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sophia_sol) wrote2018-05-02 07:34 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-05-02 07:34 pm
The Beacon at Alexandria, by Gillian Bradshaw
I read this book once before, back in 2009, the very first year I started writing down a list of all the books I read. It was one of my favourite books that year! And I've thought of it fondly on and off since then, and then suddenly this year I was like....was that book really as good as I remember? So I decided to get my hands on a copy and reread it.
Friends, I am happy to tell you that this book is EVERY BIT as good as I remembered.
It's historical fiction, set in the 4th century in the Roman Empire, and features a young woman named Charis who really really really wants to be a doctor. So she runs away to Alexandria and pretends to be a eunuch so that she can study medicine.
She's intimidated at first because she doesn't know what the heck she's doing, but she eventually finds her way and everything is great! For a while. She makes friends, she has a super great doctor acting as her teacher and she becomes part of his family, she loves the city of Alexandria, she accidentally becomes the go-to physician for the local church head (archdeacon? Something? I don't remember the specifics anymore. Important at any rate), she learns lots and is professionally satisfied with her job of helping to heal people.
But....It's the 4th century roman empire. Things are going generally downhill at this point. There's a lot of inter-church conflict and she's a liiiiittle too politically noticeable because of her well-known church patient so after he dies she gets sent away to be an army doctor in Thrace.
Which sucks at first for her because a) she misses Alexandria and b) the doctors she's working with are total quacks who don't trust her fancy newfangled ways and keep on doing things that lead to the death of their patients. But she works things out and becomes very happy and professionally satisfied in her new job too!
But....It's the 4th century roman empire. Things continue to go downhill! There's constant war, the Goths and the Huns are invading and the Romans aren't doing too good a job at turning them back, and she gets captured by the local Gothic king and finally the secret comes out that she's actually a woman.
So she can't really run away to go be a male doctor in the Roman empire anymore because news travels, and given what a close watch is kept on her (she's a very valuable prisoner because she is such a good doctor!) she wouldn't be able to run away anyway.
But then her love interest shows up and rescues her and the two of them confirm that indeed they like each other, and he'll allow her to establish her own hospital as his wife so everything's fine in the end - she will get to embody all the parts of her identity at once instead of always needing to repudiate something: she can be a doctor AND a woman AND a roman.
Okay, look, the romance is the one part that doesn't quite work for me. I mean it's fine! But I never felt like I really understood the love interest, or got the appeal of him. It is clear throughout the book that Charis is strongly interested in love and sex and marriage and children, but knew that if she wanted to be a doctor she couldn't have them and to her being a doctor was more important, so I'm happy for her that she gets to have everything she wants. And yet.....eh.
Also: she's super going to miss the degree of independence that she's used to as a man, and although she's clear earlier in the book that she's not interested in going back to a woman's constrained social role (even with the slightly greater freedom allowed a married woman), by the end apparently she's fine with it? Maybe it's just that it looks better in comparison with having been a literal prisoner for years.
Anyway, whatever, EVERYTHING ELSE about this book is 100% A+. The characterization, the groundedness in the world of the time, the character interrelationships, the medical stuff, etc, etc, all super good.
(My only other complaint: I always want crossdressing-for-plot-reasons fiction to be more queer than it ever ends up textually being, sigh. And I had such high hopes for this one being at least able to be read as genderqueer given Charis's feelings about being so divorced from her feminine appearance at the very beginning of the book, but the rest of the book goes on to make it clear that Charis does definitively want to be a woman.)
Some details I particularly loved:
1. Charis crossdresses as a eunuch specifically, which I have never seen elsewhere in crossdressing fiction. But it makes a lot of sense: it provides an explanation for her feminine features and voice, and an excuse for her unusual-for-the-time sense of modesty, not ever wanting to be undressed in front of anyone else. And I love how this also makes her experience as a man more complicated, because people treat eunuchs differently than other men: there are a lot of negative assumptions and stereotypes, and she has to deal with a fair amount of prejudice as a result. And yet being seen as a eunuch is still vastly more freeing for her than to be a woman.
2. The religion stuff! It's messy and complicated and kind of nasty sometimes and feels so, so real. This is set in a period before the Arian heresy was officially deemed a heresy, and so there's church infighting and it's not clear at the time whether the Arian or Nicene ideas will win out. Plus also there's non-Christian religions as well, like a fairly large Jewish population in Alexandria at the time. Who are pretty awfully discriminated against (eg the monastery hospital doesn't like the idea of accepting patients from a Jewish doctor, even if the Jewish doctor's patients are Christian), but are still holding their own. There's no comfortable homogeneity of belief here. Religion matters, and people care deeply about it, and do pretty awful things to each other over it, but at the same time there can be instances of deep compassion and friendship across religious boundaries - like Charis and her Jewish doctor teacher who basically adopts her into his family.
3. How deeply Charis feels like she doesn't know or understand enough about the human body and human ailments, that although she's doing the best she can with the best education of the time she knows there ought to be more that's possible. But she IS doing the best she can, and is truly helping people with the knowledge she has, even if she mourns that there isn't more she can do.
4. Charis's passion for Hippocrates, and the loving teasing she gets about it from the people she knows. It's just so charming!
5. Charis personally owns SIXTY-THREE BOOKS in an era before the printing press, and all but one are medical texts, I love her so much
And now I need to seek out other stuff that Gillian Bradshaw has written, because somehow the last time I read this book I never thought to do that? But she's written a LOT more historical fiction and I bet it's all pretty great too!!
Friends, I am happy to tell you that this book is EVERY BIT as good as I remembered.
It's historical fiction, set in the 4th century in the Roman Empire, and features a young woman named Charis who really really really wants to be a doctor. So she runs away to Alexandria and pretends to be a eunuch so that she can study medicine.
She's intimidated at first because she doesn't know what the heck she's doing, but she eventually finds her way and everything is great! For a while. She makes friends, she has a super great doctor acting as her teacher and she becomes part of his family, she loves the city of Alexandria, she accidentally becomes the go-to physician for the local church head (archdeacon? Something? I don't remember the specifics anymore. Important at any rate), she learns lots and is professionally satisfied with her job of helping to heal people.
But....It's the 4th century roman empire. Things are going generally downhill at this point. There's a lot of inter-church conflict and she's a liiiiittle too politically noticeable because of her well-known church patient so after he dies she gets sent away to be an army doctor in Thrace.
Which sucks at first for her because a) she misses Alexandria and b) the doctors she's working with are total quacks who don't trust her fancy newfangled ways and keep on doing things that lead to the death of their patients. But she works things out and becomes very happy and professionally satisfied in her new job too!
But....It's the 4th century roman empire. Things continue to go downhill! There's constant war, the Goths and the Huns are invading and the Romans aren't doing too good a job at turning them back, and she gets captured by the local Gothic king and finally the secret comes out that she's actually a woman.
So she can't really run away to go be a male doctor in the Roman empire anymore because news travels, and given what a close watch is kept on her (she's a very valuable prisoner because she is such a good doctor!) she wouldn't be able to run away anyway.
But then her love interest shows up and rescues her and the two of them confirm that indeed they like each other, and he'll allow her to establish her own hospital as his wife so everything's fine in the end - she will get to embody all the parts of her identity at once instead of always needing to repudiate something: she can be a doctor AND a woman AND a roman.
Okay, look, the romance is the one part that doesn't quite work for me. I mean it's fine! But I never felt like I really understood the love interest, or got the appeal of him. It is clear throughout the book that Charis is strongly interested in love and sex and marriage and children, but knew that if she wanted to be a doctor she couldn't have them and to her being a doctor was more important, so I'm happy for her that she gets to have everything she wants. And yet.....eh.
Also: she's super going to miss the degree of independence that she's used to as a man, and although she's clear earlier in the book that she's not interested in going back to a woman's constrained social role (even with the slightly greater freedom allowed a married woman), by the end apparently she's fine with it? Maybe it's just that it looks better in comparison with having been a literal prisoner for years.
Anyway, whatever, EVERYTHING ELSE about this book is 100% A+. The characterization, the groundedness in the world of the time, the character interrelationships, the medical stuff, etc, etc, all super good.
(My only other complaint: I always want crossdressing-for-plot-reasons fiction to be more queer than it ever ends up textually being, sigh. And I had such high hopes for this one being at least able to be read as genderqueer given Charis's feelings about being so divorced from her feminine appearance at the very beginning of the book, but the rest of the book goes on to make it clear that Charis does definitively want to be a woman.)
Some details I particularly loved:
1. Charis crossdresses as a eunuch specifically, which I have never seen elsewhere in crossdressing fiction. But it makes a lot of sense: it provides an explanation for her feminine features and voice, and an excuse for her unusual-for-the-time sense of modesty, not ever wanting to be undressed in front of anyone else. And I love how this also makes her experience as a man more complicated, because people treat eunuchs differently than other men: there are a lot of negative assumptions and stereotypes, and she has to deal with a fair amount of prejudice as a result. And yet being seen as a eunuch is still vastly more freeing for her than to be a woman.
2. The religion stuff! It's messy and complicated and kind of nasty sometimes and feels so, so real. This is set in a period before the Arian heresy was officially deemed a heresy, and so there's church infighting and it's not clear at the time whether the Arian or Nicene ideas will win out. Plus also there's non-Christian religions as well, like a fairly large Jewish population in Alexandria at the time. Who are pretty awfully discriminated against (eg the monastery hospital doesn't like the idea of accepting patients from a Jewish doctor, even if the Jewish doctor's patients are Christian), but are still holding their own. There's no comfortable homogeneity of belief here. Religion matters, and people care deeply about it, and do pretty awful things to each other over it, but at the same time there can be instances of deep compassion and friendship across religious boundaries - like Charis and her Jewish doctor teacher who basically adopts her into his family.
3. How deeply Charis feels like she doesn't know or understand enough about the human body and human ailments, that although she's doing the best she can with the best education of the time she knows there ought to be more that's possible. But she IS doing the best she can, and is truly helping people with the knowledge she has, even if she mourns that there isn't more she can do.
4. Charis's passion for Hippocrates, and the loving teasing she gets about it from the people she knows. It's just so charming!
5. Charis personally owns SIXTY-THREE BOOKS in an era before the printing press, and all but one are medical texts, I love her so much
And now I need to seek out other stuff that Gillian Bradshaw has written, because somehow the last time I read this book I never thought to do that? But she's written a LOT more historical fiction and I bet it's all pretty great too!!
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