it from Alexander’s perspective. I have yet to read it, but Lyon ’s
emphasis on the Golden Mean inspires me to want to read an imagined account
from Alexander’s perspective so that I might find a Golden Mean of fictions
that this famous mentorship has spawned.
Those of you following my preparatory reading for Squaw
Valley may wonder why I chose a book by Annabel Lyon, who is not
on the faculty of the impending workshop.
The answer lies in Lyon ’s editor, Diana Coglianese, who is on the faculty and whose resume of working with
literary fiction writers makes me eager to meet her. Less than two weeks left
until the workshop starts! Time to get
back to my reading…
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