I’ll tell you about rage, and a complicated man.
Another big family vacation, another novel by Natasha Pulley to enjoy!
Regular readers of my reviews will know that I love a good retold myth. So a story about the Greek god of wine and madness is right in my wheelhouse. Although it was also a surprise, because I was expecting a retelling of the god’s origin from a mortal’s point of view, and what Pulley serves up here is much, much more complicated.
Phaidros, knight of a Greek legion of Thebes, is who tells us the story. And if there’s one thing that hooked me right from the beginning with this book it’s how Phaidros can describe a reality that’s upsetting, dangerous, and downright wrong for children, but then also describe his real feelings which in many cases are the exact opposite of what you’d think they’d be, and you believe both of them.
I am not myself: I am my legion. We are the Sown, the children of the dragon; in fire we will come, and in ash we will leave, until we too are ashes.
The Sown are the spiritual descendants of the soldiers who sprang from the ground that had been planted with dragon teeth. Children as young as four are paired with older knights – say, twelve years old maybe – and trained to be obedient warriors, ruthless enough to put down slave uprisings or raze cities to the ground. Most importantly, each soldier-and-ward pairing is raised to be so madly in love with each other that they’ll charge into certain death before they’d even think of letting down the knight they’d sworn their life to.
And Phaidros? Loved all of it. He loved being part of a pack of young children running wild, playing find-the-treats the older knights would hide in the wreckage of a battlefield, getting to ask endless questions of the galley slaves who were chained up so they couldn’t walk away from you. Phaidros sees all of the violence of army life from a child’s perspective, completely devoid of malice, so it seems perfectly reasonable that he would love the glow of a city that’s been burned to the ground, or cheer when the priestesses of a besieged city signaled the end of the war by jumping en masse from the roofs of the temples. And Phaidros adores his sworn knight Helios completely and truly, wanting nothing more than to fight and die by his side.
Then Phaidros screws up one time and his entire happy life crumbles into ashes.
Things happen fast in this book. Life-changing, fatal events taking place in between sentences, an entire war in the space between chapters. And Phaidros is so fatalistic about all of it it, telling the reader about how his comrades wish he would just die with the same even temper that he uses when explaining that getting attacked by assassins at five years old is no big deal because you can always go back to sleep after all the blood is cleaned up. Or when telling the story of how his entire crew was destroyed by a god masquerading as a young nobleman that they decided to kidnap for ransom.
Maybe it’s this all-accepting attitude towards miraculous things that saves him. Or maybe it’s the fact that he can’t really fear death if he agrees with everything that it would be convenient if he would just die somewhere. Whatever the reason, Phaidros survives when his ship is turned back into trees, covered in grapevines, and all the sailors transformed into dolphins. Pretty standard Dionysus story. What isn’t standard is that Phaidros knows the god will come for him someday for revenge, and also that he wants more than anything for that day to happen because he needs to know that the beautiful young nobleman with a voice like a burning city is okay.
Someone coming for you on a revenge quest is much better than nobody coming at all.
All of this is just preamble. The Phaidros who tells the bulk of the story is older, wearier, showing mental and physical signs of PTSD, which Phaidros fully acknowledges because this sort of thing was very common among the Sown. Among all warriors, really. Remember Hercules and Hera’s curse? Ever wonder if that might have been a reaction to the relentless amount of fighting Hercules had to do? Phaidros does, and he’s perfectly willing to ignore his duty to have a wife and family and instead spend the rest of his life alone if it means not having someone vulnerable near a scarred knight who has a bad habit of punching anyone who does something startling like say “good morning” when he’s not expecting it.
Phaidros spends most of his time thinking about how to not be a danger or a burden to others. Like a great many of Pulley’s characters, Phaidros is desperately lonely and convinced that he’s supposed to be lonely, he deserves to be lonely. He also has zero problems with telling truth to power, which led to some of my favorite exchanges when he offhandedly says something shitty and dismissive to someone who could have him executed for not bowing low enough. (“You can’t say that.” “Off you fuck…”) Unfortunately this also leads to Phaidros being drawn into some dangerous court intrigue. There are all kinds of things happening that require a savvy, empathic, and loyal knight who isn’t just a yes-man. The city of Thebes is suffering from a years-long drought, the populace is starving and getting close to rioting, the crown prince is missing, there’s rumors of a missing heir who might also be the son of Zeus, and, oh yeah, knights are going mad and dancing themselves to death right around the time a young witch named Dionysus comes to Thebes and starts making Phaidros’s life really complicated.
Sing, sing to the lord of the dance
Thunder-wrought and city-razing
King, king of the holy raging
Rave and rise again.
Pulley explains in the afterward that she had to make up a lot about life in Thebes, seeing as how the story takes place hundreds of years before the concept of writing down history was invented. The details she creates puts the city in a fantasy world where gods and magic feel right at home. This is a Thebes covered in smoke and cinders from the constant desperate sacrifices during the drought, but also a Thebes with giant steam-powered clockwork statues of the gods. There are chapters set in towering throne rooms, near trees dripping with wine and honey and covered in a tangle of ivy and candles and hanging prayer tablets, or inside an illegal masquerade set in an abandoned labyrinth, or during a quiet moment in an underground grotto of glass lamps and spring water and a friendly leopard.
Dionysus fits neatly into this magical-realism setting, by which I mean he constantly walks the line between madness and cold-hearted reality, leaving behind madness in his wake, striding through a courtyard as vines and flowers burst through the flagstones, and occasionally being exasperated when Phaidros holds onto his trauma and duty and sometimes shocking ruthlessness when all Dionysus seems to want is for Phaidros to get better. Even if that means going mad to do it.
Phaidros himself spends most of the book going back and forth between believing Dionysus is an ordinary (well, beautiful, kind, funny, startlingly intelligent and very annoying) human witch, and seeing him as a god who’s come back to either kill Phaidros, or tear down and destroy everyone and everything in his life and then kill him. And of course Phaidros is in love with both versions of Dionysus. Which seems perfectly appropriate for a story featuring a god who’s famously known for wildness and wandering and madness, but also for wine, something that was only made possible when humanity stopped wandering and made the first steps towards building a civilization. A civilization which, occasionally, needs to get broken down by madness to remind everyone what civilization is for.