Reviewed by Stephanie Williams
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| Bust of Nefertiti, Nofretete Neues Museum |
My source was a wonderful historical novel by someone like Mary Renault, who I was devouring at the time — but it wasn’t … whatever the book was, it is long gone, leaving me with an enduring fascination with Egypt. Last year, I was lucky enough to float down the Nile to see the Valley of the Kings and the temple of Karnak at Luxor — where, in the days when it was ancient Thebes, Nefertiti may once have walked.
‘Fair of face, great of charm,’ Nefertiti represented the female element of creation, while her husband was a living god — their source, the sun, worshipped by holding up a disc to the sun. Through your prayers to them, you would have access to the true god. Together Akhenaten and Nefertiti overhauled the state’s religion, based on a pantheon of gods and their henchmen. The king’s feet never touched the earth, their whole life, from daily worship, to the marital bed was a religious act.
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| A house altar showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three of their daughters. 18th dynasty, reign of Akhenaten |
After 17 years, Akhenaten died. What happened to Nefertiti afterwards is a matter of dispute. Did Nefertiti rule briefly as a female pharaoh? Oversee the kingdom as regent? Akenhaten’s son – DNA testing suggest Nefertiti was not his mother -- was the legendary child pharaoh, Tutankhamun, whose golden sarcophagus has entranced millions around the globe. He repudiated his father’s sun worship, and reinstated the old gods.
When did she die? One thing is certain, despite generations of strenuous efforts, her tomb has never been found.
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Archaeologist Dr Lucie Fitzgerald has travelled to the Lebanon in March 1975, to visit her dying mother, Polly. Beirut is emptying; it is the eve of the civil war. Polly, whose life has been consumed breeding Arabian horses on a farm west of Cairo, and after the war, outside Beirut, knows that it is time to tell her daughter the truth about her close friendship with Lucie’s godmother, Juno Munro.
The narrative weaves back and forth between 1975 Beirut and 1939 Cairo and the Valley of the Kings where Juno, an archaeologist, is part of a team searching for the tomb of Nefertiti. Juno has a particular gift for recording hieroglyphs and scenes from the walls of the tombs they uncover. Disaster intervenes, war descends on Egypt, the dig is closed. Thirty-five years later, Lucie too is on the track of Nefertiti’s tomb. Professor Brandt, who oversaw Juno’s dig, turns up at Lucie’s lecture on the myth of Osiris in London on the eve of her departure for Cairo. And we wonder...
But the centre of the action is Egypt, and the louche life of the European communities in Cairo at the outbreak of the Second World War. It is a period which Olivia Manning brought so vividly to life in The Levant Trilogy, later turned into The Fortunes of War, a BBC series from 1987, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson – still out there on DVD.
Manning, of course, had lived what she wrote. Kate Lord Brown has absorbed Egypt. The details of how you run a dig. That as a pre-war archaeologist you draw, not trace hieroglyphs. The scent of rosewater, sandalwood, men smoking shisha, coloured glass, carab rings, the golden light at sunset. Dust. She’s good on horses, the backstreets of Cairo, the old clubs and the Mena House and the vanished quarter of Ezbekiyya. But I wished for more of a sense of war-time tension.
This is a quick fun read, full of romance, the friendship of women, mysteries and tragedies. Love and desire: Polly and Fitz, Juno and Max, Lucie and her handsome Australian, David. At its heart is the secret on which Lucie’s life turns.
Take it on holiday and enjoy.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Stephanie Williams is the author of Olga’s Story, and Running the Show, The extraordinary stories of the men who governed the British Empire. Her latest book, The Education of Girls, will be published in the US on 23 May and in the UK later this year. For more see www.stephanie-williams.com and https://stephaniewilliamswrites.substack.com/