A review by emfiander
The King Must Die by Mary Renault

adventurous challenging dark reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

This book is a testament to the fact that I will love any narrative device, so long as it’s well-written. 

 

It’s a really fun, very classic adventure hero story. It gets off to a bit of a slow start, but once I hit the Eleusis chapters, I couldn’t put it down. It’s definitely a nostalgic kind of story, which has a lot to do with Theseus as the main character. Modern audiences are attuned to wanting a protagonist with an arc that involves internal stakes as well as the external, and that’s not really Theseus. He’s a winner who stays winning. And yet I found his story incredibly compelling to read. 

 

Theseus is a born and bred leader, and the way he moves through the world reflects his understanding of what that means. He is not a common man, and he holds himself to incredibly high standards in regards to duty, honor, and legacy. His sense of honor especially is what defines him as a character—he is constantly considering his responsibility to his people, what it means to do right by the gods, and how a leader should behave. His flaws are not at the forefront of his journey, but he does have them: he’s rash and hot-headed, and his confidence borders on arrogance. However, he’s always quick to point out his mistakes in the narrative (easy to do through the framework of an older man telling the stories of his youth), and his flaws never seem to derail things or hold him back for more than a few paragraphs. This is something I have found incredibly grating in other, poorer works, but the storycraft here is so strong that it actually ends up working incredibly well. 

 

This book isn’t fantasy, it’s historical fiction, but it’s depicting a world that feels so wholly foreign from our own that it may as well be. While I think many fantasy authors understandably choose to create characters that feel relatable in some way, to give their audience a foothold of normalcy in their otherwise unrecognizable world, Theseus does not feel like a real person, like someone you might meet in your own life. He is a mythic figure, a hero for the ages, and if your name is going to live on throughout time, then you probably aren’t very relatable—heroes, as it turns out, are not just like us, at least according to Mary Renault. 

 

I did think the ending to the Crete section was a little anticlimactic and underwhelming. I really enjoyed all the Crete stuff as we learned more about life in the Bull Court, but frankly, I would have liked to see a whole lot more detail there. There was a lot of really rich setup in both the politics and the bull fighting, but a lot of it got glossed over as events started to unfold, and the way that whole storyline concluded felt a little rushed and almost kind of random. 

 

That said, the ultimate ending, in the Naxos section, was really well done and I thought tied up the Ariadne stuff in an interesting, satisfying way. Anyone who knows the myth of Theseus is familiar with what happens with Theseus and Ariadne following Crete, and though I always had a soft spot for Theseus above any of the other Greek heroes, his treatment of Ariadne post Crete was always a difficult thing to reconcile. In this version, I felt like the foreshadowing was woven into their relationship quite naturally, and the way it all plays out makes total sense with his character and the themes of the book.