Hello, and welcome to Western SIV. I've got a very different kind of
author interview for you guys this time. This is first for us on the
show. We're doing a piece of historical fiction. I'm going to sit down
with author Charles Fisher and we're going to talk about his book The Eunuch.
The Unich, and of course Eunichs are not necessarily endemic to any particular culture
or any particular time throughout the history of certainly the pre modern world. But
his Unich happens to live during the reign of Nebecondesser. He's the great Babylonian
monarch of the Neo Babylonian Empire. Leads to Theuest of Judah, so on
and so forth, and all of these things feature prominently in the novel.
It's an interesting it's actually kind of a dark comedy, but it's an interesting
novel. It's really quite good. And as I mentioned again in the show,
and you'll hear me during the interview talk about how there just aren't very
many, if any at all, historical novels that take place during this time
period, during the time period of the very ancient world. There are some
during the classical world. But by and large, you know, we're talking
about you know, modern history really since the American Revolution, and so to
step out there and to do something that's so different is very unique, and
it's a very well done novel, and I think it really sets the neo
Babylonian world where it should be in our history and something worth thinking about.
If you know, we're in the holiday season. If you're thinking about a
gift for someone who has a passion for ancient history but is looking for more
of a beach read, this is that and I highly highly recommend it.
And so, without further ado, here is our first ever historical fiction interview
and author Charles Fisher. All Right, and welcome back. As I mentioned
just before in the introduction, I'm sitting down here with author Charles Fisher,
and we're talking about his book The Unich, which is a first for this
podcast, which was kind of fun. We're doing historical fiction for the first
time, and I've wanted to do historical fiction for a long time, and
I think there's a lot of important things to talk about with this book,
specifically that I'm going to get into. But because the idea of a eunuch,
I'm guessing all my listen, you guys all know what that is.
But because that concept transcends a lot of places and a lot of times,
I was hoping to ask you as sort of an initial question to sort of
ground us in. Okay, where are we? Where does this book take
place, what time period are we in, and what should we be looking
for as it begins? Sure, the book takes place in sixth century bcea
Babylon and it tells the story of Babylonian king Nebukenezer the Second and it's the
recollections of a Unich harem scribed by the name of Nergal, and he's going
to tell the story of the king's invasion of Judah, the Kingdom of Judah,
which happened in five eighty nine BCE. Yeah, and that kind of
brings me to my first question, because if you go even right now to
a library, or if you go to Amazon, or if you go to
your local public school, what you'll notice is that there's a lot of historical
fiction. But there's actually very very little historical fiction from the ancient world.
Very little. In fact, I tried my hand at some just because I
felt like there wasn't any and there were great stories that need to be told,
but the vast majority, I would say, based on my research and
teaching experience, is going to be essentially American revolution forward. Is is what
you tend to get, which is amazing that we get so little in many
way shapes and form. By the way, and I should say this before
anybody sends me an email. When I say that there aren't many works prior
to seventeen seventy six, I am excluding the genre of historic romantic fiction.
Okay, if it's a romance novel that I'm not counting that as historical fiction.
No offense to all the romance novel fans out there, but it's just
a little bit too far afield. So I wanted to ask you what made
you pick this age? What made you pick the the era of a nevogad
Ezer, Like it's it's ancient, and it's quite ancient in reality, so
you know this is pre Roman Empire and all of that. So why did
you choose that in the first place, Because it's so unique. I chose
it in part because of the name Babylon and all the kind of symbolic energy
around that that term. I grew up in the Midwest, and you know,
in the middle part of the twentieth century, and it primarily kind of
Christian, kind of a vague Christian culture, and the word Babylon had all
this image of decadence and power and you know, pagan little, you know,
sexual license. It was. It was this sybyl So there was always
that kind of hovering in the background. Another reason I think I chose to
write it about nebukanez Are in particular. I was interested in the theme of
war and unintended consequences when I started the novel around the time of the Second
Iraq War, and the unit takes place in what is now modern day Iraq.
When the US army invaded Baghdad in March of two thousand and three,
the antiquities museum was sacked and about fifteen thousand antiquities went on the black market.
And so the premise of the novel is that there are these connuniform cablets,
right, which is the writing system of the Sumerian and Akkadian and Babylonian
cultures of that time, and the novel is a purported translation of these tablets.
And we can get into that as well. The novel is a purported
translation of the Babylonian Chronicles, which are a series of historical tablets that tell
about Debuequinezar and his invasion of Judah and so and I thought this kind of
parallel of the US invading Iraq Uh, you know, this old Babylonian kingdom
invading Judah, because that had a lot of historical consequences which we can talk
about as well down the line, and so that was kind of part of
my decision. Well, it's interesting, and it's also kind of interesting to
focus in on the idea of war and the specifically war in the ancient and
classical world, because it's so different from our I mean, our modern concept
of sort of total war is very is very quite modern, especially if you
if you take a sort of global view of history read you know, the
people who would have if you if you were in the path of an army,
your life would have been dramatically impacted. But if you weren't necessarily in
the path that army, then you might not have been as cognizant of the
conflict as certainly we are today. Part of that's information based, and part
of that's just simply a nature of how our economy functions relative to there.
So I thought that the idea of bringing to life the idea of conflict in
the ancient world, and the other other thing that's really that's that's interesting about
the novel is just the idea of just how prevalent conflict was. And I
think anybody who has sort of studied the past understands that, you know,
great kings, emperors, so on and so forth didn't necessarily have to have
a reason per se for beginning a conflict that's going to affect the lives of
hundreds of or thousands of individuals. You know, the were oftentimes individual decisions.
And that guess isn't an evocan hazer, and I want to come back
to him later, but I did want to ask, because this is something
that I myself wrestled with, is did you feel like it was easier or
more difficult to write about a distant past for which we just don't have that
many And I mean that by comparison to relative term that many sources. Well
surprised that there are actually plenty of sources on the Mesopotaming world. The language
wasn't They didn't cracked a Kadian language until the middle of the nineteenth century,
unlike Egyptian, which they well, they didn't figure out Egyptian either until the
early part of the nineteenth century. So anyway, there's this tremendous amount of
these records, these canutiform tablets, chronicles of king's reigns. The Messipotating culture
produced a tremendous amount of literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh's perhaps the most famous,
but there are a number of other myths and poems that are available to
the student. For a time, I was a student at Harvard Divinity School
and my best friend was doing a PhD in a seriology, which means she
was learning Akkadian, Babylonian and Hebrew. And my friendship with her opened up
this world of study to me. And it was from her that I got
the bibliography, you know, a list of twenty or so books, and
I didn't I don't read German or French, so they were they were primarily
in English, and so I spent a lot of time reading all these kind
of academic books on Assyria, Babylon, Mesopotamia, you know, Israel,
Judah, et cetera, et cetera, to help me kind of reconstruct the
world so it's out there, but it's a it's kind of a niche academic
area when it comes to the ancient world, in part because it's so demanding.
The linguist thick requirements are so demanding. Learning these dead languages is really,
really tough, and Harvard only produces about, you know, two or
three graduates in this field a year if that. Yeah, I've always felt
like if you are going to be one of these very specialized ancient or I
would be honest, even some medieval historians who have to learn something like old
French, for example, I have to read Carolingian script. It's really like
having to play ice hockey in that like, yes, you have to you
have to learn the sport, but you have to learn to skate first.
You know, you have to learn how to do this additional skill to first
open the door to do that. But linealg Yeah, as an old hockey
player from the Midwest, that's I'm a very old hockey player as well.
I grew up in Minnesota. There was an ice break on every corner from
Wisconsin. So it's similar. It's all right, okay, we're speaking the
same language. Yeah we are, we are. I know where you're coming
from. But I wanted to follow up on that last question just a little
bit because as you were talking, I guess what I'm what I'm wondering is
if you write a book about the Cuban missile crisis, Right, there's video
of JFK. Like, you know, you know kind of how he behaves,
you know a lot more about his personality. Yes, we have the
tablets, but we don't really know. I did one. I did a
historical fiction about the Battle of Kottash with Ramsey's the Great Ramsey's the second.
I don't really know what he was like as a person, So that both
leaves a lot open for you as an author. But at the same time,
like I don't know if it's more constraining. I just kind of wanted
your opinion on that. Yeah, no, what did I do? I
mean for the visual stuff, I checked out all the art, you know,
I am. I did a bit of travel during the time I was
writing the novel. I went to the Louver in Paris, the British Museum
in London, the met Museum in New York, and they have all sorts
of not a lot of antiquities, but more than you would think. So
for example, when I was in the Louver, they have the winged bullman
sculptures from Ashra Banna Paul's palace, right, and these things are about,
you know, you know, thirty feet tall. So I got to look
at those. When I was in the British Museum, I saw all the
bar release from Ashra Bana Paul's palace. He's a Syrian, but it's pretty
much the same culture. And these these were wall sculptures of what the palaces
looked like. They showed the king hunting lions and all that stuff. So
you know, I took a lot from the art sculptures. And when it
comes to writing any type of fiction, I mean you're always doing world building,
even if you're writing about twenty first century America. That twenty first century
America is an imagined reality. It's a similacrum, right, It's not the
real thing, and so it just has it has to be plausible, it
has to be believable. And so from my study I got to all the
you know, I learned the religion, the name of the gods, I
knew what kind of food they all ate, I knew what the clothing was
like, and it was all about kind of constructing a voice that didn't sound
too contemporary, that had a slightly archaic feel, you know, and then
translated into English. So you just had to give the illusion of sixth century
BCE, because there's no way you're ever going to capture what it was really
like all historical fiction is, it's like science fiction. It's speculative. There's
no way we we don't even know what like life was like in Henry the
eighth time period. I mean, because of course, there was that famous
historical novel by Hillary Mantel wolf Hall that they made into a TV series and
it was a big, u very best seller. I mean, everybody read
it, you know. But you know, she's not reproducing uh you know,
you know, sixteenth century English. She she kind of came up with
her own dialect that sounded like that, right, And again, it just
has to be credible or believable. And so that's what I was kind of
working at, working at as a writer to give the illusion of of of
of Babylon. I was never going to capture Babylon in and of itself.
That if that makes any sense, I think it makes total sense, And
I think there needs to be a caveat at the beginning of any historic work
of historical fiction that this is not history. This is not a biography of
Henry the Eighth, this is not a biography of nevgen As we like,
this is intended both to entertain and to educate. To an extent, it's
it's intended to be both. And I think that that's really sort of necessary
to get in. And so the book does take the the style or the
narrative structures. We're following these tablets right there, they're reconstructions of the tablets.
So I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about the
tablets themselves, and like, where where this idea came from? And you
know, you've obviously studied the actual tablets, and so how did you try
to construct similarities or where did you where did you go with all that?
Yeah, when you open the book itself, each each chapter is entitled Tablet
one, Tablet two. And so I wanted to I wanted to reproduce what
actual translations of Babylonian tablets look like. And for my model, I used
the Penguin translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. And so one of the things
about these ancient tablets is that many of them are damaged right by time,
by fire, by war, by neglect, right and there'll be you know,
app ser lakuta or parts of it will be damaged. And so when
you're reading the English translation in the Penguin edition, they'll have these little brackets
that say, you know, seventy seven lines damaged, or they'll have a
bracket where they speculate what the word is. They're not sure but context suggest
it's the pronoun heat, for example. So in my novel, I replicated
or reduplicated that that look that feel, so that the book looks like an
actual academic translation, and I kind of played I played around that. I
played around with that motif for my own kind of narrative purposes. So that
was fun to do. Yeah, and it kind of makes sense because then
it'll even allows you a narrative device. Then as you're going, you know,
to sort of deliberately leave sections out as needed, which allows the story
to build in a really really fastating way. The moment that I picked up
the book, you know, because I didn't know I didn't necessarily know what
time period. I knew it was going to be, you know, Babylon,
but I didn't know exactly when. So, but Babylon and certainly Sumer
Samaria. I mean you can see it differently. You know that's is very
old, even by the age of nebucate Ezer is very very old. And
so I was curious to know, like, was there ever a time when
you thought about going back further? Because I I won't lie to you.
I have always been fascinated with the beginning of things. I think it's wildly
classical in ancient history. Is I'm those first cities, the first people when
they built the first zigarot, the first person to come up with that idea,
That idea of just fascinates me. And we don't know a great deal
about of course, you know how that happened, But it's just the idea
of that is so powerful in my mind. I was just curious if you
ever thought about, well, do I do I go a little bit further
back? Well, the thing about sumer is that they haven't figured out that
language, right. They don't think that Sumerian was even part of the Semitic
language family, of which Babylonian and Nicicadian are part of. Hebrew. Babylonian
Nicadian are part of the Semitic language is sumer is this is great unknown they're
not even sure of its origins. Well, that's a good question. I
was interested in all of that. I was interested in Sumer, I was
interested in Old Babylon. I was interested in Syria. And then Nebukiinezar is
really this kind of late version of this culture. In fact, that was
part of my choice. By the time you get to the sixth century Nebu
Cadezer, the cultures didn't decline. Even the writing system is about to become
obsolete, right, you know, canue form on clay tablets, that's that's
about to go the way of all flesh. And what's going to take it
place. What's going to take its place is papyrus writing. You know,
writing on papyrus and tablets are going to be obsolete. And I thought that
was a great parallel because we're at a state, we're in a place in
written history where the book, the codex is about to disappear into the tablet
of the computer or the kindle or write your MacBook. And and so that
switch I found interesting, Right, this idea of of a culture and it's
twilight, and of course I wanted to write about the invasion of Judah,
because that was a big event in Jewish history. Not only Didbi Kinezar raise
the city, but he destroyed the temple and then initiated the Babylonian captivity.
And one of the questions I was interested when it came to these kind of
imperial wars was the issue oftended unintended consequences. Right, So you've got Babylon
taking down Jerusalem and really beginning what is the diaspora of the Jews? And
you know that ended that diaspora, you know, had its endpoint in the
show what the Jewish community calls the catastrophe the Holocaust, right, and then
that led to the birth of modern day Israel. You just don't know what
the consequences of any action are, and so when our country invaded Iraq in
two thousand and three, it's like, you know, what possibly could go
wrong? What are the consequences of that? And of course we've seen that
play out over the last twenty years, for good and for ill, And
so I was interested in that question. So it kind of circle back to
your question. Yeah, I was interested in all of that. It would
have been really fun to go back to the origins. But I had a
specific reason for narrowing in on Babylon in its end stages, and within a
generation Persia the Persians takeover and become the dominant power player in that region.
This really is kind of the end the Neo Babylonian Empire under Navican Azer,
who's the strongest of the kings of his line by any stretch of the imagination.
Is because for the longest time you've had various regional powers contesting themselves.
You do have Greater Egypt that pops up for a little bit under Ramseys,
but that's long long gone time that we even get to Nebekinezer and listeners of
the show, remember you know we're talking we're talking Iron age now. So
the Bronze Age has collapsed, the chaos from that has all played itself out,
The Assyrians come back, and then in a moment's the historical I'm gonna
put it to you this way, in an historical blink of the eye,
the Persians are going to come rolling in. You know, the Persians,
Iranians, whichever whichever term you choose, is are going to roll in.
Every and everything is going to change, and then very little is going to
change for a long time. You know, yes, the Romans and some
of Alexander's successors will kind of push back and forth after a very short period
of Greek Macedonian rule. And so this is really an interesting time period because
it's a twilight of the very ancient, like the very ancient is about to
start to give way to what is typically the classic period. And I find
that really interesting that, yeah, the time period's really cool. And and
you all you make a great point about language, and that is that when
people ask me, like, well, why do you start the show where
you do, and it's like, well, because there isn't language before then,
because before then it's just anthropology. I don't I don't know really what
happened, like we have some movement, you know, history of the movement
of people and so on and so forth. But another great example is you
know linear A. We don't. We don't. We don't have any translation
for linear A. You know when right now, Hey, I can do
that. Now that I would, I would be a new fan. But
but up until that point, I'll remain a little skeptical. But you know,
that would be a may I mean, we don't really know what to
make of that Minoan civilization because we simply can't read what it wrote. But
coming back to your novel, I'm interested to know, like, were there
aspects of Babylonian culture that you really wanted to be sure that you got into
the novel, And if so, why, good question. I've thought about
that a number of things I wanted to get into the novel. I wanted
to get the kind of architectural look. For example, there was a tremendous
wall around the city, and there were half a dozen gates, and the
most famous of which is the Ishtar Gate, which you can see in Berlin,
which is just this beautiful edifice of that that's painted in Lapis Lazuli,
and it has the it has the dragons and the bulls and all of it
there right, And so I wanted to get that image. And at one
point in my novel, Nurgel is the narrator, and he's named after the
the consort of a Rishkigal, who is the queen of the underworld, andle
is her concert, her kind of her handman. So it's been say handmade
and whatever the male equivalent of that is. So nrgyl uh Is is originally
an Assyrian young boy boy that's taken when Ninevah is sacked by Nebu Kinezer's father,
Nabo Palaza, and so he gets deported into Babylon, and his first
view of the city he goes through the Ishtar gate and sees the ziggarat right,
and then subsequently he's castrated for the king's harem. And so I wanted
to get that in there. I wanted to get that entry through the Ishtar
gate, which is an issue, of course, is the goddess of love
and Nirgo of course is going to be uh maimed, right uh and then
enslaved. And so I thought that there was a nice kind of symbolic resonance
there. And then the ziggrette, of course, is this this great phallic
object, right? And I wasn't even thinking so much of the historical cigaratte.
I was thinking of the Tower of Babel as is portrayed in Genesis.
I was thinking of Brougel's great paintings of the cigarette as this giant edifice,
right, something out of a Ridley Scott science fiction movie, you know,
something out of Blade Runner. So my cigarette isn't really quite historical. It's
more of an imaginative edifice with seventy two. It has seventy two floors to
it, so it's much larger than the actual historical Cigaatte. So I did
some I played around with that image. I wanted to get the canal system
all right. Basically, they invented bringing in water to the desert, right,
Babylon was was built over a desert, and they and of course between
the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and they had this tremidous
canal system right to irrigate the land. And one of the premises of my
novel is that there's a drought and famine in Babylon at this point, right,
that the canals are dry and the king has to do something about it.
And this kind of connects up to another aspect of Mesopotamia and Babylon that
I wanted to get into the book, and that's the religion, which was
essentially a fertility religion. And so you've got this fertility religion in the middle
of the drought, and the king is the high priest of this religion.
And one of the premises of my plot is Nebukinizer is sexually impotent. He's
this is he's an aged king. It's you know, he's in late middle
age and he's something like an aged rock star who is like e ft out.
He's exhausted and bored with sex, and he can no longer you know,
act as the you know, the symbol of fertility. And so his
kind of his impotence and his boredom with his harem poses an agricultural crisis,
had a big political problem for the court, and the only solution for that,
of course, is to go to war at the king's enemies. And
so that's kind of the premise of the novel. And then all this is
told from the point of view of the eunuch, who is who witnesses the
king's boredom and an impotence in their Actually mentioned by the way that The Unich
is a comic novel, a darkly comic novel, and so I was looking
for situations that I could exploit for I think that comes through, and I
think it makes a lot of sense to do it from that perspective, because
the eunuch is throughout history and you know, whether we're talking about this period
of Babylonian history or we're talking about you know, even the Ottoman Empire later
on, the Unich is somebody who is both without and within, you know,
they are sort of the ultimate outsider, and for that reason, for
that reason they are, they are given that inner access to see things that
other people don't get to see because of course they can't procreate, and so
there's the there's no danger for them, at least from the viewpoint the people
now, the Romans. Yeah, he's the ultimate. He's the ultimate outsider
insider. Right, So he's going to claim I've got the real story here.
I'm going to deviate from the official script, the propaganda around the war,
and I'm going to tell you the real story. And moreover, he
claims that his castration has given him a certain kind of prophetic inside, in
fact, an inside that can penetrate through the lie. So I purposely use
that social metaphor, right, that he's got a kind of a spiritual sense
or a third eye after his castration to see into the reality, you know,
behind the official curtain. And he clearly for himself. I did want
to ask you because as I was reading it, you know, part of
it was thinking like, oh gosh, this kind of sounds like a very
ancient, precopious this kind of sounds like a very very ancient secret history,
you know, after the fact, sort of uncovered, like, well,
here's a real dirt on here's the real dirt on Justinian. Yeah, the
models. I wanted to do a version of that, absolutely. Yeah.
I was interested in that because I thought, ah, it kind of sounds
like, kind of sounds like that's what's going on here. But I thought,
you just kind of made a good point. But so you make your
zigarot much much larger than it would have been historically. But one of the
things that it always comes back to me when I'm reading about very ancient history
is just trying to visually understand what this would have been like. And not
for me, but for somebody who's coming who's been captured in war, or
who's coming from the rural parts of the Babylonian Empire, and for the first
time is seeing the walls of Babylon, which you know, according to some
sources, you know, we're at parts glazed in this blue sort of shining
glass, so that you'd see them from so far away, and you've never
seen you've never seen a building, you know, more than a story maybe
two stories tall, and now for the first time perhaps the cigarrotte does look
like it's seventy two floors in height, because you to say that this is
someone going from rural America to New York City. I don't think captures it.
I really don't. I think to try to really understand, the visual
aspects are so daunting. Did you find it that way as you were trying
to describe it? Because I've always struggled with how to put that right spin
on it so that you'd really get the sense of the awe inspiring glory of
the thing that this person is facing. Well, I mean that's where you
have to kind of rely on your own kind of fictive powers of invention.
Right, you have to use language to create not only the visual image of
the ziggurat the stargate, but you have to tell it from the point of
view of a very scared and fearful and traumatized twelve year old boy. So
you have to kind of inhabit uh. I had an inhabit nrgl as a
traumatized young boy, right being you know, you know, being led by
a bunch of thuggish guards, and he's got these chains around his neck.
They're all they have these kind of neck chains and he's tied, and he's
going in there with he is and he has a brother that he's with,
And so I had to kind of inhabit it, inhabit that point of view
and imagine what it would look like to him after all that he's been through,
because his city has been attacked and it's been raised. He's watched his
father murdered, He's watched his brother, uh, his older brother gets raped
by the soldiers. He sees that and you know, endures, you know,
a couple hundred mile march from Nineveh to Babylon. And so I had
to kind of figure out what that would look like, what that would feel
like, and then describe it from that point of view. And so that's
the challenge of the writer, right, And so I had I had I
saw the pictures of what the zigarette looks like. I had an idea of
what I wanted to look like. You know, I'd seen the ishtar gate,
you know, in the museum at Berlin, and so so I had
to just kind of make that happen. It's like there was a it's like
a process of alchemy. Really. You have all these little things that you
have to or maybe you're or it's like cooking. You're throwing all this stuff
into the sauce and trying to make it come together. And of course,
uh, there was a lot of revision in rewriting the chapter in which young
Nrbal and his brother Europe entered the city. I mean, I mean I
rewrote that five or six times trying to get it right. Oh, which
is understandable. It's a work in progress, always no work of writing.
I suppose it's ever tu done. You just run out of time, but
we're retired writing. Yeah. Were there any parts of the novel that were
particularly difficult to write or particularly enjoyable? Oh? Yeah, absolutely. I
enjoyed writing most of it. But for me, when it comes to I
didn't really have trouble. Well, yeah, I think the hardest thing to
write. At one point I wanted to write about Babylon, the Babylonian army
invading Judah and the battle and a battle that would take place below the walls
of the city. For a long time, I tried to write that war
scene right. And yeah, to do that, I would look at other
novels that wrote about battle scenes, and I went to Tolstoy is Warren Peace.
He writes about the Battle of Austerlitz and Bordino and all that stuff.
I'm certainly no Tolstoy, and I just found that I could not do it.
I didn't have the skills. That was very, very difficult, and
so I figured it away. I figured it a work around. I've just
left it out and I think it worked out. But that that thing defeated
me. Another thing that's difficult to write are like party scenes, right,
feast scenes or orgies where you have a lot of different people in the room
and you get to figure out how to do that. They're particularly difficult to
write. But eventually I cracked that one. There is one of the tablets
is Disordered Is is focused on a Babylonian orgy like that, because that's part
of this image I had in the city of that kind of sexual decadence.
But that was a challenge to write because you're writing about sex too it,
which can be very cringey if you don't do it right. Yeah. Yeah,
And but again I was doing it comically, so I wasn't I wasn't
doing it straight because the Unich is a little bit you know, that particular
scene is told from the point of view of the eunuchs who are along the
wall and they're watching the court feast, and then the feast descends into this
licentious orgy, right, and so you have all these kind of sexless so
called castrates along the wall, and they're watching it, and they're watching it
with a jaundiced eye, and they're criticizing all the physical blemishes of the participants,
you know, in rating the performances, you know, like like you
do when you're watching a football game or a bad movie, right, and
so, so I was kind of and that was actually kind of fun to
do what an orgy you look from from the wall watchers, right, the
eunuchs who are along the wall, who can't participate and are just watching it.
That was kind of fun to kind of figure out that point of view.
And it's you know, it's acidic, a little bitter, and full
of mockery. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, it's those scenes
that are difficult. You know, the runt of the mill. One on
one dialogue is not particularly challenging even for a lot of individuals, but the
more moving parts, the more difficult it becomes. And it's almost exponential,
to be honest with you, for anyone who hasn't tried. But well,
we talked about a lot of things. But is there anything else that you
really think that people should know. It's a great book. I really think
that people should pick it up. And if you're interested in ancient history,
like it's I mean, it's certainly the best I've ever read for ancient historical
fiction. You know, I think that it should do quite well. But
if if there's anything that anybody else should know, I'd love to hear it.
Well. Uh. The Unich Uh is a love story, believe it
or not, and much of much of the plot, much of the narrative
focuses on the Unix relationship with nebukin Azar and Nebukanezer's lover who is the alpha
concubine in the Harim and her name is Suduri, and so Nirgo spends a
lot of time with that couple, and he ends up falling in love with
satur Siduri. So much of the book is this love triangle. Uh.
And then Siduri, well, she leads claims to fall in love with the
Unich slay described Rgyl, and they conduct kind of an emotionally intense affair behind
the back of the king. So that's that's part of the book as well.
That's interesting. That's interesting. Well, it certainly brings the ancient world
to life, so it's it's very cool. It's very cool. It's great
that you're able to do something like that. It's quite the undertaking. I'm
not going to ever attempt something like that myself again, but I certainly respect
the fact that you were willing and able to do it well. As I
mentioned that, the outset of the book is available right now. Link is
in the show notes. And I just want to thank you again for sure
for coming on the show. It's been fantastic, Adam, it's been a
pleasure. Nice to meet you.