It may seem unfair to pull apart books written to entertain rather than to inform seriously or be great literature; but fictions are useful for understanding the Akhenaten myth. They serve and renew a widespread popular interest in the past which is not satisfied by scholarly books. Most of the novels are formulaic and caught up in contemporaneity, but this contemporaneity illustrates how different aspects of Akhenaten have more appeal at particular historical moments, and so how the legend can be perpetually reconfigured. In the novels written during and immediately after the First World War, for instance, Akhenaten the pacifist is the dominant figure, sometimes combining with a Spiritualist Akhenaten who offers alternatives to a Christianity unable to cope with the flood of bereavement caused by the war. During the Cold War and in the post-Watergate 1970s, the events at Amarna became the stuff of political thrillers about corruption and espionage. In the 1980s and 1990s, Akhenaten becomes more explicitly eroticised, a figure of sexual deviance or fevered excess. Most of these works seem to be individual responses born out of an interest in the period and its events. The most original ones were written either before many facts were known about Akhenaten, or where the authors have not tried to be historically authentic. Realist novels about ancient Egypt do not work, perhaps because the novel was a genre of literature which the Egyptians did not have. The best historical novels are those which adopt in some way narrative structures of the time they describe - think of Robert Graves' brilliant use of the format of Latin annalistic history writing in /, Claudius — or which abandon narrative realism altogether, as Marguerite Youreenar did in her superb Memoirs of Hadrian.
In Philip Larkin's autobiographical novel Jill (1946), a schoolmaster spends an evening marking thirty schoolboys' essays on 'The Supernatural in Macbeth'. It was a dull evening: thirty boys with the same resources and knowledge produce thirty very similar essays. Reading forty novels about Akhenaten is a similar experience. They all include, for instance, a 'hymn' to the Aten scene, where the writers give themselves an opportunity to quote or adapt Breasted's very biblical- sounding translation: it would be possible to write a slim volume on literary reworkings of the 'hymn' to the Aten alone. Likewise, there are always tender daily life in the palacc scenes, often set in the princesses' nursery or at a royal banquet. Most writers, particularly post-1920s, arc reliant on a very few central texts (Breasted and Weigall, later Velikovsky) and, even more, artworks. The relief from Huya's tomb of the royal family (Figure 6.1), the Berlin stela showing Akhenaten and Nefertiti with their daughters (see Plate 6.1a), are described again and again. This is partly because the art itself is the first stimulus for the writer's interest. Tom Holland, author of the Amarna-bascd novel Sleeper in the Sands, told me in 1997 that the trigger for writing it was going to Egypt for the first time and seeing the Amarna room in the Cairo Museum. Even with the wealth of material there, 'the Amarna stuff struck me as being the strangest and most unsettling, the most provocative artwork that I'd seen, and I was intrigued to know what could have produced such extraordinary sculptures'. He added, 'I wanted to keep that [strangeness], I didn't want to have it frozen out by erudite discussions about the representation of the Pharaoh as godhead.'1 Not all writers have deployed it as subtly or intelligently as Holland, however. Some novels are virtually extended descriptions of canonical scenes or objects, strung together with dialogue. The strangeness of Amarna art which inspires writers in the first place often stultifies the literary imagination rather than liberating it.
Authors of historical fiction have no other option than to rely on their primary sources. But other historical novelists have written effective and original novels about the ancient world without fixating on material culture - Mary Renault, Gore Vidal, Jack Lindsay, as well as Robert Graves and Marguerite Yourcenar, for instance. Amarna art often works better as a metaphor than as a real physical backdrop. In her 1926 poetic novella Palimpsest, the American imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (better known as H. D.) repeatedly compared the exotic beauty of the Jewish heroine, Ermy Solomon, to the bust of Nefertiti. The next year, in the Clark Lectures on the novel at Cambridge, E. M. Forster used Amarna art as a comparison with the ultimate gloominess of Henry James' fiction. James' 'maimed creatures' are like 'the exquisite deformities that appear in Egyptian art under Akhnaton - all heads and no legs, but nevertheless charming'.2
