★★★★★ Theseus retold

The Bull from the Sea

Mary Renault

I read The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea in High School (about 1971, I'm guessing), then subsequently read everything by Mary Renault I could get my hands on. That, I guess, shows what I thought of them. Although her other books are good, The King Must Die was the most unputdownable.

The two books are, of course, a retelling of the classic myth of Theseus -- the demigod son of a mortal woman and Poseidon (god of the sea and also the Earthshaker) and Aegeus, king of Athens. (Son of two fathers? Yup, apparently that's something a god can do.) In classical myth Theseus went to Crete, where he killed the Minotaur with the help of the princess Ariadne, whence he returned to Athens (not yet the democracy it was famously to become) to be King. In Renault's telling most of the magical events of the myth are rationalized so that, if you want to, you can view them as nonmagical. For instance, instead of having a bull's head, Renault's Minotaur is just the large, brutal son of Queen Pasiphaë. Drawing on Cretan archeology, Renault portrays Theseus in the Cretan court as a bull-dancer, one of the youths who risk their lives in shows with live bulls.

I remember The King Must Die as a very sexy novel. (Not that, as a High School student in the 70s, I had a lot of basis for comparison.) It is no more explicit than you would expect of a novel published for a general audience in 1958. But Renault leaves you in no doubt that Theseus was a man who wanted to have sex with women, and whom women wanted to have sex with, and did. In my memory there is no convincing love story in the novel.

In contrast to several of Renault's other novels, relationships in The King Must Die are, as far as my High school memories serve me, exclusively heterosexual. (For the record, let's just stipulate that if there were subtle hints of queer relationships in The King Must Die (or even unsubtle hints), high school me undoubtedly missed them.) Theseus is a man who is proud of his masculinity. Several of Renault's other books feature queer relationships -- something that was almost unheard of in popular literature of that time.

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