There is no historical reality for the novelist to attempt to reconstruct (or, when there is, it’s seen through the limited perspective of these time travellers and their cloistered offspring, so the depiction is realistically fragmented and incoherent) the City is created out of bits and pieces from across time by its founders, just as the noveIist created it, and any apparent confusion or inauthenticity can be attributed to its origins. Moreover, the City is utopian in the sense that it is ou-topos, no place (how far it’s also eu-topos, good place, is up for discussion). The Just City is new to all the different narrators at different times, and so it is perfectly natural for them to offer lots of description and exposition, and for some characters to explain things to others, as opposed to weird internal monologues where a character ruminates on an aspect of his or her society that would normally be taken entirely for granted. I’m sure it isn’t actually this bad, but you get the idea). There is none of the desperate need to show off all the research and establish the pastness of the past, even at the expense of the narrative (I always think of the opening of Colleen McCullough’s The First Man In Rome, which in my memory runs something like “Gaius Julius Caesar carefully arranged the heavy woollen folds of his toga, with the broad purple stripe that showed he was a member of the Senate, the supreme governing body of Rome, made up of the most powerful, distinguished and wealthy men of the great city, unlike the togas with narrow purple stripes that his sons wore to show that they were not yet etc etc”. One of the reasons this is a neat trick from the novelist’s point of view is that it side-steps most of the boring questions of authenticity that bedevil most fictional engagements with the classical world. In theory (again), this farrago will be held together by a shared dedication to the ideals of Plato’s Republic, whether voluntary (the generation of Masters brought together from across time and space) or instilled (the Children and their descendents). Time-travelling Athene gathers together a bunch of dedicated Platonists from across the following 2500-odd years, helps them collect children and works of art from a more restricted period (unaccountably, no one bothers collecting some Canova or Alma-Tadema), gives them some robots from the future for the heavy work, and dumps the whole lot back in the bronze age, where (in theory) they’re not going to disturb anyone else. Walton’s work is a mash-up: of genres, most obviously, with elements of science fiction (time travel and robots), fantasy (gods), historical fiction (recreation of past society) and the novel of ideas – but also of temporalities.
However, I had far more things to say than would fit comfortably into a more or less coherent blog post, and so I’m going to take this opportunity to try to persuade sceptical historians, ancient or otherwise, that they should be just as interested in a fictional exploration of Platonic political philosophy, its limits and its implications. My contribution reflects on the books as meditations on different aspects of the classical tradition, and I would hope that most visitors to this blog with an interest in classical reception will need little persuasion to take a look at them. Crooked Timber is running an online book seminar about Jo Walton’s ‘Thessaly’ novels, The Just City and The Philosopher Kings, and the main aim of this post is to point you in that direction forthwith.
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