I love books that transport me. This sparkling, deed-driven, gestural world, conjured up by Mary Renault, is a world I find profoundly attractive. In part, this is because these stories are so deeply embedded in my unconsciousness that although alien, they are also familiar.

That said, the Minotaur of the The King Must Die is not quite the same as the legendary half-man, half-beast of my childhood. As a character in the weave of this tale it is better and more subtle for Mary Renault's art, I think. But it raises questions about veracity, if that can apply to mythology?

Some books bleed into others and I’ve come to The King Must Die immediately after Sylvia Martin’s Passionate Friends; wherein women writers hide behind assumed names. Mary Renault was the pen name of Eileen Mary Challans who pioneered novels exploring same-sex love and desire. She and her partner, Julie Mullard, emigrated from Britain, to live in a South African community of gay and lesbian expatriates. However, she was wary of identifying herself primarily by sexual orientation and was hostile towards the gay rights movement.

No doubt there are learned texts about the influence of Renault’s sexuality on her writing style, but if a writer’s sexuality has any relevance, then, in my opinion, here, it serves to make the clear air that contributes to the unfamiliar atmosphere and the timelessness of these gripping stories where there are abundant forms of sexuality and sex. Some of the most moving scenes involve love making, but of course, there is much more.

There are as many powerful women as there are men in these stories. I say stories because while the overarching story is of Theseus’s journey from boyhood to kingship, there are many sub-stories several of which: Medea and Phaedra are not contained within the arc of the narrative.

Regardless of the currency of her Greek scholarship, I found Mary Renault’s invocation of the cosmology of the Attic world with its gods and heroes utterly absorbing. So much of the power of this book is in the detail. Nowhere more than where death occurs. Many kings die, as they must in this world where succession needs be god-sanctioned.

The relationships between men, women and gods is both utilitarian and dutiful. But it is humanity that shines through: Men are only men

But I was in no danger of over-eating. It killed ones hunger to see even great lords (some of whom I knew to hate him) fawning upon Asterion, changing their faces in time with his like soldiers drilling. While he cracked coarse jokes, his eyes missed nothing. I saw him watch guess out of hearing as if he could read their lips, and his stewards lingered like spies. p.251.

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I first read this book as a child (who was fascinated by mythology especially the Greek myths) and approached it with some trepidation this time around, remembering very little about it, apart from the fact that I'd been upset by the horse sacrifice near the start of the novel. However, I needn't have worried: for a book first published in 1958 it still holds up very well.

The plot isn't a mystery for anyone who knows something about the mythological story of Theseus, but the interpretation that Renault puts on it is unique. She tells the story from his own viewpoint, looking back over his life, as if it is historical fiction, drawing on all the - then recent - discoveries about Crete such as the Linear B language. For the main meat of the book is formed by Theseus' experiences in Crete.

The story begins in his childhood when he learns how to be a king from his grandfather, but always smarts under the stigma of not knowing his father's identity. He is the sole child of the king's daughter and sole surviving child - and comes to believe the story put around that the god Poseidon is his father. This seems confirmed when he starts to experience the kind of 'aura' that animals and birds receive as a warning of earthquakes - to the ancient peoples a sign of Poseidon's anger. But he remains small and light, outgrown by his contemporaries, unlike in the myth, because - more realistically - Renault takes the fact that Theseus later excels at bull leaping to indicate he must have been agile and shorter than average.

Then comes the revelation about his real father and the circumstances around his conception - plus the need to shift a massive stone and take the sword concealed underneath it to his father to claim his birthright. And so the tale gathers momentum. En route, Theseus learns skills and gains experiences that will later serve him well, plus changing for ever the nature of the goddess worship in an intervening town where the old practice of sacrificing the king annually has survived. And his experiences on Crete will change and inform his maturing character for the rest of his life.

I liked the way Renault came up with realistic explanations for all the oddities which myths take for granted, and made Theseus likeable despite the - to our age outrageous - treatment of women, something in which he was following societal norms. The goddess worship had been subsumed into the worship of male gods such as Zeus and Poseidon by this time, apart from in pockets where it survived less transformed, and was regarded with suspicion by men in general. Yet Theseus does gain an awareness while on Crete that the women who have to face the bulls - despite their being labelled always as 'girls' - are just as brave and capable as the men, and that the flighty behaviour of so many women is due to their conforming to what is expected of them in a male dominated society.

The one point which I didn't think Renault quite managed to make convincing was Theseus reason for not painting his sail on his return journey - unlike the myth, he doesn't just forget. But that is such a minor point that the book still deserves a 5-star rating. ( )

A 1958 episodic historical novel, the first half of a pair, that is an attempt to tell the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur in some realistic way. I recommend that you go to the back of the book and read the legend first, since some key points in the story are described very briefly, and sometimes with an odd sentence or two, as if the author assumed that the reader would know the myth well. Ultimately, I think attempts to explain religious myths as a distortion of a real event are unconvincing.

The author wrote two brief passages that seem to foreshadow Christianity. These are very short, but distracting, since the reader is trying to immerse himself in the time with all of its cultural peculiarities, and Christianity was a long way off in 1600 BCE. It is like the author is winking at you.

I liked the comment on p. 150 of this edition, "I learned...how much easier it is to move the many than the few." Έμαθα πόσο εύκολο είναι να μετακινήσετε το πολλοί από τους λίγους.[?, Google translate doesn't do linear A or B] ( )

A wonderful blend of myth and historical fiction, all told by Theseus as he progresses from childhood in Troizen, until he learns that his father is King of Athens. He starts for Athens by chariot, but is stopped in Eleusis, where he becomes the King who must Die. But this is not his fate (moira), and so he goes on to Athens where, having made himself known to the King, he gives himself the Cretan tribute takers, to honour Poseidon.
And so he comes to Minoan Crete, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. A story splendidly reimagined.

I read Renault’s highly enjoyable Alexander novels about 35 years ago and I don’t know what has taken me so long to pick up this book. The language is slightly dated (published in 1958), but for me this captures the archaism when writing about the Bronze Age. [For example, She had that vein of wildness which stirs a man because it lies deep, like Hephaistos’ fire which only the earthquake loosens from the mountain.

Brilliant. ( )

I read this book for book club, and managed to slog through it, but I hated it. I don't know how she managed to make mythology so boring, but she did. I would not recommend this, there are tons of better books, if you are interested in Greek mythology. ( )