A Son of the Rock

Picador, 1984, 715 p.

The main preoccupations of the novel as a form throughout the years have been with love, sex and death. This is not a love story and, since it revolves around reincarnation, that pretty much takes care of death. (Not entirely, there is a long description of the Battle of Kadesh, which isn’t exactly mortality free, and to be reborn one has to die, but these are all-but incidental.)

That leaves only sex, la petite mort. And boy, does it leave sex. You name it, it appears in these pages.

Not that there is much intimation of that to start with. We begin with someone – we quickly learn this person is named Menenhetet Two – waking up in the Great Pyramid of Khufu, assuming himself to be dead, and making his way up into the light. (Ancient Egyptians of course had an afterlife.) This is the first of seven Books in the novel, The Book of One Man Dead. The others are The Book of the Gods, The Book of the Child, The Book of the Charioteer, The Book of the Queens, The Book of the Pharaoh and The Book of Secrets, in all of which the chapters are preceded by that section’s descriptive Egyptian hieroglyph.

The first two are fairly turgid, the second, The Book of the Gods, being an account of Egyptian mythology but which doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose beyond illustrating their Gods’ convolutions. It is only in the third section that we begin to have some appearance of story. Here Menenhetet Two, as a seven year-old boy, accompanies his parents (mother Hathfertiti and father Nef-khep-aukhem, who in Egyptian tradition are half-siblings,) and his great-grandfather Menenhetet One, to a celebration known as the Night of the Pig (an unclean animal of course,) in the presence of Pharaoh Ptah-nem-hotep, also known as Ramses the Ninth, in the royal city of Memphi. The later chapters play out the ramifications of this evening and Menenhetet One’s reminiscences of his four lives so far, but are mostly set during the life and times of the Great Pharaoh Ramses the Second, (Usermare Setpenere,) whom Menenhetet One served in various contexts – as charioteer, then General, then governor of the little queens in the House of the Secluded (the Pharoah’s harem,) then guard to Ramses’s Queen, Nefertiri, and later to the Pharaoh’s third Queen, the Hittite princess Rama-Nefru, but also, in Menenhetet One’s second life, as High Priest – during his long reign.

Egyptians, due to the influence of the Nile, are privy to other people’s thoughts and Menenhetet Two experiences all of this – and knowledge of his mother’s desire to actually have sex with Ptah-nem-hotep (eventually fulfilled) – mostly by pretending to be asleep. So it is that Menenhetet Two learns his great-grandfather and his mother have been long-time lovers and his real father is Ptah-nem-hotep, conceived by Hathfertiti through devious means.

Mailer makes a fair enough attempt to mimic ancient Egyptian speech patterns and phraseology but in the main the novel is overwritten, which renders it hard going to start with. The details of Menenhetet One’s first life though do manage to conjure some interest but there are still significant longueurs within most of his reminiscences.

My overall memory of this book, however, is likely to be of the quite ridiculous amount of sex it contains.

Pedant’s corner:- On the backcover “Nefititi” (In text it’s always Nefertiri.) Otherwise; lay (lie,) Isis’ (Isis’s,) Osiris’ (Osiris’s,) Horus’ (Horus’s.) “The air alt red” (altered.) “My means might be one-seventh of what once it had been” (of what once they had been.) “Ahead were nothing but mountains covered with trees” (Ahead was nothing but…,) paniers (panniers,) “the first of our advantages were the bows” (the first … was the bows,) staunch (x 2, stanch.)