The Golden Mean

by Annabel Lyon

Published by Random House Canada, $32.95, available

Review by Carrie Anne Snyder

This is the book of the season, and the one you must read, if you must choose only one: a debut novel that won the $25,000 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, as well as nominations for the Giller and the Governor General's awards.

Proof isn't always in the prizes, but The Golden Mean is more than deserving of notice.

While this may be Lyon's first novel for adults, she is no novice storyteller and her experience shows. The book achieves a smoothly plotted, deeply characterized, wholly believable and vivid conjuring of ancient Macedonia, when the philosopher Aristotle served as tutor to the adolescent prince who would be grow up to be Alexander the Great.

Lyon's previous published works include a collection of short stories, Oxygen, a book of three novellas, The Best Thing For You, and a novel for young adults. She may be the new Margaret Atwood, displaying technical skill across the genres, along with a keen curiosity and intelligence, although her flavour is of calm empathy rather than dry wit.

Navigating the brutality of the times — war, plague, courtly machinations and betrayals — Lyon's Aristotle, as first-person narrator, is a man troubled by the extremities of his own temperament and those he sees in his brilliant student. Aristotle's voice is by turns abrupt, reasonable, cool, sympathetic and always searching, seeking a balance between extremes, between action and contemplation: the golden mean of the title. In a book flush with philosophy and ideas, Lyon's language is rough and salty and down-to-earth, easily devoured. (Be warned: the descriptions of sex and violence are explicit.)

There are, perhaps, too many characters to keep track of (a cast list appears at the beginning of the book), and time telescopes and moves, sometimes too quickly, makes leaps that could be off-putting to readers who prefer more narrative connections. But this is the essence of Lyon's style: stripped down prose that is almost shockingly rich.

At the end, you will feel you have gone on a rare journey to a world that seems no longer distant.