Riordan Retrospective: The Red Pyramid

Welcome once again to my Riordan Retrospective. For those of you just joining the fun, this is my look back at the works of Rick Riordan.  That means we're taking a look at Percy Jackson, its sequel series and its spin-off series. This is less of a formal review, and more of a look back, along with my thoughts and observations.  Last time, we looked back at The Last Olympian, and finished our look back at Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  

Today, I am proud to announce that we're are officially starting our look back at The Kane Chronicles. As such, we're going back to the one that started it all, and taking a look back at The Red Pyramid,The Kane Chronicles book 1. As per usual, we're starting off with a quick summary.

Carter and Sadie Kane are brother and sister, but have hardly ever seen each other.  Carter travels with their dad around the world on archaeological digs, while Sadie lives in London with their maternal grandparents.  Carter and Mr. Kane are visiting Sadie for Christmas vacation, and the trio go on a trip to the British Museum...and Mr. Kane is imprisoned in a sarcophagus of golden light, after blowing up the Rosetta Stone.  

Before long, the siblings discover a number of shocking revelations: the Egyptian gods are both real and active in the modern world, their parents are members of an ancient society of Egyptian magicians called The House of Life, and their dad is being held hostage by the god Set.  Oh, and they've only got five days to make sure Set doesn't take over the world.  Carter and Sadie are in for a whirlwind adventure of gods, monsters and magic.  

I've been a fan of Egyptian Mythology for a long time.  In fact, I was a fan of Egyptian Mythology even before I got into Classical Mythology.  So, you can imagine that I was really excited back when The Kane Chronicles was first announced.  Admittedly, I was a bit disappointed that Riordan mostly shied away from the animal-headedness of many of the Egyptian gods; that was one of the things always made them so cool to me.  Still, I'm overall reasonably happy with how he portrayed the gods.

Well, if I'm being honest, it's a bit more complicated than that.  Let me state up front, I don't thing Riordan necessarily did a bad job with the gods.  As per usual, his knowledge of the myths is second to none.  It's just...well, I've written stories of my own that involve Egyptian gods, so they're kind of like old friends to me.  As such, sometimes it feels weird how Riordan interprets the gods in the modern world.  For example, Thoth is an absent-minded professor.  Nothing bad there in and of itself, just not how I would have written him.  Thought, admittedly, Riordan's Thoth has started to grow on me over the years.  Like I said, nothing inherently bad, just my own bit of weirdness and biases. 

A common criticism the series gets is that the characters are a bit too similar to Percy Jackson characters.  I suppose that's true to an extent.  Carter and Annabeth do have somewhat similarly brainy personalities, but they have enough differences to keep things interesting.  People always say that Sadie is similar to Percy, but I just don't see it.  She just comes across as a bit too bitchy to really be remotely similar to Percy.  Speaking of Sadie, at times it felt like Riordan was trying to make her edgy and rebellious, but had to keep things family friendly, and couldn't go as far as he wanted to. 

I suppose that's why she says "God!" so much.  And yeah, God singular.  One of the things I always liked about Percy Jackson was how Riordan adapted to swearing and exclamation to the polytheistic setting, so I was rather disappointed that The Kane Chronicles didn't follow suit, at least for the first two books.  Sadie does also say bloody a lot, but that might have been Riordan slipping up.  For those who don't get it, in British English, using bloody as an exclamation is considered minor swearing, akin to saying shit or damn.  Then again, we all remember that scene in The Titan's Curse at the dam snack bar, so who knows. 

I do thing that The Kane Chronicles differs from Percy Jackson in scope and feel.  Percy Jackson takes place almost exclusively in America, baring a few bits in the Bermuda Triangle.  The Kane Chronicles, by contrast, has much more of a globe trekking feel to it.  Granted, much of The Red Pyramid still primarily takes place in America, but we also get scenes set in Britain, France and Egypt.  It does help that, thanks to magic, the characters can teleport across the world at a moment's notice.  Another thing is that you get just as much Ancient Egyptian history as mythology.  Rather than being children of the gods, Carter and Sadie, as well as pretty much everyone else in the House of Life, are descended from the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt.  Specifically, they're descended from Narmer on their dad's side, and Ramses the Great on their mom's side.  Fun fact, the House of Life was an actual institution that existed during Ancient Egypt. 

The Egyptian gods have a different feel to them than the Greek gods of Percy Jackson.  They feel, at times, a bit more raw and primeval.  So, let's talk about the concept of hosting.  It took my a while to wrap my head around how works, but I think I've finally figured out an explanation.  An Egyptian god manifesting in the human world without being hosted by something would be like a human stepping onto the Moon without a spacesuit.  The gods need things to help anchor them to the mortal world.  It doesn't have to be humans, it can be anything from a building to a car.  In the latter case, it doubles as a rather literal example of deus ex machina.  They also tend to prefer humans who have Blood of the Pharaohs.   

Now let's get a bit more serious and talk about race, specifically, Carter and Sadie's race.  Their father is black American and their mother is white British.  Carter is looks more black, while Sadie looks more white, to the point that people often don't realize that they're siblings.  This isn't as crazy as it sounds; there's actually quite a few cases of mixed race siblings where each sibling tends to favor one parent's race over the other.  This actually doesn't come up all that much, and never gets preachy.  

This ties into another point: what race were the Ancient Egyptians?  Egypt sits at the crossroads of three continents, so you do get a good mix of peoples.  Overall, though, not all that different from the modern-day Egyptians; meaning similar to the Arabs and other Middle Eastern peoples.  Genetic analysis of mummies has pretty much confirmed this theory.  In fairness, Egypt has several black dynasties during the reign of the Nubians, and we have the very Egyptian Zia Rashid as Carter's eventual love interest as prominent character to provide some balance on the racial front.  Unlike a certain other series, it never dips into "We Wuz Kangz" territory, but I'm getting a head of myself.  We'll get to Magnus Chase in our due time.

When I first read this series, I was sure that Iskander, the Chief Lecter of the House of Life, was going to turn out to be Alexander the Great.  Iskander is the Arabic form of the name Alexander, and it is mentioned that he's been around since the Ptolemaic Dynasty.  Sadly, it turns out that I was wrong, and all of the above were red herrings.  Then again, Alexander the Great claimed to be a son of Zeus, so that would have opened a whole new can of worms.  Also, the Chief Lecter is the second in command, and the one who runs the House of Life when the pharaoh isn't around. 

In other events, I'm quite happy with how Set was portrayed.  It's set-up (hahaha, I said set!) to make it look like yet another poorly researched story where Set is portrayed as the Ancient Egyptian Satan, which isn't even close to being true.  Then the story subverts it all by revealing that Set is being manipulated by the true villain of the series: Apophis.  Set has always had a bit of a bad reputation even since ancient times.  You can blame it on the time the Hyksos people invaded Egypt.  Set was their favorite god, so the Egyptians began to associate Set with foreign invaders.  Over time, he got increasingly conflated with Apophis; which is ironic, because Set helped Ra battle Apophis every night.  

I liked how the series was able to reconcile mythology and science.  As Bast explains it, two things can be true in different ways.  Chairs exist, but so does the idea of chairs.  The sun can exist as a physical star, but Ra and his solar barge can exist as the embodiment of humanity's hopes and dreams about the sun.  Also, like The Demigod Files before it, The Red Pyramid confirms that Rick Riordan exists as a character in the Riordanverse.  The Kane Chronicles are explained to be based on a series of audio recording given to Riordan from the Kane siblings.  It also turns out that not every famous person was a demigod.  Some, like Elvis, were members of the House of Life.   

On the flip side, I thought that Riordan could have handled the religious implications better.  For example, Uncle Amos is very adamant that the House of Life doesn't worship the gods...except that what he describes is pretty much worship in all but name.  This is particularly odd, as there's a scene in Battle of the Labyrinth where Percy prays to Apollo and Artemis for good luck, and he's prayed to Poseidon plenty of times.  Even more bafflingly, it's confirmed that Moses existed in the Riordanverse, and was apparently the only magician who ever bet the House of Life in a magic contest.  

Now, there's a couple reasons for why this might be.  One, Riordan himself is a Christian of some stripe; my guess is Episcopalian based on how he used to work for an Episcopalian summer camp.  On the other hand, he did eventually more comfortable incorporating aspects of pagan religion into his books as time went on, so maybe that wasn't it.  More likely, he was fearing backlash from the Religious Right, and other such groups.  Remember, The Red Pyramid was published back when the whole "Harry Potter Leads Kids to Satanism" hubbub was still fresh in everyone's memory.  As such, Riordan might have wanted to avoid similar controversy. 

Despite The Kane Chronicles taking place in the same universe as Percy Jackson, we don't really get much in the way of crossovers.  The closest is when Uncle Amos looks to the Empire State Building and remarks that Manhattan has other gods, and other problems.  Well, we don't get much crossover in the main series.  Hopefully, Audible.com will get its act together and we'll be able to discuss Demigods and Magicians at some point.  

Speaking of Audible.com, let's take a moment to talk about the audiobook.  It features two narrators; Kevin R. Free narrates Carter's chapters, while Katherine Kellgren narrates Sadie's chapters.  This was my first encounter with Kevin R. Free, and he certainly does a good job.  So imagine my surprise when I encountered him again as the voice of Kevin from Welcome to Night Vale.  It was kind of surreal, since first and foremost, he'll always be Carter Kane to me.  

Now we have to get a little bit sad.  Earlier this year, Katherine Kellgren lost her long battle with cancer and passed away.  She narrated numerous audiobooks over the years, and was a much beloved narrator, but to me she'll always be Sadie Kane.  Was her narrator not always perfect, and sometimes a bit annoying?  Perhaps, but she always gave it her best shot, and whoever replaces her will have some awfully big shoes to fill.  

I'm not a big can of the new cover.  Aesthetically, it just feel like a big step backwards.  Even the new logo looks like a step backwards.  We see Carter and Sadie standing behind the Brooklyn Bridge, with a the Red Pyramid looming in the background.  Also, there's a statue of either Amun or Khnum, despit neither of them appearing in The Red Pyramid.  What else can I say?  The new cover sucks, let's move onto the older and better cover. 

We see Carter and Sadie standing in front of Brooklyn House, seat of the 21st Nome, while magical hieroglyphs float around them.  Nomes were administrative divisions used in Ancient Egypt, and are still used by the House of Life to divide their territory across the world.  There are 360 in total, with the First Nome, the House of Life's headquarters, being based in Egypt.  

Well, I think that should do it for now.  Join me again next time when we begin our look back at The Heroes of Olympus by taking a look back at The Lost Hero.  I hope to see you all next time.