Book Review: Creation by Gore Vidal
A fun "rebuke" of Herodotus that makes the reader reflect on religion's role in the development and evolution of culture
Weird how things circle back around, right? I started this book review journey two years ago with Julian by Gore Vidal, and here a thick paperback copy of Creation just happens to fall into my lap. We also briefly talked about him last month as part of the Norman Mailer article, so having the idea of Vidal fresh in one’s memory can only serve to help prepare us for the story at hand.
This novel has been floating around in my list of books for review essentially since I started keeping a list. I have heard the prose style of this work compared favorably to Herodotus himself, and I am happy to agree with the sentiment. Indeed, the impetus for Cyrus Spitama to begin his account is that he listened to Herodotus’ account of history and disagreed with the portrayal of Persian culture, for reasons that anyone with a cursory grasp of his Histories will understand. Both works are, in their own ways, poorly sourced. The narrator of Creation is a man prejudiced against the Athenians for a multitude of personal reasons, while we interpret Herodotus’ biases to be a result of poor sourcing. Naturally, it’s hard to expect someone to follow best practices in writing about history if they’re the ones inventing history as a genre as we know it. Cyrus, on the other hand, puts down almost anyone that doesn’t follow the teachings of his grandfather, Zoroaster. Even some priests that do aren’t safe from his criticism, as he accuses them of “following the lie.” Even so, his personal religious beliefs about how sacred Zoroaster was aren’t always rock-solid.
These lapses in faith mean that Cyrus can ask the right questions to other religious leaders regarding the nature of their beliefs and can credibly interpret their philosophies through a real cultural lens. Rather than being a hereditary follower like the average ancient farmer that may be swayed by enough fancy rhetoric, the reader trusts Cyrus by the time he leaves the Persian court to be a proper critic. He takes pride in his familial beliefs, and has endured training of praying with the deva-worshipping Magians in the palace school. In his travels to Babylon, he and his royal companions learn that a ritual shrine that the god Bel-Marduk sleeps in with priestesses of Ishtar isn’t so much the god incarnate, but after pressing the issue they find that the priests claim to embody him. As teenagers seeing a quick opportunity for some late-night fun, his companions order the priests to allow them to take their positions that night. By the time he heads off to India as a foreign dignitary and representative of the Persians, the reader trusts him to inquire openly about topics of faith without holding his tongue.
The term Cyrus uses to describe himself is “counter-historian.” In the sense that this is a book that describes the way one man’s actions in the world instead of the world’s effects on a body of people, I suppose that an autobiography would be the opposite of a history book. With that being said, there are times when his stories intersect with Herodotus’ in interesting ways. The story of the tomb of Nitocris,1 for one, appears as a secondhand account from an heir to Darius’ throne, albeit with a little more detail added for comical effect. Cyrus does more due diligence in other cases; unlike Herodotus, he tends to give both names of a syncretic god (usually in Greek as well as the native tongue). Now, yes, this is because Vidal was a modern author with the benefit of 2,400 years of hindsight, but there are narrative reasons for Cyrus giving a more “reliable” account. For one, as we have established, he was well-versed in all different forms of ancient religions, but also the in-universe reason for this novel’s existence was to snub Herodotus for getting things wrong. Sometimes spite just creates that desire to be more reliable; it’s a great motivating force.
One aspect of this novel I deeply appreciate is Vidal’s clear, deep appreciation for the historical period he is exploring. The further east the narrative travels, the thinner my own understanding of the lines between history and fiction becomes. That being said, I feel like I can put my trust in the author to not drop something farfetched and ridiculously fabricated into the chapters about India because he creates a solid foundation of his understanding early on. The work as a whole is a sort of love-letter to Herodotus, in a sense, but he’s hardly the only ancient author touched on. The detail of Socrates being a stonemason2 by trade is one of those nifty Classics 102 facts that tend to get left out of dusty tomes about philosophy that take themselves much too seriously, and him being employed by our narrator and viewed as a lowly worker builds rapport with the reader. At one point, he also refers to an area as “Modern day Sigeum near the ruins of Troy,” which sounds one of those literary references that could have convinced more of the archeological establishment that Schliemann had something going for him before he sailed off for Turkey with all that dynamite.
This, like the last novel I reviewed, was a massive time commitment, and I’m not confident that someone who doesn’t like reading dense and “boring” history books is going to necessarily enjoy this as much as I did. I’m begrudgingly giving this one star, but I think that I’ve sold the high points of the novel hard enough that anyone who’d enjoy the book from this review would ignore such a low rating anyway. With the exception of the Dune novels I mentioned beginning back in November, I’d be surprised if I ended up enjoying any novel more than this one this year.
Herodotus Histories 1.187
It’s all over the place in implicit mentions in Plato, but the one that readily comes to mind is Diogenes Laertius Lives 2.19