Gilgamesh the King (Robert Silverberg)

Gilgamesh the King
Robert Silverberg
Open Road Media
Fiction, Fantasy/Historical Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: King, hero, god... there are many names for Gilgamesh, highest of high kings of the great city of Uruk at the center of the world. Here, in his waning years, he sets down his own story, from a childhood where he first learned to hate and fear death through his rise to the crown, his tumultuous relationship with the gods and the high priestess of the goddess Inanna, the finding of a true friend in the wildman Enkidu, and his grief-stricken wanderings in search of immortality.

REVIEW: Silverberg puts a historical fiction spin on one of the oldest tales known (if in fragmentary form), the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the ancient Middle East. While a real king of that name is presumed to have existed from other records of the time, around him has grown up a myth cycle reminiscent of later half-divine heroes such as Hercules. Silverberg does a decent job fleshing out the basic tale with decently realized characters and action and details, creating a reasonably cohesive arc. The world he inhabits comes to life in many vivid details about the lands, the cities, the peoples, and the beliefs and customs. I'm not educated enough to know how historically accurate these details may be (or were as of the time it was written in 1984), but they create a solid world for the tale to unfold in, and a solid foundation for Gilgamesh's triumphs and failures, his worldview and senses of right and wrong. Here, elements of the supernatural and the presence of gods and demons are taken as a matter of course, though their presence is often just ambiguous enough to invite some skepticism over whether there actually is spiritual influence or if Gilgamesh and his companions are reading their own beliefs into otherwise natural events; some things clearly appear to be natural phenomena, while others aren't quite so easily explained. From his childhood, watching the funeral of his royal father, the boy who would be Gilgamesh vows to never let death defeat him; since he is two parts divine and only one part mortal (or so he has been told, and his unnatural size and strength seem to confirm), he considers this an entirely plausible goal. This ambition and assumption of ultimate divine victory shape his personality from the start. Along the way, he must regain the throne that was handed to an unworthy successor after his father's passing, enduring through years of exile and dealing with the plots and scheming of an ambitious priestess who may or may not be backed by the power of a goddess. He must also come to terms with the mortality of his subjects, whom he pushes to the point of tyranny with his semidivine ambitions and his lusts until he finds a worthy match for his energies in wild Enkidu. Though the story sometimes bogs down and Gilgamesh can be rather self-absorbed and a bit slow on the uptake at times, it moves decently as he faces various challenges and struggles to either overcome them or gain wisdom from them (as in his quest for a way to evade death).
Where this story lost a half-star was partly due to the occasional sense of dithering but also due to the fact that, to be mild, this was clearly written by a man. Gilgamesh is almost a caricature of a manly man at times, the problems with his rule stemming from him being so perfect and so full of testosterone that no mere mortal can hope to keep up with him. His sexual exploits in particular are detailed and somewhat boastful throughout the tale. Women, meanwhile, are best when they are mild-mannered and stay in their place well behind (or pliantly underneath) men; both the priestess and the goddess Inanna are shrewish, petty, grasping, backstabbing, power-hungry vixens who threaten to destroy everything in the name of vengeance, utterly corrupted by their power. The priestess herself suffers most because she falls in love with a man who, through custom and her vows to her goddess, she can never truly marry and can only know pleasure with ritualistically once a year; yes, Gilgamesh is such a perfect specimen of masculinity that even a priestess falls hopelessly in love with him, and would rather see the world burn than admit he must be shared with his people and his kingdom. Clearly, no woman of this world should ever be given any power at all, not when there are manly and masculine men who are far better endowed to handle such things. There's historical accuracy (as interpreted here, at least), and there's stomping the sexism into the reader's face... Add to that some irritation with the way the audiobook reader delivered some of the lines, particularly the ritual incantations, and it was enough to drop the rating just below Good.

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