I finished this novel last week while commuting though I am kind of mystified why I did not get down to review it earlier than today. Anyways, Paul Doherty's The Year of The Cobra is set in one of the most scrumptious periods of human history--the end days of Thutmosid Dynasty. I love this period. Remember this is the time of Egyptians and Hittites, the Sea peoples, Moses and Exodus and the arrival of fascinating peoples like Hebrews, Phoenicians and Philistines onto the stage of human history. Suffice it to say that any novel set in this period will gain my attention for that reason alone.
The Year of The Cobra is the last of the trilogy, the earlier novels supposedly deal with Akhenhaten and other intriguing figures like Nefertiti. I never got to read them and started with the third and realised that it was supposed to be part of a trilogy only after half way through.
The novel is narrated by Mahu, a spy chief in Pharoah's court, also Tutankhamen's guardian. As it opens, Egypt is facing some dark times. The renegade pharoah Akhehaten has disappeared and Tutankhamen is young and inexperienced and the court is awash with intrigue. Meanwhile, Hittites under their chief, Suppiliulama are massing in the north and threatening to march over Canaan. Mahu is sent to Tyre on a mission.
He is deeply troubled to leave Tutankhamen behind but leaves for his mission along with his Apiru( Hebrew sidekick) Djarka. Mahu also has a secret mission, he wants to find out what happened to Akhenhaten, who according to rumours was hiding somewhere in Canaan. And even before he sets foot on his journey, he gets mysetrious messages.
It should take lot of skill to twist sketchily known historical facts into a coherent plot and Paul does a neat job of it. The novel reads smoothly and Paul's solutions to the many puzzles of the era are interesting.
Still, there are a few downsides. For most of the novel, Mahu is passive. For an allegedly spy chief, his thinking is almost done by others, either by Djarka his assistant or his wife Nabila. There is no sense of Sherlock Holmes kinda aura either. At no time, we are told that Mahu already knew what his sidekicks were speculating before him, a la Sherlock Holmes. So, the passivity of the hero is just that, passivity; it's not redeemed later in the novel. All through the beginning, we are told of an assassin in Mahu's group but this plot point is forgotten in the denouement.
The biggest disappointment for me, which I don't think is the author's fault, is that it is filled with rather crude violence which kind of took away the romantic sheen of this era. The violence did not bother me but the dingy portrayal and the failure to add richness, colour and depth to these intriguing civilizations were big downers for me.
All in all, a very nice way of spending time.
Did you know how much you can read on the trains, in train stations waiting for the trains and in between changing trains? I never knew. I see all these peopledaily, reading on the trains and I, an otherwise voracious reader, would just morosely stare at them. (By the way, I am particularly impressed by those who read while standing, without even leaning on one of those rods. I can barely stand still in a train and am always falling and tripping over people. How you can read while standing in a moving traing is beyond my comprehension.)
I started a resonably sized novel yesterday and I read only on train trips to office and back and in my 10-minute breaks at work and golly, I have already finished half the novel in two days! It's not about reading speed. Obviously, I can be a very fast reader but I am not a disciplined reader. I can finish Harry Potter tomes in a straight sitting of 7-8 hours and other books that I've liked maybe in a day but if the book doesn't catch my fancy I'd take eons to finish it. I know this is supposed to be normal but you never know. A "good" reader is supposed to care for culture and all that and probably should do reading for its own sake and not for kicks. And I have thrown away some greatest classics of the world after reading just a couple of pages. That's me.
Last month or so, I have skipped reading novels because I was reading up all this recondite stuff. Which did not leave me nearly enough time to read novels and somehow I was disenchanted with fiction in general. Still if I had known that one could read so much in between bouts of madness at work, I would have finished off so many tomes by now.
Will dash off a review tomorrow when I finish the novel.
Have you heard the story of Dido, the queen that Aeneas left behind so heartlessly? She is a Phoenician princess. Have you heard the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, the sculptor who fell in love with the statue he carved and prayed to Aphrodite that she be given life? He was a Phoencian king. Have you heard of Moloch, the terrible monster-like God to whom young children were sacrificed? He was the main god of Phoenician pantheon and yes, children were routinely sarcificed to him. Have you heard of Europa, the nymph whom Zeus carried away as a bull? She was a Phoenician princess according to the story and more likely, she was a Phoenician goddess. Have you heard the story of Hannibal and how he almost destroyed Rome? He was a Phoenician general who almost overrun the Roman empire.
These are probably the most well-known cultural references that have come down to us from both Western(that is Greek and Roman) and Judaic sources and the Phoenicians remain in the background and animate the shadows of both these traditions. Unlike other shadowy people, we know much more about them because they have left huge imprints of their civilization behind.
They come to the fore after the invasion of the Sea Peoples, except unlike the Philistines, these have occupied the long stretch of Lebanon coast. They built magnificent cities along this narrow coast: Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Amrith, Berytus and later they colonised the whole of Mediterranean Coast and built the city that rivalled Rome in power and prestige, Carthage. Berytus, is of course, the modern Beirut.
They were the pre-eminent sailors, hence they filled in the role of abductors and pirates in legends. They were also known for the purple dye they produced, hence their name Phoenicia.
But, I think the Phoenicians were more influential than that. There is a version of thought that major Greek Gods like Aphrodite and Adonis were actually Phoenician imports. Though not an expert, I think the same too. More importantly, a whole lot of mythology that involves Thebes and Cadmus down to Oedipus and others, has at least a familial link to Phoenicia that survived in the stories themselves. I think that there must be a more intimate link.
The more I know about ancient near-East religions, the more I realise how Judaism (and Christianity) was shaped by its environment. Remember the famous story where Abraham was required to sacrifice his child and God finally spared him. The Old Testament God is called merciful when by your modern sensibilities he looks quite vengeful. I never understood him until I came to know about the wide-spread practice of child sacrifice. Yahweh is merciful because he has spared his followers the necessity of this grim practice in exchange for his protection.
Gods are bringers of new cultures. Just as Dinoysus is worshipped because he introduced vines and Athena because she brought olives, Yahweh is worshipped among other things because he got rid of the actual sacrifice and replaced it with a symbolic one. This is a new cultural invention. But, if you want to know the grimness of what Yaweh replaced, you should read about Moloch and his tophets, the death chambers where little children were burned to death and you would be stuck with a kind of horrible fascination about the civilization which practiced this as a normal ritual
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