PANEB THE ARDENT
The Stone of Light III
By Christian Jacq
Simon & Schuster - January 2002
ISBN: 0671773755 - Paperback
Historical Fiction - Ancient Egypt

Reviewed by: Rachel A Hyde, MyShelf.com
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This is the third in Jacq's internationally acclaimed quartet about the mysterious village of craftsmen whose task it is to work on creating tombs for the pharaohs from 1550 BC to 1070 BC. The Place of Truth was also the home of The Stone of Light, a marvelous item that could transform barley into gold - the original Philosopher's Stone. Naturally there are other people who want to get their hands on it, one of whom is the evil General Mehy and his mad wife Serketa who is rather too handy with a bottle of poison. Now Ramses The Great's grandson Seti II is on the throne, his son Amenmessu waits in the wings and civil war seems inevitable as the pair of them both struggle to reign as pharaohs in different parts of Egypt. In the village there is still a traitor on the loose (and we don't know who it is yet) and all sorts of troubles beset Nefer, Paneb and their wives and colleagues but they must ensure that whatever fate throws at them, the work still gets done.

In his earlier novels Jacq's easy prose style made for a fast read but for once this novel was rather wordy and repetitive. I still wonder if Egypt was quite as enlightened as he portrays it. His characters tend to be somewhat two-dimensional; either virtuous heroes or dastardly villains without a lot of shading in between. On the plus side though I commend his use of the "supernatural" as, although the Egyptians attribute all kinds of magical reasons for the things that happen, they can just as easily be explained away as natural phenomena. Neither does Jacq worry about his characters being politically correct, as he knows that people were different then - for example Paneb has a wife and a mistress and they tolerate each other. Thus he rises above the all too common fault of historical novels of modern-thinking people in period costume. The wordiness in this novel dispels the charmingly simple way all his other books were told in as, although this is still the same, the addition of extra verbiage to the bald but colorful text takes away the feeling of reading an ancient folk tale, which is a pity. Still, this is nonetheless likeable and entertaining tale even if it does tend to lose something in translation. I look forward to finding out how it all ends in the fourth and final book in this trilogy, and then reading the new whodunit that Jacq has out later this year.