Wise man and warrior

JOURNEY back to the time of Alexander the Great with Annabel Lyon’s thoughtful and utterly convincing debut novel.

Lyon is the author of two short story collections and a children’s novel, but The Golden Mean is a more ambitious effort. Narrated by the philosopher Aristotle, Lyon’s novel depicts Alexander’s coming of age in crisp, fascinating detail.

As the novel opens, Aristotle is set to take over Plato’s Academy, a place “where the greatest minds apply themselves to the greatest problems, where one glimpses order beyond the chaos”. Yet a childhood friend, King Philip of Macedonia, has other ideas. Educating his “violent, snotty boy” is a desperate necessity if the teenager, a genius in his own right, is someday to rule the known world. It is a challenge Aristotle cannot resist.

Lyon treats the great philosopher with nothing of the reverence that customarily accompanies his portrayal.

Her Aristotle is a cruel and lustful old man with a “freakish brain”, a profane, almost bipolar character.

He is the smartest individual of his age yet he believes in slavery and thinks nothing of mutilating a corpse on a battlefield for his own amusement. The depiction may surprise some, but it reflects the realities of life in the brutal, warrior cultures of ancient Greece and Macedonia.

Alexander, meanwhile, is ruthless even in his adolescent years. Thrown before he is ready into the bloody crucible of his father’s wars, the boy develops a thirst for conquest surpassing anything the world has previously known.

He accepts Aristotle’s guidance only grudgingly, yet together the wise man and the warrior will lay the foundations of a mighty empire, with Aristotle as the depressive brain to Alexander’s burgeoning, sociopathic brawn. Between them lies something of the civilised ideal we know today, the titular Golden Mean, a sense of perfect equilibrium between emotional extremes.

Lyon dramatises this balance in an unusual and startlingly effective way. Her kings and philosophers conduct their business in a rough-and-tumble language which owes as much to modern colloquialisms as it does to the staid, affected style often assumed to typify the era.

It results in a convincing rendering of history peopled by believable, three-dimensional characters.

Fêted in the author’s native Canada, The Golden Mean delivers a bold reimagining of one of history’s most intriguing relationships.

It is a beguiling and rewarding novel in which the past comes alive in unexpected ways.