Akhenaten

The person who is to carry on Akhenaten's work is, of course, Michael Amory. He, Margaret and Freddy have long discussions about Akhenaten's reign and the significance of his religion, especially regarding pacifism. Soon Michael and Margaret fall in love, although he is already involved with the novel's villainess, worldly and materialistic Mrs Mervill. The Iretons advise Michael to go and discover himself spiritually by visiting a Muslim holy man with a particular repu­tation for sanctity, who tells Michael of a fantastic treasure buried at Amarna. Michael duly goes out there to dig — a journey which is part treasure hunt and part spiritual quest. Mrs Mervill insinuates herself into joining Michael at Amarna. Rumours that she is living there as his mistress reach Margaret, and she breaks off their romance. She and Freddy both return to England to do their bit for the impending war. Freddy joins up, to be shot by a sniper shordy after going to the front, and Margaret joins the Voluntary Aid Detachment, working as a drudge in a London hospital. In the grey London of wartime, the light and colour of Akhenaten's Egypt seem very far away.

Then, in a climactic scene in a Lyons' tea-shop, Akhenaten manifests himself to Margaret. Under his influence she writes a message in automatic writing, mixing Old Testament vocabulary with the 'hymn' to the Aten:

When the chicken crieth in the egg-shell, He giveth it life, delighting that it should chirp with all its might. The same Aton, Who liveth for ever, Who slumbers not, neither does He sleep, knows the wishes of your heart. The Lord of Peace will not tolerate the victory of those who delight in strife.²³

Akhenaten's encouraging message helps Margaret to go on with her life after Freddy's death, and Akhenaten is also responsible for her meeting with Michael again, in a railway buffet. Love overtakes them and they make plans to marry before Michael is sent back to fight. For a final time Mrs Mervill is encountered, blasted with smallpox and swathed in draperies like a mummy. On their wedding day, Michael and Margaret remark on the similarity of the Psalms to the 'hymn' to the Aten, and as they say their vows the sun breaks through the clouds and touches them with its rays, just as the Aten touches Akhenaten and Nefertiti. A final quote from Akhenaten's 'hymn' concludes the novel perfectly.

A Wife out of Egypt

and There Was a King in Egypt are in some ways the most complex fictional treatments of Akhenaten. Although ultimately based on the familiar nineteenth-century idea that Egypt was the beginning of everything, Lorimer's version of Akhenaten is allowed to comment on (and offer solutions to) a wider range of difficult political and social problems than usual. In this respect, her novels hark back to an older tradition of Utopian fiction about ancient Egypt, such as Jane Loudon Webb's The Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and Edgar Allan Poe's

Some Words with a Mummy (1847). In both of these, revived mummies give invaluable advice, sanctioned by time, to a world which has gone wrong and lost all proper sense of values. Crusading English novelists would probably have co-opted Akhenaten into other political debates, but archaeology intervened. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun at the same time as the excavation of Amarna was to be a turning point in the development of fictions about Akhenaten.

Fictions post-Tutankhamun

The palace hall, the pillars hung with flowers. And frieze of royal cobras, while the Sun Through opened ceilings sends the morning hours As gods of Egypt and of Ikhnaton.

Leonard 1924: 13

There is a significant difference in the presentation of the Amarna dramatis personae after 1922. Before this date, Akhenaten was a ghost, a spectral figure conjured up in a museum or in a mystic communion between past and present. But after 1922, archaeological discoveries at Amarna and the Valley of the Kings enabled writers to re-create a physical context in which he could move and act, and Akhenaten becomes far more material and tangible. W. E. Leonard's poem above, with its sensuous evocation of a lived space, is an example. In the 1920s realistic novels set at the time of his religious changes began to be written, with Akhenaten appearing as a fully realised character in his own right. It is almost as if uncovering the material remains of the royal court of Akhenaten's city gave writers the confidence to allow him to emerge. While deeply interested in the material culture of the past, the realist Akhenaten fictions of the 1920s and 1930s continually project the modern onto the ancient - not, as in Lorimer's novels, the other way round.