Word: menenhetet
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...truth, Ancient Evenings does achieve some of the cleaning of the slate it sets out to do and goes a ways towards creating a new world, however bizarre that world is. As evinced in the story of Menenhetet, a peasant who rises to the post of First Charioteer in the reign of Ramses II and succeeds in getting reincarnated three or four times--ancient Egypt is a land of many weird rites and customs, filled with magic, telepathy and violence. Menenhetet relates his odyssey from a Nile village to the Pharaoh's chariot in the glorious battle against the Hittites...
...succinctly, Menenhetet's life is a long series of extraordinary feats such as running over a mountain, carrying a chariot or slaying more Hittites than you could ever shake a scarab at--and crashing humiliations like getting exiled to a desert outpost and being sodomized (more than once) by the Pharaoh. These events are punctuated by various hexes and incantations, long processions to one temple or another, descriptions of statues and animals and peasants and eunuchs (many eunuchs) and life in the seraglio and the smell of different perfumes and incenses and precious stones and robes and linens...
...most of all, Menenhetet's tells about sex. He was quite a stud in his time, and in the course of 700 pages we are trusted to perhaps 300 episodes of sex. Not just garden variety copulation either. The works. Even when he's a ghost he has sex. This may be indicative of life in ancient Egypt; certainly a look at the statuary of the time shows as much of an interest in sex and fertility as there was in any other historical period. Here, however, it makes for one very boring book. Certainly, there are moments when...
...book: as you might have guessed by now, is painfully bad. The writing tries to mimic the Biblical cadence which translators often give to old, mythic stories and hence seems gimmicky, especially with Mailer's consuming interest in sex and scatology (an important episode in the book comes when Menenhetet steals some of the Pharaoh's feces, I swear). But even more annoying than the problems in execution, the concerns of the book, and its vacillation between comic book heroism and pornography is the simple fact that the book seems utterly irrelevant. I don't know if anything worse...
...there a clash of vivid personalities. The young Menenhetet, age 6, has the ability to enter the minds of those around him, a power he shares, it turns out, with his mother and great-grandfather. What this means, in practice, is that mystery becomes unnecessary. Whenever one character wonders what another is thinking or feeling, telepathy comes instantly to the rescue. Different people are simply parcels of the same brain, one that usually resembles Norman Mailer's. Menenhetet I often sounds like the world's oldest existentialist: "Look for the risk. We must obey it every time. There...