The Golden Mean - Couverture rigide

Lyon, Annabel

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0307593991 ISBN 13 : 9780307593993

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2010

Synopsis

As The Golden Mean opens, Aristotle is forced to postpone his dream of succeeding Plato as the leader of the Athenian Academy when Philip of Macedon asks him to stay on in his capital city of Pella to tutor his precocious son, Alexander. At first the philosopher is appalled to be stuck in the brutal backwater of his childhood, but he is soon drawn to the boy's intellectual potential and his capacity for surprise. What he does not know is whether his ideas are any match for the warrior culture that is Alexander's inheritance. But he feels that teaching this startling, charming, sometimes horrifying boy is a desperate necessity. And what the boy needs most to learn - thrown before his time onto his father's battlefields - is the lesson of the golden mean, the elusive balance between extremes that Aristotle hopes will mitigate the boy's will to conquer. In her first novel, Annabel Lyon boldly imagines one of history's most intriguing relationships and the war at its heart between ideas and action as ways of knowing the world. She tells her story, breathtakingly, in the earthy, frank and perceptive voice of Aristotle himself. With sensual and muscular prose, she explores how Aristotle's genius touched the boy who would conquer the known world. And she reveals how we still live with the ghosts of both men.

A propos du livre

Extrait

One

The rain falls in black cords, lashing my animals, my men, and my wife, Pythias, who last night lay with her legs spread while I took notes on the mouth of her sex, who weeps silent tears of exhaustion now, on this tenth day of our journey. On the ship she seemed comfortable enough, but this last overland stage is beyond all her experience and it shows. Her mare stumbles; she’s let the reins go loose again, allowing the animal to sleepwalk. She rides awkwardly, weighed down by her sodden finery. Earlier I suggested she remain on one of the carts but she resisted, such a rare occurrence that I smiled, and she, embarrassed, looked away. Callisthenes, my nephew, offered to walk the last distance, and with some difficulty we helped her onto his big bay. She clutched at the reins the first time the animal shifted beneath her.

“Are you steady?” I asked, as around us the caravan began to ?move.

“Of course.”

Touching. Men are good with horses where I come from, where we’re returning now, and she knows it. I spent yesterday on the carts myself so I could write, though now I ride bareback, in the manner of my countrymen, a ball-busting propos-ition for someone who’s been sedentary as long as I have. You can’t stay on a cart while a woman rides, though; and it occurs to me now that this was her intention.

I hardly noticed her at first, a pretty, vacant-eyed girl on the fringes of Hermias’s menagerie. Five years ago now. Atarneus was a long way from Athens, across the big sea, snug to the flank of the Persian Empire. Daughter, niece, ward, concubine—the truth slipped like ?silk.

“You like her,” Hermias said. “I see the way you look at her.” Fat, sly, rumoured a money-changer in his youth, later a butcher and a mercenary; a eunuch, now, supposedly, and a rich man. A politician, too, holding a stubborn satrapy against the barbarians: Hermias of Atarneus. “Bring me my thinkers!” he used to shout. “Great men surround themselves with thinkers! I wish to be surrounded!” And he would laugh and slap at himself while the girl Pythias watched without seeming to blink quite often ?enough. She became a gift, one of many, for I was a favourite. On our wedding night she arrayed herself in veils, assumed a pose on the bed, and whisked away the sheets before I could see if she had bled. I was thirty-seven then, she fifteen, and gods forgive me but I went at her like a stag in rut. Stag, hog.

“Eh? Eh?” Hermias said the next morning, and laughed.

Night after night after night. I tried to make it up to her with kindness. I treated her with great courtliness, gave her money, addressed her softly, spoke to her of my work. She wasn’t stupid; thoughts flickered in her eyes like fish in deep pools. Three years we spent in Atarneus, until the Persians breathed too close, too hot. Two years in the pretty town of Mytilene, on the island of Lesvos, where they cobbled the floor of the port so enemy ships couldn’t anchor. Now this journey. Through it all she has an untouchable dignity, even when she lies with her knees apart while I gently probe for my work on generation. Fish, too, I’m studying, field animals, and birds when I can get them. There’s a seed like a pomegranate seed in the centre of the folds, and the hole frilled like an oyster. Sometimes moisture, sometimes dryness. I’ve noted it all.

“Uncle.”

I follow my nephew’s finger and see the city on the marshy plain below us, bigger than I remember, more sprawling. The rain is thinning, spitting and spatting now, under a suddenly lucid gold-grey sky.

“Pella,” I announce, to rouse my dripping, dead-eyed wife. “The capital of Macedon. Temple there, market there, palace. You can just make it out. Bigger than you thought?”

She says nothing.

“You’ll have to get used to the dialect. It’s fast, but not so different really. A little rougher.”

“I’ll manage,” she says, not ?loudly.

I sidle my horse up to hers, lean over to take her reins to keep her near me while I talk. It’s good for her to have to listen, to think. Callisthenes walks beside us.

“The first king was from Argos. A Greek, though the people aren’t. Enormous wealth here: timber, wheat, corn, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, copper, iron, silver, gold. Virtually all they have to import is olives. Too cold for olives this far north, mostly; too mountainous. And did you know that most of the Athenian navy is built from Macedonian timber?”

“Did we bring olives?” Pythias asks.

“I assume you know your wars, my love?”

She picks at the reins, plucks at them like lyre strings, but I don’t let go. “I know them,” she says ?finally.

Utterly ignorant, of course. If I had to weave all day, I’d at least weave myself a battle scene or two. I remind her of the Athenian conquest of Persia under the great general Pericles, Athens at her seafaring mightiest, in my great-grandfather’s time. Then the decades of conflict in the Peloponnese, Athens bled and finally brought low by Sparta, with some extra Persian muscle, in my father’s youth; and Sparta itself defeated by Thebes, by then the ascendant power, in my own childhood. “I will set you a task. You’ll embroider Thermopylae for me. We’ll hang it over the bed.”

Still not looking at me.

“Thermopylae,” I say. “Gods, woman. The pass. The pass where the Spartans held off the Persians for three days, a force ten times their own. Greatest stand in the history of warfare.”

“Lots of pink and red,” Callisthenes suggests.

She looks straight at me for a moment. I read, Don’t patronize me. And, Continue.

Now, I tell her, young Macedon is in the ascendant, under five-wived Philip. A marriage to cement every settlement and seal every victory: Phila from Elimea, in the North; Audata the Illyrian princess; Olympias of Epirus, first among wives, the only one called queen; Philinna from Thessaly; and Nikesipolis of Pherae, a beauty who died in childbirth. Philip invaded Thrace, too, after Thessaly, but hasn’t yet taken a Thracian wife. I rifle the library in my skull for an interesting factling. “They like to tattoo their women, the Thracians.”

“Mmm.” Callisthenes closes his eyes like he’s just bitten into something tasty.

We’re descending the hillside now, our horses scuffling in the rocky scree as we make our way down to the muddy plain. Pythias is shifting in the saddle, straightening her clothes, smoothing her eyebrows, touching a fingertip to each corner of her mouth, preparing for the city.

“Love.” I put my hand on hers to still her grooming and claim back her attention. My nephew I ignore. A Thracian woman would eat him alive, tender morsel that he is, and spit out the little bones. “You should know a little more. They don’t keep slaves like we do, even in the palace. Everyone works. And they don’t have priests. The king performs that function for his people. He begins every day with sacrifices, and if anyone needs to speak to a god, it’s done through him.” Sacrilege: she doesn’t like this. I read her body. “Pella will not be like Hermias’s court. Women are not a part of public life here.”

“What does that mean?”

I shrug. “Men and women don’t attend entertainments together, or even eat together. Women of your rank aren’t seen. They don’t go out.”

“It’s too cold to go out,” Pythias says. “What does it matter, anyway? This time next week we’ll be in Athens.”

“That’s right.” I’ve explained to her that this detour is just a favour to Hermias. I’m needed in Pella for just a day or two, a week at most. Clean up, dry out, rest the animals, deliver Hermias’s mail, move on. “There isn’t much you’d want to do in public anyway.” The arts are imported sparingly. Pig-hunting is big; drinking is big. “You’ve never tasted beer, have you? You’ll have to try some before we leave.”

She ignores me.

“Beer!” Callisthenes says. “I’ll drink yours, Auntie.”

“Remember yourself,” I tell the young man, who has a tendency to giggle when he gets excited. “We are diplomats now.”

The caravan steps up its pace, and my wife’s back straightens. We’re on.

Despite the rain and ankle-sucking mud, we pick up a reti?nue as we pass through the city’s outskirts, men and women who come out of their houses to stare, and children who run after us, pulling at the skins covering the bulging carts, trying to dislodge some souvenir. They’re particularly drawn to the cart that carries the cages—a few bedraggled birds and small animals—which they dart at, only to retreat, screaming in pleasure and shaking their hands as though they’ve been nipped. They’re tall children, for the most part, and well formed. My men kick idly at a clutch of little beggars to fend them off, while my nephew genially turns out his pockets to them to prove his poverty. Pythias, veiled, draws the most ?stares.

At the palace, my nephew speaks to the guard and we are admitted. As the gates close behind us and we begin to dismount, I notice a boy—thirteen, maybe—wandering amongst the carts. Rain-plastered hair, ruddy skin, eyes big as a calf’s.

“Get away from there,” I call when the boy tries to help with one of the cages, a chameleon as it happens, and more gently, when the boy turns to look at me in amazement: “He’ll bite you.”

The boy smiles. &ldq...

Revue de presse

“It is testament to Lyon’s talent that she has shaped history into a narrative not only gripping, but also accessible and poignant, even tender . . . Beautifully researched and written . . . A novel that is brave enough to raise the universal questions about how a man should live his life [and] that describes with amazing authority the flaws and growth of one of our greatest philosophers as well as his famous student . . . What could be more relevant to our own troubled times?”
—Boston Globe

“A splendidly intelligent and entertaining novel about the ancient world . . . Here’s a story that gives us the classical world with everyday liveliness and narrative force, without ever sacrificing intellectual integrity and historical accuracy.”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR/All Things Considered

“A sensational first novel . . . Not to be missed . . . While The Golden Mean is beautifully written, its compressed prose both fleet and rhythmic, the novel’s pleasures are closer to those of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or even the historical pot boilers of Ken Follett . . . [It] hooked me as a first novel should, carried me along, and left me determined to read whatever the author writes next.”
—The Daily Beast (Must-Read Debuts)

“The Golden Mean is more than a brilliant and beautifully told novel: it’s also a profound exploration of moral and philosophical issues that have troubled and perplexed us since Aristotle.”
 —Russell Banks, author of The Reserve

“It takes chutzpah to make your main characters Aristotle and Alexander the Great, but Lyon pulls it off; she has the gift of finding the pulse of the ancient world and bringing it back to glorious life . . . Gripping, with a powerful sense of time and place.”
 —The Times (UK)

“Ancient Greece, in all its gusto, gore, and glory, springs vividly to life in Lyon’s pitch-perfect paean to Aristotle and Alexander the Great . . . Lyon’s ability to penetrate the mind and convincingly articulate the thoughts and emotions of one of the greatest intellects of all time is absolutely astounding.”
—Booklist

“The 4th century BC and the youth of Alexander the Great are marvellously reimagined in Lyon’s justifiably garlanded novel . . . The daily intrigues of the court, the visceral aspects of battle, philosophical discussion, and Aristotle’s household are all evoked in measured, burnished prose, which combines thrilling immediacy with a stately timelessness. Aristotle’s black moods and Alexander’s probable latent psychosis in particular are fascinatingly drawn.”
—Guardian (UK)
 
“Few writers would dare to employ Aristotle as their narrator but Annabel Lyon has done exactly this in her extraordinary novel The Golden Mean. In thoughtful and controlled prose that never fails to grip, Lyon presents an unexpected portrait of the young Alexander the Great, a fascinating recreation of Plato’s Academy and brings the ancient world back to life with a splendour I haven’t seen since I, Claudius. A triumph of erudition and story-telling.”
—John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
  
“A richly imagined and engrossing novel . . . In Lyon’s capable hands, the intense battle of wills between student and teacher, philosopher and ambitious warrior prince, is arresting and original . . . A flawlessly drawn world . . . A moving and illuminating historical novel that can stand proudly alongside the works of Mary Renault.”
—Shelf Awareness

“The harsh light of the classical world is prone to bleach away all humanity and leave only the bare outline of myth. Not so in Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, in which Aristotle is haunted by agonies of the flesh and spirit, and Alexander, his most famous pupil, struggles to be Olympian despite a murderous nature and merely human powers.”
—Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey

“The fourth century BCE comes eccentrically alive in this award-winning debut historical novel . . . Impressively researched and vividly detailed . . As authoritative and compelling as Mary Renault’s renowned novels set in the ancient world.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Lyon captures Aristotle’s voice so gracefully I sometimes thought I was reading a memoir rather than a work of fiction . . . Along with food for thought, The Golden Mean is filled with charming dialogue, colorful and dynamic characters, lush description, moments of deep sadness, love, sex, humor (often dark), and so much more, giving the book the chops to appeal to nearly any reader looking for a rich read.”
—Bookpleasures.com

“Remarkable . . . Lyon explores and develops the relations between [Aristotle and Alexander] with uncommon sensitivity and skill . . . The Golden Mean does beautifully what the best historical novels do. It recreates a past time whose manners are different from ours; yet it shows what is permanent in human nature . . . This is an outstanding novel, admirably structured, economical and evocative, keenly intelligent, amusing and sad—a book in which imagination and intellect are yoked in harmony.”
—The Scotsman (UK)

“The Golden Mean is an extraordinary achievement . . . Lyon portrays the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander with great subtlety, carefully investing their characters with perfectly judged light and shade . . . With her sensuous prose, rich imagery and meticulous attention to detail, Lyon has brushed the cobwebs of ages from two of history’s most charismatic characters and brought them gloriously to life.”
—Yorkshire Evening Post (UK)

“This is a pitch perfect, even dazzling debut novel . . . Historical fiction at its best . . . Lyon authoritatively evokes a fabled time and place in the urbane and dry voice of the man judged the smartest of his age.” 
—Montreal Gazette

“A wonderful book—an enthralling page-turner with deeply realized characters. [It] echoes right up to modern times, in spite of its ancient setting . . . A taut, polished novel that will hold your attention from start to finish . . . Funny, thought-provoking, sensual, and suspenseful.”  
—Vancouver Sun 
 
“I absolutely loved The Golden Mean. Annabel Lyon brings the philosophers and warriors, artists and whores, princes and slaves of ancient Macedonia alive, with warmth, wit and poignancy. Impeccably researched and brilliantly told, this novel is utterly convincing.”  
—Marie Phillips, author of Gods Behaving Badly
 
“The best books are those that steal up on you, and lead you gently into a world made real, not by an abundance of detail, but by honestly rendered characters that, from the very first page, so completely captivate that before you know it, you’ve read half the book and there are but a few hours until dawn . . . The Golden Mean is such a book.”
—MostlyFiction.com
 
 

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0307593991
• ISBN 13: 9780307593993
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Authorised Representative Service; ar.info@doceupoint.com; ; 77 Camden Street Lower; Dublin; Dublin; D02 XE80; Irlande