And how an old lover was responsible for Philip’s death. Like how Philip was conquering things, and how he wanted to use the Thebans to get to the Athenians, and the Thebans took him (but not Alexander!) off guard by throwing in their lot with Athens. As a younger reader, I managed to pick up on nearly all the character moments while completely tuning out what was going on around them. The politics though? I would say the vast majority of the political machinations going on in this book were new to me on this reread. (And more and more, if I am remembering The Persian Boy right.)

When he gets older, he develops a certain level of respect for his father in war, and finds his mother’s constant demands more and more difficult. As a child, his mother means security and his father is a threat. I love how we see this change for Alexander.

The relationships with the other characters, I definitely picked up on that – his friendship (etc) with Hephaestion (they’re sweet), the initially simple love/hate split for his mother and father, respectively, that gets more complicated as he gets older. And Alexander in this book is so great I would almost follow him to war and I am a pacifist. I always think it must be so difficult to write a character with charisma like a cult leader or a great general, so you really believe people would follow them, and it must be even harder when it’s a real historic character. Mary Renault’s Alexander is one of my favorite characters ever, partly because I think Alexander the Great was cool and partly because Mary Renault does an excellent job on him. There are so many things that I didn’t remember ever reading! In past readings, I got that Alexander was fierce and loyal and awesome – still definitely true, incidentally. To me this is very pleasing.Īfter rereading Fire from Heaven for the first time in a while, I am beginning to suspect that I was not paying any attention to it any time that I read it before. I love how Mary Renault makes silence and implication work for her: how something will happen, and you don’t think anything of it, and then the characters react in a way that makes you go back and look at it again, and reassess. It takes us from Alexander’s childhood through to Philip of Macedon’s death, and it is a damn good book. But I like her a lot, and this, the first of her books about Alexander the Great, is the first thing I ever read by her. I will preface this by saying that I can understand how you might not like Mary Renault’s writing.

Fire from heaven renault