Epic Historical Fiction

Creation – Gore Vidal

This historical novel is set in the 4th century BC, from the Persia of Darius and Xerxes to ancient India and China before Qin Shi Huang. The narrator is old and blind Cyrus Spitama who dictating his memoirs to his distant relative, the future laughing philosopher Democritus.

The story is Spitama’s life as an ambassador and traveler throughout the East and chronicles his meetings with Buddha, Confucius, Anaxagoras, and Herodotus. He even hires Socrates the mason, who botches getting a wall up, perhaps because of being distracted by musings about whether virtue can be taught.

As in Julian and Lincoln, Vidal pushes the reader to review many of their pious certainties soaked up in school and not really examined since. For instance, Vidal is acerbic about the glory that was Greece. “Democritus thinks Athens is wonderful,” our narrator observes. “The fact is, son, you haven't seen the rest of the world. I hope one day you can travel and go beyond your Greekness.” Cyrus entertains doubts: “wisdom was not born in Attica, Democritus, but maybe that's where it will die.”

As in the Narratives of Empire, Vidal loves these large frescoes, where he can allow himself to recast a familiar or dimly recalled story as he sees it, such as the Greek wars from the viewpoint of the Persians. But the real preoccupation of the novel is that of the narrator, the grandson of Zoroaster, as to how the universe arose and who or what created it, with the answers of the various wise men and philosophers of the time. Confucius, a practical scholar, shrugged at inquiries into first causes, figuring that it was a waste to time discussing unanswerable questions and that our life, right here, right now, wasn’t affected whether the origin of Creation was divine or natural forces.

A good novel for those times when the reader that wants an evocation of the remote past, with endless court and harem intrigues, regicide, parricide, fratricide, witches and sorcerers, bloodthirsty leaders and impalements of 15,000 soldiers on the losing side of a battle. Feel for a little time the world when it was either new relative to urbanization or philosophy or really old due to the intrigues of politicians, ministers, and merchants that thought they are going to build systems that would last forever only to have them survive founders by mere decades.