Guest Author Read-Along: The Charioteer by Mary Renault (with Alexis Hall)

Hello hello Romancelandia

I am so so *so* excited to be joining you for all a buddy read. And many thanks to the lovely mods for inviting me and organising this event.

The book I’ve chosen is *attempts drum roll despite the fact it's in the post title*: The Charioteer by Mary Renault.

I chose it for a few reasons, some sentimental, some practical. As a point of trivia, it’s Oliver Blackwood’s favourite book, and one of mine. But, with its exploration of queer love, queer identity, gender, and classical idealism, I thought it might tap into a lot of this sub’s interests and preoccupations.

Please do be aware it’s not a genre romance. It is, however, a love story and it does have a hopeful, optimistic ending.

Housekeeping Stuff

• Obviously this is, like, a voluntary thing: I’m not here to force anyone to read semi-obscure queer books from the 1950s. And I’ll only be swinging by today, at the mid-way point, and at the end – so I won’t be breathing down the neck of the sub, or getting in the way of normal business (including general posting and the other bookclubs)
• Please do check out the supporting mod posts which contain the logistical details of how this is going to work
• If you’re new to the sub don’t forget to read the rules, and if you joined because I posted about this on my social media, I do hope you’ll enjoy meeting the rest of the community
• There’s some background stuff about the book and the author to follow: it’s a bit tl;dr because I’m a bit tl;dr, but it’s entirely optional. If you’re on the fence about whether you want to read the book, it might help you decide whether The Charioteer is for you.
• Having posted this, I’ll be hanging around for a bit to chat and I also brought a romance-reader-friendly game to play to help break the ice (and also because it’s fun) since we’re all going to be a reading a book together. Details on that to follow. Of course everyone is welcome to play the game, regardless of whether you’re joining me for the read-along.
• Still super happy to be here 😊

Very Brief No Spoilers Overview (including content guidance)

The protagonist of The Charioteer is Laurie Odell: injured at Dunkirk (with no idea about his own queer identity) he is recovering in a field hospital when he falls desperately in love with an idealistic conscious objector called Andrew. Not long after this, he falls back into contact with an old school friend, Ralph Lanyon, towards whom he had once felt a certain confused hero worship.

In super basic terms the book is a complicated love triangle, but it’s also an exploration of identity, queer identity in particular, the place of queer people in society, and an interrogation of how to love both truly and queerly in a world that does not recognise the validity of either who you are or how you love.

The Charioteer was written in the 1950s (first published in the UK in 1953, I think, and 1959 in the US, having fallen afoul of censorship laws) so do be aware that—while the book’s portrayal of homosexuality is ultimately positive—both book and protagonist are still products of their time. So expect some old-fashioned, explicitly Freudian views on what “creates” queer people (lacking an appropriate father figure and being close to your mother, apparently) alongside complicated attitudes to disability and masculinity, and what we might interpret as internalised queerphobia today (especially in its portrayal of less conventionally masculine queer men).

Plus additional content guidance for wartime scenes, mild violence, and suicidal ideation.

And I will be the first to admit the prose style is pretty dense and (because of censorship fears) certain things are approached very obliquely. If you bounce off it, that’s totally fine.

A Little Bit About Mary Renault aka How Much Can I Say Something Is Complicated In Half A Page

Mary Renault is a fascinating, complicated person. And also kinda problematic in a bunch of ways. I am going to use the pronouns she/her for her, because those are the pronouns that are universally used for her. I think there’d be a case for others but it would involve applying modern principles to a person from another time.

She was also very private so quite a lot of this is speculative.

The eldest daughter of a generically respectable English family, MR had an unremarkable childhood, despite the strained relationship between her parents. After graduating from Oxford, she worked as a nurse for a while, including through the second world war (treating soldiers injured at Dunkirk—which seems significant for Laurie’s story), and met her lifelong partner, Julie Mullard. Eventually the two women emigrated to South Africa, where they could live more openly as a couple among other queer expats.

MR wrote throughout her life. Her early novels were contemporary and tend to be intricate, psychological dramas, with either an explicit or implicit queerness to them, even the ones that are ostensibly m/f. (Seriously, I think she might have invented the disaster bisexual.)

The Charioteer was her first and indeed only contemporary set novel about exclusively homosexual men. From there, she vanished into antiquity: writing the novels set in the classical world for which is most well-known (and which also focused on male-male love). My understanding is that MR felt she had greater freedom to portray same-sex love as natural in books set in the ancient world (though obviously this is quite an idealised take on classical attitudes to same-sex desire).

In terms of her other writing, I very much recommend the Alexander the Great trilogy, especially to those who are fans of The Song of Achilles. Though do be warned that the thread of alienation when it comes to women that winds through most of Renault’s novels (contemporary or classical) develops into something it’s hard not to see as full-blown misogyny in her later work. Or, at the very least, she is often contemptuous of women who exhibit conventionally feminine-coded traits or are interested (or trapped) in conventionally feminine-coded lives, like wives and mothers. Her version of Hippolyta, by contrast, is frankly kick arse.

So. Yeah. I did warn you she was complicated. Because there’s much that’s paradoxical about Mary Renault. She was, in many ways, extremely compassionate and empathetic. Her books depict queer love and queer desire as entirely natural, and argue strongly for the integration of queer people into society, rather than their exile from it. Her take is very much that queer people are not themselves harmful, but social rejection creates damaged people who may therefore cause harm. She also campaigned against Apartheid. But—and again I don’t want to be speculating too much about this kind of thing, because it’s not my business and MR is dead—I think she struggled with both her gender identity and her sexuality.

She comprehensively rejected the term ‘lesbian’ for example, and felt very alienated by the more libertine aspects of the queer circle she and her partner moved in. She found the idea of people united solely by their sexuality deeply troubling (a theme you may well see in The Charioteer). And, as I mentioned earlier, she was often scathing about women and their place in society (at a time when various women’s liberation movements were gathering momentum). Without Freuding MR back, she did have a notably strained relationship with her mother who was strongly invested in her daughters reflecting conventional feminine ideals. MR often said she wished she’d been born male and—given the fact she almost exclusively writes from the POV of her male protagonists—was clearly more comfortable with traditionally masculine-coded ideas and behaviours than traditionally feminine-coded ones.

Of course, it’s complicated to interpret figures from the past as trans coded, especially because, before we had words for trans and nonbinary people, it is impossible to navigate the boundary between “identifies as a man” and “does not feel represented by conventional femininity.” After all, MR lived in a world where what it meant to be a woman was stultifying narrow. But given her discomfort with being thought of as a lesbian, her writing, and her comments about her own sense of her gender identity I would certainly not dispute a reading of MR as trans or nonbinary.

Although, out of fairness, I should probably note that some feminist critics see her work as less about her own gender identity than, well, um, affirming the patriarchy? While others see her triumphant reclamation of the ancient world, as a female-identified writer, as an attempt to stake her own claim on a historically male-dominated field. And thus a feminist act.

Like I said, all very complicated.

Plus, as an ironic coda to all this, her portrayal of male protagonists was found so psychologically plausible by contemporary readers that the rumour that MR was a female pseudonym for a male writer was never quite dispelled in her lifetime.

Some Stuff I Think It’d Be Interesting To Think About

Obviously I would love our discussion to be as free-form and wide-ranging as possible but here are some elements of the novel I think it might be worth thinking about as we read:

• The influence of classical world, and classical ideas, on the novel as a whole
• The central metaphor of the charioteer itself which it’s explained early on comes from Plato’s Phaedrus. In Laurie’s own words: “Each of the gods has a pair of divine white horses, but the soul only has one. The other ... is black and scruffy, with a thick neck, a flat face, hairy fetlocks, gray bloodshot eyes, and shaggy ears. He's hard of hearing, thick-skinned, and given to bolting whenever he sees something he wants” (The typical reading is that one of Laurie’s love interests is the white horse, and the other black, but I … am not sure)
• #teamandrew v #teamralph
• The formation of queer identity and queer legacy in a world that rejects you
• Masculinity and gender in general

Further Reading

Let me emphasise that NONE of this is necessary to read The Charioteer. This isn’t supposed to be a seminar handout. I just think this is the sort of sub that values further reading.

Unfortunately, finding further reading on Mary Renault is super difficult because there’s not much writing on her. There are two biographies, both of which are quite old (they were written in 1993 and 2001 respectively) and neither of them provide much insight into her because she was very private. And it’s good that privacy has been respected.

But these are illuminating and/or fun:

• The American Boy: an article from a queer American writer who exchanged some letters with MR when he was a boy
• Masquing the Phallus: Genital Ambiguity in MR’s Historical Novels: an academic piece about … err … well the clue is in the name. It’s available via a free account on JSTOR (assuming you have not used up your monthly 100 articles). It’s mainly about her books set in the ancient world but it’s got some … intriguing theories shall we say about MR’s depiction of queerness.
• How To Tell You’re In A Mary Renault Novel by Daniel Lavery of Toast fame. This is just funny. And accurate. And will amuse the classical aficionados among you.
• An episode of the Bad Gays podcast on Radclyffe Hall. This is not about MR *at all* and she famously despised The Well of Loneliness (RH’s sapphic woefest) but as well as being just independently interesting it offers some useful cultural context in terms of early 20th century AFAB queer writers who desired women and grappled with both their gender and their sexuality. Also I’m sure the high-profile censorship of The Well of Loneliness must have been in MR’s mind as she was writing her own books, particularly The Charioteer.