GRAVES, Robert
British novelist, poet and non-fiction writer (1895-1985)
Graves' main interests were myth and poetry. He wrote a bestselling version of the Greek myths, a controversial account of the Bible stories as myth, and The White Goddess (1948--52), a study of poetic inspiration. Throughout his life he composed poetry (much of it autobiographical), and his love-poems in particular are much admired. He claimed that his novels were potboilers, written to finance real' work, but their quality and craftsmanship belie this description. Most are historical, reimagining characters of the past -- from the author of the Odyssey to Jesus -- as people with markedly 20th-century sensibilities, able to view the events of their own lives, as it were, with hindsight. His books are like psychological documentaries, as if we are looking directly into his characters' minds.
I, CLAUDIUS (1934) This novel and its sequel Claudius the God purport to be the autobiography of the fourth Roman emperor. A spastic and an epileptic, he is regarded by everyone as a fool and ignored; he thus survives the myriad political and dynastic intrigues of the first 50 years of the Roman empire, the reigns of his three dangerous predecessors. He is finally made emperor himself, in a palace coup -- and proceeds to rule with a blend of wisdom, guile and ruthlessness which he describes with fascinated relish. The story ends -- typically for Graves -- with a real document, an account by a Roman satirist of the Pumpkinification of Claudius', the arrival of the stammering, limping fool of an emperor in Olympus, home of the gods and of his own terrifying, deified relatives.
Graves' other novels include Count Belisarius (set in 6th-century Byzantium), Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb (about the American War of Independence), Wife to Mr Milton (set in Puritan England, and written in a brilliant pastiche of 17th-century prose), Homer's Daughter (set in prehistoric Greece), and King Jesus (about the life and death of Christ). Seven Days in New Crete is an urbane future-fantasy, and Goodbye to All That is autobiography, moving from a tormented account of Graves' time as an officer in the first world war to malicious glimpses of Oxford life and the literary London of the 1920s.
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The Golden Fleece (Hercules, My Shipmate) (a novelised account of the expedition of Jason and the Argonauts to find the Golden Fleece, with ingenious rational explanations of such magic events as the escape from the Clashing Rocks, the yoking of bronze bulls and the sowing of serpents' teeth)
To I, Claudius : David Wishart, I, Virgil (about the Roman Civil War, Caesar’s assassination, Antony and Cleopatra, the rise of Augustus – a kind of prequel to I, Claudius) Robert Harris, Pompeii Steven Saylor, Roman Blood Joan Grant, Winged Pharaoh Allan Massie, Tiberius Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen Mary Renault, The King Must Die Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian see also pathway
Books of similar gusto, on non-classical subjects : Augusto Roa Bastos, I, The Supreme (the 'autobiography' of a deranged 19th-century Paraguayan dictator) Frederick Rolfe, Hadrian the Seventh (about a waspish inadequate who is elected Pope) Gore Vidal, Kalki (about an insane Vietnam veteran who imagines himself Kalki, the Hindu god whose coming will end the present cycle of human existence)
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