How could I resist this title when came across it as I shuffled through a box of my great grandparent's books? My mother had tagged it as one 'to go to the market'. It was no classic that would be worth hanging onto in case someone might want to read it one day; just an obscure old book without even any redeeming prettiness to save it from the reject box. But for me the title straight away conjured up some strange curiosity. Add to that the aristocratic author. And then, inside, the name of my great grandmother; - this is another part of the story.
I've often felt unwilling to talk about the books I've read because I've felt like it gives away a little too much. There, between the covers must lie something with the power to talk to others about me - what I like, what I respond to emotionally, what I might think about or be curious about. And all this just seems a little too intimate.
But, when it comes to opening a window on someone else it's another matter entirely. Here was a window on the inner world of my great grandmother. Known within the family without a great deal of affection, she was, nonetheless, an accomplished artist, perhaps best known for a badly attributed painting of 'the Governer's wife' in the Allport Museum in Hobart. Well, painting that could have been the only thing saving her from historic oblivion, as, like innumerable other 'accomplished artists' most of her work was more about keeping food on the table and the home fires burning, rather than pursuing some creative vision. Which is not to say the other paintings were poor. They include portraits, still lives and scenes of the landscapes of south-east Tasmania. Those I have seen are sensitively rendered and rich in atmosphere, light and feeling.
So what about the 'Gods Beloved'? Nowhere could be further from the moist, peppermint scented woodlands of Tasmania than the golden sands of Egypt, but what a vivid, wonderful dream. A dream from another moist and verdant land, of the exotic other, and a dream for the dissatisfied dreamers of the 'fin de siecle', of the ouija board rooms, and the followers of Madam Blavatsky. For eyes accustomed to dim light that seek out the spark of another world made manifest. Maybe just for the bored.
By the Gods Beloved certainly rises to the task of entertaining. From schoolboy England the reader is swept into a desert furnace where the humble matey clay is fired into a hero of lordly stature, with glancing blue Aryan eyes, and his observant Friday. Together these two follow ancient directions across the broiling desert, and only when they arrive at the brink of death, are they reborn into a secret world where the ancient Egyptians live on, their culture with all its sensual exoticism still intact. Who better for the lordly Englishman than a beautiful Egyptian Queen, the culmination of schoolboy fantasies of Cleopatra and her Antony.
As the story evolves the reader is immersed in a rich and beautiful landscape of fresh springs, sunshine, lotus flowers and cool marble palaces. We take a short, tantalising tour, before we are forced to flee, with our hero back to the safety and sense of the 'green and pleasant land'. But what fun the adventure has been. For a short while the world does seem to shift and myth and magic become possible, the dreamer dreams.
When we dream, it can be hard to awake and step back down into the mundane, everyday world, of children and cooking, sheep and vegetables. We'd prefer to rest in the laudanum light of dreams.
Notes
- Baroness Orczy may not be as unknown as she was to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroness_Emma_Orczy
- Great-grandmother Mildred Stonehouse: http://tascommunities.org.au/mildreds.html
- Who's Blavatsky? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky
