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Poignantly doomed to ignominious failure in a man's world, despite her strong spirit, she, and perhaps Renault, appear to think she could have been an Alexander if only she had been born a boy.

Having made a special study of all the ancient sources covering the period in question, it may interest those who share my very high opinion of Renault that Funeral Games is not actually as perfect in historical authenticity as one might expect from her. The plot is sometimes flawed, as when Alexander's top generals are made to know Stateira was pregnant and think her son more worthy to be the next King, and yet, inexplicably, none of them say anything about it at the gathering assembled to decide the succession.

These are small imperfections. A much more serious criticism of her depiction of Alexander in all of her novels about him is that she has over-homosexualised him, not through overly emphasising his love affairs with Hephaistion and Bagoas, but through unfairly deprecating his two love affairs with women.

The ancient sources depict Alexander as genuinely involved with both women and boys with a typically Greek sense of there being no contradiction involved, but the one affair of his life they clearly depict as both passionate and founded on eros is that with Roxane. On any fair assessment, it was surely one of the greatest love affairs of antiquity, the greatest man in the world choosing to marry rather than take a young girl of remarkable beauty but otherwise little importance.

In contrast, in The Persian Boy , Renault depicts their entanglement as a brief infatuation. Her Alexander soon tires of Roxane and thereafter merely tolerates her out of loyalty and kindness.

The known reality was very different. Their surviving son was conceived sometime in the two months following Hephaistion's death and only eight months before the King's, which suggests it was to Roxane that he turned for solace in his greatest grief, rather than Bagoas or the new royally-born wife on whom he should have been trying to beget an heir.

Roxane's first appearance in Funeral Games is when she is removed from the dying Alexander's chamber at Bagoas's suggestion because her demonstrative and self-pitying grief was disturbing her husband. Actually, Bagoas is not even known to have been still living then, and Roxane is attributed a movingly loving role in her husband's last days by the only, albeit unreliable, sources to speak of it.

Even worse is Renault's total omission of Alexander's mistress Barsine, who came into his life well before Bagoas and was still sufficiently part of it at least three years later to bear him a bastard son, Herakles. Lest this be supposed to be an understandable simplification of Alexander's story rather than a desperate attempt to deny Alexander such heterosexual enthusiasm, I should point out that in her biography The Nature of Alexander , Renault goes so far as to pour scorn on Herakles's existence despite the unanimous certainty of our sources.

Shorter, grimmer and less moving than Renault's other historical novels, mostly because none of the major characters are deeply appealing, Funeral Games is still excellent by general standards. May 17, Rhosyn rated it really liked it Shelves: awesome , challenge. My, what an ending! Honestly, this might be the craziest final part of a trilogy that I've ever read! Why I liked this book spoilers : The plot and action was fantastic!

The non-stop action and plotting kept me thoroughly entertained. Due mainly to Alexander not clearly naming an heir or planning who would succeed him if he ever died, this book clearly portrays the collapse of what he'd managed to establish.

That is, with no clear successor, almost everyone is vying for the throne. Almost everyone My, what an ending! Almost everyone is scheming, plotting and backstabbing one another. And almost every character you've come to know dies as a result of this sob. It was so painful to go from the second and first book, where everyone liked, respected and worked well with one another to this book where the characters were made to be almost unlikeable as they either failed to properly understand Alexander's wishes or completely disregarded them.

Gosh, this book was something else! Memorable lines that summed up the book for me : Eurydike to her army "Can you find me a trumpeter? We must call them back! Slowly, like a man explaining something simple to a child, which even a child must see, he said, "But, madam. That is Alexander's mother.

She has seen, at last, her real enemy. Not the terrible old woman on the black horse; she could be terrible only because of him, the glowing ghost, the lion-maned head on the silver drachmas, directing her fate from his golden bier. You see, you never knew him". Eurydike was possibly one of the characters I loved learning the most of in this book. Her ambition and drive is similar to Alexander's and was great to read about.

Therefore, when she tries to lead her army in a seemingly heroic and grand way, like Alexander had done she falls short as she cannot connect to the soldiers in the same way that he had done. Consequently, the soldiers ignore her and go to Olympia while she is left to suffer Overall, the only thing I disliked in this book besides spending so little time with Bagoas was being slightly confused with who all the characters were since there were so many of them some with more than one name and all with unusual names.

To be fair though, I started reading the series with the first book and didn't have the copy of the text that had all of the character's names listed down with notes on who they were and a map which tracked the movements of Alexander.

Honestly - make sure you have these in the text you're reading as they're definitely a big help! Jul 07, Carla Bull rated it it was amazing Shelves: favourites , historical-fiction. I am so pumped right now, I feel like I could scale a building.

This series was absolutely stunning, it has given me LIFE. I finished this book at about 2am and I have been buzzing ever since. When I started out with Fire from Heaven, my knowledge of Alexander was pretty non-existent.

Horse, hair, conquest. Three books down the line, and a little reading around the subject because I have no chilllllll and I've realised several things: I've realised that Mary Renault's version of Alexander is a I am so pumped right now, I feel like I could scale a building.

Three books down the line, and a little reading around the subject because I have no chilllllll and I've realised several things: I've realised that Mary Renault's version of Alexander is a very positive one.

It is, and I challenge you, almost impossible not to love him. But in truth, Alexander did some pretty awful things. Alexander was not a good guy. But he also did a lot of crazy, interesting, incredible things too. I've realised that Mary Renault oh my GOD, she followed what scant knowledge there exists of Alexander's campaign very closely. She is not messing around here in terms of key events and key people. Everything was as close to accurate as we are going to get, and treated with so much care.

History and fiction combined in the most powerful and mesmerizing way. I've realised that the way she structured these three books is utterly dazzling. Switching perspective, changing mood, pulling back the curtain on key events. I love books like this, I am actually crying a bit right now. This stuff gets me okay. Funeral Games is set during the aftermath of Alexander's death, literally just at the point he is still breathing his last.

It made me feel like a ghost, like I'd been granted this special permission to follow Bagoas for a time, and now I had to say goodbye. In Funeral Games we switch back to multiple POV's, watching in horror the huge effect Alexander's death had on the people around him.

This great, empty void of uncertainty that began sucking his friends and family into it one by one. What I especially loved about Funeral Games is that it is largely about Alexander's women.

His mother, his wives, the incredible Eurydice II of Macedon!! I thought for sure she was an invention. She was such a badass, I was rooting for her all the way. The events in this book are so wild, I had to keep fact checking to see if there were sources attesting to them.

And yes, apparently, shit just got this real. It was so great! I had this book glued to my hands for two days! Oh, I want to ramble on but that is absurd so I am going to finish here. I loved them. I am absolutely going to read them again, and I am going to be thinking about them for weeks to come. In turn, this novel takes what he had built and smashes it to pieces through folly, hubris, greed, ignorance, feuds, and idiocy. Not to fault Renault, she paints a beautifully heartbreaking picture, but it became almost emotionally unbearable to get through the last pages.

Due to their appearances in the first two novels of the series, Bagoas and Ptolemy held my interest and continued emotional investment although they only occupied a small fraction of the story.

And yet I felt for Eurydike as she, still in her teens, struggled to become a warrior Queen in a time that saw her as a silly girl. Yet, the memory of Alexander haunts those left behind, as if taunting them in their failure.

View all 3 comments. Jun 09, Seth Reeves rated it liked it. The final book in Mary Renault's novelization of the life and death of Alexander the Great did give me what I longed for in the second book, the point of view of more of the characters. It also kept going with her somewhat stilted, overwrought writing style. The story is all about the few years following Alexander's death. You immediately are given to understand that the only person around who could at once expand and maintain so vast and diverse an empire was gone and there was not a single per The final book in Mary Renault's novelization of the life and death of Alexander the Great did give me what I longed for in the second book, the point of view of more of the characters.

You immediately are given to understand that the only person around who could at once expand and maintain so vast and diverse an empire was gone and there was not a single person left in his wake that could take his place. Everyone around the empire that felt that Alexander unfairly ignored them while he was alive or sees their chance to stand out starts to think about how they are going to fill the power vacuum.

They succeed and fail to varying degrees but the people who really get reamed are anyone who was directly related to Alexander as they are enemy 1 for anyone that wants to rule the empire. A character you are sympathetic to in one part of the story can turn around and become a horrible tyrant only to eventually get strung up and fed to carrion by his or her own men. I can say I'm glad I read these books. They've been hanging out on my Kindle almost since I first got it and I had put off reading them because the reviews weren't very kind.

I can't knock the author for taking all this history and getting it into around pages of novel without every chapter being a revelation in style and prose. I must say I enjoyed historical fiction by Gore Vidal or Robert Graves much more but the story was intriguing in places and she managed to strain a lot of the melodramatics out of this last book that were somewhat annoyingly displayed by Hephaiston in the first book and the eunuch and narrator Bagoas in the second book.

I think this trilogy is definitely worth reading, if only to make you more knowledgable about one if history's greatest historical figures, but I would advise taking them on when you are on a real reading binge or are about to study Alexander the Great in college. Otherwise, although the story and the man's life are unbelievably interesting, you might get a bit bored and give up on them midway through the second book. The third one wraps it up very well so just don't stop till the end, like Alexander.

A disappointing conclusion. Feb 02, Saimi Korhonen rated it really liked it Shelves: ancient-greece-and-rome. Funeral Games was a wonderful finale for a wonderful trilogy!

I really enjoyed the earlier books and luckily Funeral Games didn't disappoint me. Just like the two previous books in this trilogy, Funeral Games was an atmospheric and intense read full of political schemings, war and well-written characters.

This book follows the events that took place after Alexander the Great's rather surprising early death. We get to follow multiple characters - some who were already introduced in the earlier bo Funeral Games was a wonderful finale for a wonderful trilogy! We get to follow multiple characters - some who were already introduced in the earlier books, such as Ptolemy and Roxane, but also some amazing new characters like Eurydike, a distant relative of Alexander, whom I LOVED - as they fight over Alexander's empire.

I liked how we got to see reactions to Alexander's death from many characters, some who hated him and some who loved him, and how, throughout the book, though he was long gone, you could still feel his presence in the world he left behind. The memory of what Alexander accomplished haunted those who came after him and weighed on their shoulders, and whenever a new person stepped up to take control of the empire, they were always compared to Alexander.

All this was super interesting to read about. Another thing about Funeral Games that I liked a lot was getting more significant female characters. In the first book there was really only Olympias, and in the second book Roxane, but in Funeral Games we were introduced to Eurydike and her mom Kynna and Alexander's sister Kleopatra played a big part in the story as well, as did Roxane and Olympias. Oct 07, Ben Kane rated it it was amazing. How right the people who advised me to read Mary Renault were.

I started with Fire from Heaven, and was blown away by the precise, yet almost musical prose. Laden with historical detail, the book evoked 4th century BC Greece as I could never have imagined. Thanks to the titling on my kindle, I mistakenly read this volume next. No matter - I knew much of the history already, and have now moved on to The Persian Boy. Back to this book. This is historical fiction at its finest. It simply doesn't get How right the people who advised me to read Mary Renault were.

It simply doesn't get better than this - at least not in this reasonably well-read person's opinion. I won't go into the ins and outs of the plot: other reviewers have done that well. Be sure to read the first two books before this one, however.

Renault makes the ancient world feel real, and this novel is no exception. It is also the most brutal and bloodthirsty novel I've read by her.

Not surprising when the prize in these funeral games is a throne. Political machinations, the consequences of overstepping one's authority or ability, and the dangers of political chaos are all potently portrayed. Tonally this could almost be read as a standalone from Renault's first two novels about Alexander, but it helps a lot to know the background hi Renault makes the ancient world feel real, and this novel is no exception. Tonally this could almost be read as a standalone from Renault's first two novels about Alexander, but it helps a lot to know the background history.

This novel would be twice as long if it had to explain all of the background history that undergirds this novel, freed from the restraining hand of Alexander. I enjoyed this book from begining to end. Now, people could easily have photos of their loved ones while they were still alive. The new exhibit is also, unfortunately, a harbinger of things to come for the museum.

Boetticher admits that the museum is simply running out of room, which is likely to lead to more and more new collections being wall installations and small, portable stand-ups such as the recent jazz funerals display. National Museum of Funeral History When : 10 a. Monday-Friday; 10 a. Saturday; Noon-5 p.

Sunday Where : Barren Springs Dr. Get the best gaming deals, reviews, product advice, competitions, unmissable gaming news and more! Gaming deals, prizes and latest news. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands.

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