Aside from pictures of course, the novel itself was pretty good and quite interesting, but I have to admit to not having understood a great deal of it. Part of this is probably because my knowledge of the lives and histories of Alexander the Great and his teacher Aristotle -- the two central characters of the novel -- is, shall we say, porous.
Part of it, I like to hope, is that the author seems to represent courtly intrigues and everyday slights with a realistic sort of opacity. You don't always realize you've been stabbed in the back by your host until you've left the party, had a couple of drinks, and have begun to lose yourself in your latest trashy vampire novel. It dawns on you in the middle of a paragraph that you might be bleeding dignity. You understand that something about their turn of phrase wasn't entirely on the level... but you're too far removed from it now and there's nothing you can do to help yourself make better sense of it, and so you're left with the fuzzy knowledge that you were the butt of a joke... of some kind... you think. That's how I felt about a lot of the seemingly pivotal yet wilfully vague scenes in the book, and it's how some of the characters felt too. You know, maybe.
Either way, one thing I thought Lyon did really well was to portray the Macedonians as real people, without that ponderous feeling of greatness by virtue of ancientness that you often get when reading about History(TM). These ancients were just folk, three-dimensional, earthy, petty, distractable, workaday. I felt they might, like me, enjoy something one day and like it rather less the next. They seemed capable of having intellectual opinions about stuff that didn't always jibe with their gut convictions. The most intelligent and emotionally astute ones were able to make mistakes in judgement, perhaps convinced that somebody was sweet and innocent when that person was actually a sociopath. The most sociopathic ones demonstrated frequently how sweet and lonely and loving and childish they could be.
The "golden mean" of the title represents a theme I've always found attractive: that of moderation between extremes. The protagonist, Aristotle, tried to teach his protege, the young Alexander, to be wary of becoming a caricature based on extremes, and instead to pursue greatness by finding the balance between intellectual and physical, philosophical and practical, hard and soft, etc. One of my frustrations is that only a brief summary of Alexander's adult life is offered as an Afterword, and so it's hard for me to say whether he managed to achieve this, or whether the author and/or protagonist saw him as having gone toward a tragic extreme. Theatrical tragedy was another important theme of the novel, and I feel like somehow I've failed because I'm not quite able to decide whether the novel was one. I think yes. But I'm not sure.
Aside from me not having as deep an understanding of it as I would have liked (which, I suppose, is no small thing), the one thing about this novel that disappointed me was the fact that several characters had important roles and perspectives that I would have liked to know more about. Several of the characters had specific mental illnesses that had a pretty huge impact on their lives, and these were frequently discussed and referred to, but with one exception, not explored or explained nearly to my satisfaction. I wanted to know more about Arridhaeus, Alexander's brother, and about his mother Olympias. Their lives had huge importance in the sequence of events in the book... but the fact that their perspectives were entirely left out even as their effects were widely felt was frustrating to me. I guess that's the way of things with HistoryTM though -- the perspective of women, of slaves, of the disabled, these are left off the books and the strong, healthy firstborn sons of sons get the last word. But I guess that's why I'm frustrated -- this was fiction, written by a Canadian female author. Shouldn't I have been able to expect a little equity??
