Les Cole,
The Sea Kings

The Prophecy

Tanuati, the hero of this first volume of a trilogy of novels, grows up as the son of a wealthy merchant captain in Minoan Crete. The story follows the boy growing up to become a man.

Tanuati visits a school in Knossos, becomes an apprentice to a coastal skipper and falls unhappily in love with the Libyan ambassador's daughter. Then he ends up in places all over the known world of his time: in the Cyclades, in Ugarit, as a slave in Babylon, as well as in Libya and Egypt. He witnesses the ever growing threats to the light-hearted world of Minoan merchants posed by earthquakes and "sea peoples", and he joins the fight against them.

Les Cole has thoroughly investigated the time of his novel. He describes nicely the multifaceted interconnections of places, cultures and societies around the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, there were many of those, and the sea did more connect than separate them. I liked quite a few scenes of the book very well. For example how he describes the glas production in Babylon in a very vivid and detailled way.

The problem with the novel is its story. In order to avoid a simple sequence of anecdotes (which by the way are quite well written), Cole spans an odd "prophecy" all over the novel. The purpose of this prophecy for the story never becomes clear. Then there are these awkward transitions: Almost all chapters end with some gloomy prediction, artificially trying to build up suspense.