Laurie ODell –
Ralph Lanyon –
Andrew Raynes –
Mrs. Odell – (Lindsay Duncan) –
Reg Barker –
Alec Deacon –
Sandy Reid –
Bunny
Dave the Quaker CO orderlies Supervisor –
Nurse Adrian –
Derek the Quaker CO orderly –
Charlot the French soldier
Willis the Missing Link –
Mrs Chivers – (Imelda Staunton)
Major Ferguson –
Neames –
Mr. Straike –
Night Sister –
Nurse Sims –
Bim Taylor –
Miss Haliburton the physiotherapist

I only have two actors in mind for two female roles right now, so I need help from other fans of the book.

Don’t worry, I have never given up on the modern novels. I didn’t love Middle Mist, but I absolutely adore The Charioteer. The Charioteer is the one of Mary Renault’s modern novels that is in my permanent rereading rotation. I’ve reread it a dozen times since the first time. You thought it ended tragically? I thought it ended — not WELL, but medium well. Well with compromises.

I think the best of the romances that I’ve read so far was Middle Mist (aka The Friendly Young Ladies). Leo, one of the heroines (and much better than the sappy Ellie, her sister and the beginning heroine who is nauseous–truly), is awesome and is in a kind of open-ended relationship with another awesome woman, and they both have their own careers. The ending is tragic, but only because Leo’s gonna toss all that to the wind & go off with… well, you gotta read it!

I did think that Kind Were Her Answers was sort of awful, along the lines specified; so don’t give up on the modern novels until you at least read Middle Mist and Charioteer, is my advice! 🙂

The Charioteer is really, really, really good. Not depressing! Or anyway I didn’t think it was depressing. It’s about a metaphorical charioteer.

The order in which I read her books was completely accidental and botched, but worked out uncannily well. I discovered Renault in high school with “Funeral Games.” I then read “The Nature of Alexander,” because it was the only other book of hers in the library, then “Persian Boy” which I had to order from a different library, THEN “Fire from Heaven.” In retrospect I read the Alexander series completely backwards. But it actually made for a pretty cool effect, in that I started with his legacy, then met the man himself, and finally learned what made him.

It’s like when you hear everyone around you humming fragments of a song you’ve never heard. Or relatives telling stories about a grandparent you’ve never met. When you finally encounter the real thing, it’s so much fuller and richer than you could have ever imagined.

They aren’t exactly romances. They’re too depressing to be romances. They are more just…Novels. With a capital N. And they happen to have (weird, dysfunctional) romances in them. :/

I never knew she wrote romances as well, these books sound really awful. Your review reminds me of those milky Denise Robbins books that I used to read as a teenager. Uggh!

The Bull from the Sea is the second in a series, and it’s not my favorite series. Read Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy. She’s very very strong on Alexander the Great (though she has been accused of having a crush on him).