Dysfunctional Dynasty

...every one of these unions ends miserably, usually with the slaughter of offspring...

...If Apis licked his left-hand nostril with his great gray tongue, it meant such and such...

...His narrator, who brooks no argument, insists, "Every word of it is true...

...His first wife, a captive Persian princess, has only a cameo appearance...

...The Ptolemies dedicated themselves to transforming Alexandria from a newly established backwater into a thriving center of culture and commerce, installing its great library, the Mouseion, and its lighthouse, one of the wonders of the world in its day...

...The truth is, this old Egyptian chauvinist does not think much of Greeks in general...

...Let's hope this troubling omission will be corrected in the upcoming volumes...

...Keraunos' fitness to succeed his father as Pharaoh is thrown into doubt when he impregnates the not exactly uncooperative Arsinoë Beta...

...When it is triumphantly inaugurated at the novel's end to honor the memory of the first Ptolemy, it illuminates the city like a stage set...

...Twenty or so years later, they marry each other for a span of less than 48 hours—a match made in Hades, as our narrator might describe it—until Keraunos murders, among hundreds of others, two of Arsinoë Beta's sons from her previous marriage...

...The question then becomes, is an unreliable narrator a tenable conceit in a historical novel...

...Breathlessly Thoth reports on what was perhaps the world's first recorded same-sex wedding: "At the Oasis of Ammon, Hephaiston and Alexander had gone through some ceremony of marriage, male to male, husband to husband, for this was the only place in the world where such an abomination is allowed...

...In a book thick with facts and details and trivia, seamed with repetitions and wrap-ups, with almost no dialogue or metaphor to air out its Hollywood-epic prose, it is old Thoth's pompous, judgmental, often annoying, but somehow weirdly endearing voice that lightens the flow of the narrative and renders The Ptolemies surprisingly readable...

...Thoth only knows...

...All of this juicy sniff we leam from the bossy, pedantic and bigoted Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and scribes...

...Sons are bronzed and buffed in the gymnasion, with the casual expectation that they will also be inducted into the distinctly Greek (according to the narrator) pastime of sodomy...

...But how does he know all this...

...A highly opinionated old blowhard, he effectively stands in for Sprott not only as the omniscient narrator of the story but as its purported writer and creator...

...He was known as the son of Lagos, but rumor had it that he was sired by Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father, who, like almost every warrior in this book, fought for a living and raped for relaxation...

...He devotes his energies to securing and expanding his realm and in the process acquires the title Soter, or Savior, an apotheosis accorded him for his role in saving the island of Rhodes from attack...

...His second wife, Eurydike, age 15 when she is delivered to Ptolemy (then in his 40s) as part of a political package deal, eats dirt and goes insane...

...Rather, Thoth knows because of the formidable research that Sprott has done, evident on every page...

...Eurydike's chaperone, her cold-hearted and power-hungry aunt Berenike, becomes Ptolemy's third and most appreciated wife...

...Everything else connected to the Ptolemies, particularly in the personal sphere, is bad news...

...Egypt needed a Pharaoh, and Ptolemy was the best that could be hoped for in an unenlightened foreign occupier...

...It is Ptolemy's dismal record as afamily man, though, and the messed up tribe he spawned, that provide the material which makes this a novel worth reading...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "The Jewish War" When Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, just short of his 33rd birthday, the vast empire he amassed during a reign of less than 13 years—stretching from Macedonia in Central Europe through the Middle East and deep into Asia—was carved up among his 12 generals...

...What we may have here is another instance of the unreliable narrator...

...And, just in case you harbor doubts about Thoth's accuracy, the novel includes maps, a chart of Greek measures and money, a chronology, a full genealogical table, lists of Pharaohs, high priests and other suspects, as well as a glossary...

...Thoth's prejudices and pronouncements are so predictable and, in context, so often ridiculous, that you begin to suspect Sprott is using this crank to toy with the reader...

...their marriage lasts just one week because she does not let him near her...

...He repeatedly carps that more or less all Greeks—with the possible exception of Ptolemy Soter, for whom he has a soft spot—lie, steal, perpetrate violence, abuse their wives, and eat strange foods...

...Even though one of the bridegrooms is Alexander the Great himself, Thoth is not impressed, and he does not approve...

...Everything you ever wanted to know about the Ptolemies is here, from their military campaigns to the state of their bowels, from how to crown a new Pharaoh to the correct color of foods at a Greek funeral...

...The family fun and togetherness will continue in Sprott's next volume, when Arsinoë Beta marries her full brother Ptolemy Mikros, who, as a consequence of the union, will forever afterbeimmortalizedas Ptolemy Philadelphos, the Sister-Loving Ptolemy...

...Dragging along the dead body of Alexander like a lucky charm, Ptolemy initially arrives in Egypt as Satrap, a provincial boss officially under orders from headquarters in Macedonia but actually his own man...

...Beginning with the founding father, Ptolemy Soter, the hero of this installment, and climaxing with a true superstar, Cleopatra—a household name thanks to Plutarch, Shakespeare and Elizabeth Taylor—the very Greek and very interbred Ptolemies ruled over Egypt as Pharaohs and living gods from the legendary port of Alexandria...

...There is, however, no bibliography or acknowledgement of sources consulted by the author...

...Sprott intends to cure the reader's "disgraceful" ignorance of the epoch (worthy of a "beating on the soles of your feet...

...As Irish author Duncan Sprott tells it in this historical novel, of the 12 only Ptolemy died "in his own bed, of old age...

...Not, presumably, from consulting the Greek Oracle of Zeus-Ammon or from inquiring of the Egyptian Apis, the Sacred Bull of Memphis, which he mocks: "If Apis flicked his tail, it meant so and so...

...It will be interesting to see if Sprott, with three more books to go and over 200 years to cover, can manage to sustain the peculiar narrative voice he has saddled himself with...

...Originally published in England as The House of the Eagle, Sprott's novel is the first of a projected four volumes on the bloody and degenerate Ptolemy dynasty's 300-year, 10-generation reign over Egypt...

...Anemhor, a master of practical political manipulation, recognizes Ptolemy as a fundamentally stable and fairminded ruler who is also capable of the brutality necessary to protect his interests...

...The refrain "Thoughts of Thoth," followed by an emphatic colon, runs right through the book...

...Ptolemy took Egypt as his portion because he didn't mixid the heat as much as the others, and after years on the road soldiering, rising from Alexander's food taster to the rank of stratèges, he was at last eager to settle down...

...Daughters are stashed away out of view in the gynaikeion, to be traded off later on to seal a political alliance...

...The ambitious sequence, when completed, will be a new "Alexandria Quartet," even richer in intrigue and exotica than Lawrence Durrell's, with the added bonus of self-improvement...

...The standouts in this cast of characters are, without question, Ptolemy's violent and volatile son by Eurydike, Ptolemy Keraunos (Thunderbolt, like Zeus), and his lustful, ruthlessly ambitious half sister Arsinoë Beta, Ptolemy's daughter by Berenike...

...About Ptolemy Keraunos' affair with Arsinoë Beta, for example, Thoth comments: "For the Egyptians an incest such as this was really no great horror, nothing out of the ordinary, but among the families of the Pharaohs quite the normal thing to do...

...On the other hand, the Hellenic taste for homosexual sex is, according to Thoth, anathema in Egypt: "The Greeks' favored practice of aphrodisia, man upon man, this was forbidden at Memphis, as an impurity in this purer than pure, this purest of pure cities...

...Eventually, after much cajoling by the shrewd Anemhor, the High Priest of Ptah at Memphis, Ptolemy bows his head to take on the burdens and six crowns of the Pharaoh...

...Luckily, despite Thoth's schtick, despite his rather too cute modern locutions (Keraunos "really had an urgent need to be king of somewhere"), and despite his tiresomely coy displays of perspicacity (an Oracle informs Ptolemy that "the world would fight over Syria and Palestine and Koile-Syria and Lebanon and all the countries in this corner of the world for ever"), the reader trusts Thoth...

...The clan truly earned its place in the HBO heaven of dysfunctional families...