Honestly – and one must be honest, one must always be honest for without honesty, what is there to a life but artifice and shame? (I mean with honesty there is still shame but at least there’s much less artifice) – I had never heard of the 1988 Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and the only reason I had heard of this book is because my lover read it a few months ago for a book club and left it lying about and also because I went to a small exhibition about the historical event this novel dramatises when I was in Copenhagen for 24 hours in the Spring and-
I was not familiar with Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth (a 1985 Egyptian novel first published in English in this translation (by Tagreid Abu-Hassabo) in 1998) until I read it; I did not know what to expect, other than it is an evocation of the life of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and her (much less name-checked) spouse, Pharaoh Akhenaten, who moved the capital city of Ancient Egypt during their brief reign, a movement that was totally reversed as soon as power was wrested from them.
In the Danish museum exhibition I wandered through, depressed, that location, that new, purpose-built city, was known as Amarna, or The City of the Sun God, though in this book – unless I misremember a day after reading this short novel – it is always given the same name as the young emperor takes following the death of his father, Akhenaten. (No, I was wrong – it is one letter different, i.e. Akhetaten.)
Why a new city? Because the new Pharaoh believed in a new god, a monotheistic god who ruled all and had no need of the pantheon of major and minor gods that the rest of the Egyptians were then worshipping.
Akhenaten started preaching his beliefs – in contrast to established religion – from a young age, to the point where he only really seemed to ascend to the Pharaohship because his daddy died too soon – and too cuntstruck (I haven’t seen that word for a while and tho it was definitely overused about a decade and a half ago – like petrichor – I do kinda miss it sometimes – unlike petrichor) by his latest teenage bride to disinherit him…
Mahfouz’s novel is framed by a narrator who is a generation younger than Nefertiti and her man, who is using his own rich daddy’s connections to investigate – for journalistic posterity, it seems – the circumstances of Akhenaten’s disastrous reign.
This narrator speaks to many people still alive who were in those rooms and those palaces, including priests, guards, politicians, women from the harem, Nefertiti’s parents and then, finally, inevitably, Nefertiti herself, who is living, basically alone, in the now decades-abandoned Akhetaten City complex as the dessert reasserts itself and she waits for a natural death so she can join her preacher-pharoah-husband in the Nether World (death).
Each chapter begins with the narrator detailing who he is meeting and their position in Akhenaten’s court twenty or so years earlier, before switching into (and sometimes briefly out of) first person memorialising from the interviewee… so the novel is composed of testaments, essentially, fictionalised testaments about this rapidly built new city and religion, both of which were both also rapidly abandoned…
There is intentional overlap and disagreement, there is gossip and there is hearsay and there are accusations and there are people being reticent and people being indiscreet. Was Akhenaten shagging his mother but not his wife? Was Nefertiti shagging anyone and everyone? Was the country actually riven by a new religious faith or did everyone just agree with Akhenaten for a bit because he was the guy in charge and then go back to the old ways as soon as there was a coup that shifted power back to people who were friends with the priests? I don’t know.
Of course, it’s a translation, so attributing any nice phrasing to writer or translator in particular is debateable, but the ideas and discussion of societal change and faith and false faith is definitely interesting and articulate.
I don’t know enough about the writer’s personal life and other works to know if he is writing as if a monotheistic religion is more believable than a polytheistic one, or if he is trying to do the opposite and draw attention to the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of all organised religion?
I don’t know and I’ll never know.
But it’s an intriguing read, though not intriguing enough for me to Google Mahfouz or – right now – look up any of his other works.
It’s fine, but it’s a solid 1980s literary historical novel and no better – and no worse – than that implies. If you like that kinda thing, you’ll prob’ly like this!
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Triumph Of The Now 
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