We learn, in [the 709 large pages of "Ancient Evenings"], a great number of things. Most of all we learn how much Egyptology Mailer has learned in the past 10 years. Gold mining, magical ceremonies, priests and eunuchs and concubines, the moods of the Nile, crocodiles, the character of Queen Nefertiti and her son Amen-khep-shu-ef—the whole of ancient Egypt is set before us, complete with its odours and its sexual ecstasies, these two last being given about equal billing. And the secret of power, which the book is chiefly about? This lies in magic, and magic is essentially control of the lower human functions. In a word, magic is anal.

The anus is here sometimes called the ass or the asshole. This is a pity. The word should be arse, which has an ancient ancestry, whereas ass is an Americanism of puritanic provenance. A pity because a novel about ancient Egypt must not sound as though it is written by an American, and this is the only verbal area where Mailer's careful stylistic neutrality breaks down. It is the most difficult thing in the world for the speaker of a new language to mimic an old one, and Mailer has, for the most part, done admirably. Never (except for ass and, I would say, cock) is there a breath of anachronism, but the timelessness of the narrative idiom, avoiding slang, Freudianisms, and various forms of hindsight knowingness, inevitably bores a little until it flares into lurid life with cannibalism and buggery….

Clearly, Mailer has not spent 10 difficult years on a difficult book in order to demonstrate his skill, not previously disclosed, as a writer of historical fiction. If I can achieve a second, or third, reading of 'Ancient Evenings,' I may be prepared to name it as the best reconstruction of an ancient world since Flaubert's Salammbô, but Mailer does not want that kind of praise. His concern is with the modern world, with the psychic problems of modern America above all, and he considers that these problems may find a solution through an understanding of the repressed areas of sexuality, with the reality of magic. Our own rationality has failed. Here, he seems to say, is a complex civilisation of high achievement based on the irrational, on the radial power of a magic whose centre is both decay and resurrection.

He justifies himself with an epigraph from Yeats's 'Ideas of Good and Evil,' in which the poet, always a dangerous thinker, expresses his belief in the evocation of spirits and ends by asserting 'that the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind … and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.' Mailer finds his spirits in the gods of Egypt and the power of intercourse between minds in the Egyptian doctrines of death. He also finds, in his imagined world of a post-Mosaic Pharaoh, a location for his own anal obsessions…. Strange that, nearly 10 years ago, some of us could believe that Mailer was working on a great chronicle of exodus and diaspora. Egypt has proved to be no house of bondage for him but the terrain of the release of his fantasies.

In America this novel—which, whatever its intermittent unreadability, makes the fictional products of our own islands seem all too readably bland—has had a bad press. I don't think it has been well understood. Give it a few years and, like Thomas Pynchon's equally misunderstood 'Gravity's Rainbow,' it may well appear as one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis. It certainly gives us a new look up the anus.