Suffering doesn’t make people good or noble. A little bit gives them perspective. A lot turns them cruel, and too much – you get a murder or a marvel, and neither of those are really people any more.
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to DionysusHis duty was hurting him, and this is the medicine, and the only reason you think that’s unreasonable is that your duty has hurt you much more, there never was medicine for you, and you don’t see why other people shouldn’t be hurt the same way.
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to DionysusI felt like an old candle that had sat forgotten on a shelf for years, frozen into the same lumpy awkward shape, dull with dust, but now here was the fire again, and I was softening and changing and finding I didn’t have to be that cold shape forever, and the wax was turning warm and bright again. He’d burn me away altogether before long, but it was worth it.
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus
CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d
Phaidros is a knight in The Furies, a legion in the Theban army. Raised by Helios, the prince of Thebes and a fellow knight, Phaidros grows up as part of the roving military unit sent from Thebes to raid, capture, and sell plundered treasure and conquered peoples as slaves to Egypt. He is the ward of Helios, which is the standard practice in their culture. Helios is responsible for teaching Phaidros how to be a dutiful and lethal soldier.
Because he is Helios’s ward, he is in the palace in Thebes when it catches on fire. Only a boy himself, he rescues a baby boy, who is set to be some sort of secret sacrifice by queen Agave. The baby is Helios and Agave’s nephew and supposedly a child of Zeus. Being so little, Phaidros only knows that he cannot let the child be harmed, so he sneaks him out of the palace. Helios finds them hidden in a neighboring temple, and hides the baby so that the queen cannot find it. Over the following years, Helios tells Phaidros this story, the story of the night of the lightning and the baby and the burning palace, so that Helios cannot remember if what he experienced was real or a collection of tales that Helios braided together into one epic story. As the years pass, the legend of the lost prince of Thebes and son of Zeus takes on a life of its own. The queen kills anyone who whispers that such a child ever existed.
In flashbacks, Phaidros recounts how he went from being a frightened young ward to a disgraced soldier. At this point in his life, he is a knight tasked with training the children who are being raised like he was. Unmarried, he has no children of his own, and the brutal task of taking the children of Thebes’s most powerful houses, called the ‘Sown’ and training them to become weapons in human form, watching them suffer and die in battle is eroding his will to live. He takes on more and more reckless tasks, so much so that his fellow soldiers believe he has a death wish. He performs his duty because he has known no other life. His mistakes are many and his shame is crushing. But there is one that haunts him – another boy that he rescued, a beautiful kind boy, that accepted him when others wouldn’t speak with him. When it came time to protect the boy, Phaidros turned away from him. The boy escaped using some sort of magical powers, but Phaidros knows that someday, the boy will find him and kill him. The wearier he becomes with the death and crushing weight of duty, the more he longs for the boy to return and end it all.
Because of his relationship with Helios, the queen of Thebes asks Phaidros to find her son, prince Pentheus, who is betrothed to an Egyptian prince for diplomatic and financial purposes. Phaidros doesn’t think much of Pentheus, as he is a spoiled prince, but he cannot say no to the queen. The day the prince disappeared was the same day that a witch, a tall man clad head-to-toe in black robes, appeared as if he was god sent. As Phaidros hunts for Pentheus, as the alliance with Egypt and the continuation of the kingdom is at stake, a horrible madness takes hold of the Theben people. The citizens say it is the lost prince come back to take his throne. But Phaidros believes it is the boy he abandoned so long ago finally come to take what he is owed.
The witch, named Dionysus, keeps appearing wherever Phaidros goes. Despite his terror of what is to come, Dionysus’s presence brings Phaidros such peace that he believes the sacrifice is worth it.
I don’t really know where to start with this review. This book is so much. Trying to pin it down to one core theme is difficult because it touches so many things. So I won’t try to wrap it up into a single, core lesson, so to speak. The Hymn to Dionysus is an answer to The Song of Achilles. It shows the extremely brutal way of life with the blackest humor imaginable.
In the myths and in this book, Dionysus brings madness wherever he goes. People sing and dance until their bodies give out. They go wild and begin attacking their neighbors, with no memory of why they did so in the first place. Dionysus is present, however he does not actively incite the resulting mayhem. The madness is a natural byproduct of his existence.
Dionysus explains to Phaidros that to adhere to duty and continue to grind away like a machine, one loses one’s soul. The only way to protect yourself from yourself is to go a little mad from time to time. Phaidros doesn’t know what he wants because his entire life has been his duty: as a soldier, as a sworn shieldmate to Helios, as a servant to the crown. Dionysus shows him that he, that his life, is more than his duty. His adherence to duty is killing him. Why must he always walk into the fire?
This is the second Natasha Pulley book I’ve read. I enjoyed The Mars House more as the plot was less repetitive and more linear than this novel. However, this book has the same things that made me love The Mars House. In spite of, or perhaps because of Phaidros’s nearly debilitating melancholy, he is hilarious. He is every person who is so done with their job or school, or Herculean task, or what have you, that he would gladly walk into the fire just to feel something again. In his culture, dying for the cause is acceptable. There is a certain shame in not dying heroically in battle. There is the added shame of not marrying and having children to mold into loyal soldiers. Instead, he is an old soldier tasked with the soul crushing task of training children for war. Through his interactions with Dionysus and with the queen, his eyes are opened to what is real and what is propaganda. He doesn’t change as a person, but eventually he chooses himself as the structure upon which he built his life and his identity is nothing but government-manufactured danger supported by religious zeal.
I enjoyed this book but the middle dragged on and on. I am satisfied with the ending, but the conclusion was tainted by the twisting path it took to arrive there. If you are going to read Natasha Pulley, I recommend starting with something else.
TW: Throughout the book, Phaidros fantasizes of dying.