Note: The theme for book club for June was Myths and Legends Retold, and - as a group - we chose Cleopatra.
Interestingly, most of us stated that we went into reading this book with very little knowledge about Cleopatra. We had no opinions, few of us had even watched the Elizabeth Taylor film, we knew about Marc Anthony being the love of her life, we had no clue she existed in the same time period as Julius Caesar, let alone had a child with him.
Cleopatra was a book that promised us big things. It promised to show us a side to the Egyptian Queen that we had never seen before. It promised to prove that our Historians were incorrect in their assumptions, and that we had been mislead.
I, for one, was excited to explore what Cleopatra was really like.
Now, don't get me wrong, I definitely didn't go into reading this book expecting definitive answers, because no one will ever know what she was really like. However, given the Author's Note at the beginning alongside the extensive research that she had put into the book, I was expecting some educated guesses.
I really expected her to be portrayed as a badass.
Instead, I was a little disappointed.
You can clearly tell that El-Arifi has done a lot of research into the possibility of what happened throughout her life. However, it does feel a little like an A Level student hopping from one big life-event to another.
There's a section towards the end of the book where Cleopatra states that very little is known about this specific time-period, and it drifts around what is known. However, it feels like El-Arifi has forgotten the promise she made at the beginning: to tell us Cleopatra's side of the story, and forgive me for assuming that Cleopatra would 100% know what her own story is.
I appreciate that this was probably intended as a historically accurate piece, but honestly, considering the ending (I'll get to that in a moment!), I think it would have been perfectly acceptable to use some creative licensing here.
I desperately wanted the author to make some stuff up, but nope, we'll just gloss over it.
SPOILER ALERT
And then, it turns out that the "gift from the gods" wasn't a gift after all, but a curse, and whilst it does answer A LOT of questions I had, it also raises the enormous questions of...if El-Arifi was happy to add this nice little twist of fantasy at the end, why did she not add more zest to her story?
I genuinely wanted to enjoy this book, and it did get a little more interesting when Julius Caesar came into the story, but I just didn't feel that Cleopatra was portrayed as the bad ass she was promised to be.
Any callous decisions she made, were normally made because someone pushed her into doing it. She was constantly trying to get us to believe she wasn't weak, but you can understand why Historians might have felt that way.
I wanted her to be fearless. To stand up for herself.
She constantly talked about how she was Egypt, and how much good she was doing for Egypt, but it felt more like delusion.
Perhaps that was the point?
Overall, as a group, we all agreed that we enjoyed Cleopatra to a point, however, we wanted more from it. Like, this is a great first draft, but now we need to author to pad it out with a bit more substance.
At 300-odd pages this was still a hefty book, but we all agreed it should have been at least 200 more.