Fire from Heaven: A Novel of Alexander the Great Paperback – June 11, 2002

Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.Fire from Heaven is about the childhood and youth of Alexander the Great. No doubt, Mary Renault has done such an extensive and comprehensive research on the subject matter. She touched on key events such as his first kill at twelve, the taming of his horse Bucephalus, being made regent at sixteen and commander at eighteen, among other things. She touched on key relationships that he has with his tutor Aristotle, and the immense love and devotion that he has for his companion, Hephaistion.Alexander was lying flat on his back, staring upward. Suddenly he grasped Hephaistion in an embrace so fierce that itknocked the breath out of him, and said, "Without you I should go mad.""I too without you," said Hephaistion with loving ardor.Through her inferences, she brought Alexander the Great back to life. We got a glimpse of all the things that made him truly deserving of that epithet. It's intriguing to know that what Mary Renault writes are things that could have happened, might have happened; the words exchanged could have been uttered.When Alexander got up, his eyes had grown used to the shadows. He saw they were all looking at him, jealous,despondent, hopeful; feeling their pain, and wanting their contribution recognised. In the end, before he left, he hadspoken to every one of them.This is truly a heavy book - the way it's written to be exact. The stilted writing made the reading process long and slow. But the rich history is worth it. The Wikipedia page on Alexander the Great and the film Alexander make great supplements to Fire from Heaven - although Colin Farrell makes a terrible Alexander. Jared Leto on the other hand makes a fine Hephaistion!Conclusion: For a brilliant semi-fictitious historical novel, be sure to pick up Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, the first of the Alexander the Great series!

"Fire from Heaven" may be Mary Renault's best work on Alexander the Great, and I enjoyed it almost as much as I did her other stories about young ancient Greek homosexual men in "Last of the Wine" and her flawed, but also great, gay coming of age story set in 1940's Britain, "The Charioteer." Renault excels in her uncanny ability to depict convincingly young gay boys and men and their developing, often difficult, lives of emerging knowledge and experienced about who they really are. One could also look to Andre Aciman's "Call Me by Your Name," for other excellent writing on this subject.Despite her caveats about the disputed and never to be known actual facts about Alexander's homosexuality in her "Author's Note" at the end of the book, you'd never know Renault had any doubt about his being gay from Day 1. Her story boldly shows Alexander as homosexual even as a young boy, smiling coyly at a handsome envoy who came to visit King Philip, Alexander's father. Alexander's preference for the company of men is never hidden, and it blossoms in full force during his early teenage "friendship" with Hephaestion, the male who turns out to be his life-long lover and bed partner. They were partners in everything for 20 years.Alexander, Renault writes, is precocious in just about every facet of his young life. His brilliance is not limited to how quickly he learned war games as a teenager or his ability to disappear into the wild and survive better than ever, but also in his "understanding" of people and the world around him.Of course, down deep, Alexander is portrayed as a deadly, cold fish, a truly calculating strategist, whose ability to love anyone other than himself emerges only as a consequence of Hephaestion's handling of his emotions and blazing internal fire. Their courtship and early love life is the core of this story.His mother, Olympias, is shown to be a vicious, selfish, scheming witch, and his father, King Philip, hardly is a person to admire, either. There's lots of war talk, war strategy, and war events. I found myself skipping over them to some extent, so that I did not lose the thread of the true story at hand: the love story of Alexander and Hephaestion. Steven Pressfield is a good alternate read for the wars stuff.This is good historical fiction, with, of course, emphasis on "fiction."