Book: The Twice Born by Pauline Gedge

[Krishna]

** Original Post on Oct 6 2012 **

Pauline Gedge continues what she does best: Writing stories set in Ancient Egypt and based on some historical events. This, though she does not say it here, is the start of a King’s Man Trilogy. She has written an excellent trilogy before, the Lord of the Two Lands.  The first two books are The Hippopotamus Marsh and The Oasis, both of which have been reviewed here earlier. This has the makings of an equally good set of books.

I find that, starting  from Scroll of Saqqara ( also reviewed earlier here) Pauline has introduced elements of the supernatural in her stories, not strictly sticking to the historical events as she did in many novels at the beginning, but it takes nothing away from the readability of the books. (You may remember that Wilbur Smith strayed into that territory a lot with his Ancient Egypt Series featuring Taita, the slave.).

This story features Huy, the son of Hapu, who is a humble farmer. The son is bright, adored by Itu, her mother and has Ishat, the daughter of the house servant as a childhood friend.

Seeing his brilliance, his rich uncle Ker agrees to fund his studies in Iunu, the great temple on the great city. He reluctantly is sent by his family. He meets Thothmes, who also is a small kid of five years like him, and becomes his friend.

Sennet, a bully, gives Huy trouble and to escape him, Huy once runs blindly and reaches the shade of the Ishat tree, forbidden for any but the priests to see. He is punished fiercely by the High Priest, who wonders if Huy was meant to see it.

The next encounter with Sennet knocks him senseless and confirmed as dead by the doctors. When the Sem priests take him to the place where they are about to remove his organs and embalm him, he wakes up, frightening everyone and earning the sobriquet ‘The Twice Born’. He finds that he is now endowed with the power to predict the future, as revealed to him by Anubis when he was in the Twilight World between life and death.

Thothmes is the son of the rich governor, Nakht, who treats Huy like his own son, until he realizes that Huy has fallen in love with his daughter Anuket, when he rejects him.

In bitterness and anger, Huy rejects the gift of the Gods. He resents the weight put on him by the Gods without even asking his consent and tries to escape his responsibility by moving back to Hent-Hurib after his studies, hoping to fade into obscurity as a nameless scribe in a small temple there.

But the Gods had other plans for him….

A lovely narration, with the authentic sounding descriptions of the life in Ancient Egypt and the easy flow of the story keeps you reading. This one is as good as most of her books, and keeps the interest until the end.

I would give it a 7/10

— Krishna