Ancient Evenings [Paperback]

Mailer seeminngly captures Egypt during a period that could be easily considered antithetically decadent to its many periods of great glory like the First Dynasty's uniting of the "The Two Lands," the Pyramid Age, the 12th Dynasty or the famous 18th, with Akhenaton, Nefertiti, and King Tut. Or, heartbreakingly enough for romantic Egyptophiles like myself, he could be capturing how everyday Egypt, underneath the pomp and circumstance of the persepective of an Egyptologist or the Kingly/Pharonic court ritual (much like Rome millenia later) actually was.

Mailer has always been accused of personalizing himself too much in his work, and the evidence of twentieth century left-of-center White American bohemian life and culture, as well as its self-projected/narcississtic perspective on ancient Egyptian culture, does at times bleed through. African people South of Egypt are referred to in the novel as Negroes or Blacks. (Ancient Egyptian people, Pharaohs and rulers--those that weren't actually fully Black themselves--saw much greater differences amongst peoples regarding religions, kingdoms/class, language and geography than the modern world has taught us to believe about the myth of race and skin color. Such distinctions regarding non-Nilotic or non-North African African peoples [as the Egyptians were North African peoples whose language was in a family of languages shared by many peoples in a thousand mile radius], let alone quasi-contemptuous ruminations on them [patricularly considering the ancient Ethiopian, Dogon or Sudanese] would not have been made then as Mailer makes them when he wrote this, he being a product of pre-integrationist America). The conversations about that strange tribe known as the Hebrews are equally reflective of Biblical story and cultural influence as opposed to ancient Egyptian. (And of course, as the Torah/Old Testament was written many centuries after ANCIENT EVENING's story takes place, the Egyptian take on the Hebrews would be either far less interesting and mythologically significant to them, or interesting to the Pharoahs and religious leaders in a way that would change our entire concept of Western culture if it were revealed.) Most of all though, even for a left of center, non-homophobic artist like myself who knows the value of sexual freedom in artistic expression, the rampant and graphic scenes of homosexual dalliances and rapes are just a wee bit much for me (!).

Just the same, Mailer's ability to weave the complexity of emotions, personalities, issues, struggles, strange powers, human potentialities and overall mysticism of the civilization and its people into a treatise on its understanding of the human spirit and the singular mystery of one continuously suspense-weaving plot, is already captivating me in magical ways.

After working for years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Egyptian Art in New York, my enjoyment of reading this novel, which may have been a closet favorite of many of my curator friends, is greatly enhanced. I highly recommend this for anyone who likes Mailer, ancient Egyptian art and civilization, and a fascinating mystery. Pick it up, and even when it gets confusing to you, you won't be able to put it down.