Product Description

This title is the first in a series of five novels chronicling the life of Egypt's greatest pharoah, Ramses II. The story opens with Ramses aged 14 years. His father, Sethi, has created a powerful empire and favours Ramses as his successor, rather than Ramses' scheming older brother, Chenar.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55216 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-30
• Original language: French
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 368 pages

Customer Reviews

fairly exciting, but annoylingly shallow
...By describing ancient Egypt in a literary style, Christian Jacq has made this history instantly accessible and fun. The plot is engaging enough to allow accurate details regarding religious beliefs, mythology and geography to sink in effortlessly. But Jacq is incapable of building plausible characters of any depth. Ramses is just *too* perfect, and other characters are just too simplistic, sticking rigidly to wholly unrealistic models of behaviour. Moses has his spiritual unfulfilment, Ahmeni his tirelessness, Setau his down-to-earthness, but each alone is only two dimensional. Even though Jacq pays brief lip service to the importance of the roles played by women in ancient Egypt, this knowledge is not borne out by the female characters, whose important lies only in that they provide inspiration and sexual pleasure for men, and in a very cliched manner (e.g. chapters often end with the beginning of love-making). In fact, Jacq has allowed his own subjective ideas regarding women and beauty to alienate and spoil his female characters for his audience. As an Egyptian who sees real beauty in the proud and independent North African woman, I was disappointed to find that all his heroines, in addition to being submissive, had fair skin, fair hair, and blue or green eyes (i.e. they're European, like Jacq). Even a quick glance through papyri portraits of ancient Egyptian women shows that such features were not the norm and certainly were not fundamental to any Egyptian definition of beauty. If you want to experience something of romantic North Africa, ancient or modern, the Ramses series (and especially the later volumes) won't be much help.

I don't understand what all the fuss is about
This is the only Christian Jacq book I have read, and it's probably going to stay that way. I thought it was badly written (or, to be fair, perhaps just badly translated), with a plot as thin as the paper it's written on, and very contrived set pieces that rely on things like magic (just because Egyptians thought their pharaohs were gods, it doesn't mean that they actually were) and characters suddenly clutching their chests and dropping dead when the author has written himself into a tight spot.

The characters are wholly two dimensional - they all fall into either the 'good guy' or 'bad guy' camp in a very black and white manner. Each character tends to have one defining characteristic, and no other depth to them whatsoever. The character of Ramses goes through so many arbitrary changes with no reasoning or plot behind them that he was totally unbelievable as a person. I just didn't care whether he succeeded or not.

If it was publicised as purely a work of fiction it would be a bit more readable, but the really annoying thing with this book is that it purports to be the true life story of the pharaoh, leading the reader to believe that Ramses had an evil elder brother called Shanaar (he didn't), that Homer wrote the Iliad in Ramses back garden (he didn't) or that Moses was a close childhood friend of the pharaoh (very dubious indeed).

If you're going to write a novel set in ancient Egypt, you need to do more research than flicking through the Boy's Own Book of the Middle East, and at least try to find out how many Egyptian women have blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skins. Not many, but Jacq hasn't even bothered to get that fairly fundamental background material correct. Everything else is researched just as badly.

In short, if you're looking for a good, accurate, pacy historical novel, look elsewhere. If you read and enjoy this one, fair enough, but PLEASE don't think you've learned anything from it.

About as historical as Carry on Cleo
How to write a historical blockbuster: start off with cardboard-thin characters and a central hero who is just a compendium of noble virtues, and a few female characters - just for eye candy. Add a wafer thin plot about a non-existent evil brother and a lame subplot about watered-down ink supplies (who cares?) and you're almost there. Now stir in plenty of historical gaffes and rope in a few characters from myth and history who could not possibly have been alive at the time (eg Homer who lived a full 500 years later than the time of this book). Finally finish the book before the hero becomes Pharaoh so the reader has to buy the next volume in order to complete the story of the first! If you're interested in historical fiction then try Manfredi's far superior Alexander (which he manages to fit into 3 volumes) or something by Mary Renault.