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3.0�toiles sur 5 Gripping, rewarding collaboration of history-telling and myth-making, Sep 27 2007

Par	Tyler J. Smith (McMaster University, Canada) - Voir tous mes commentaires (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome (Hardcover)

Steven Saylor, best known for his historical fiction series Roma Sub Rosa, took on a challenging enterprise in his epic-length ROMA: The Novel of Ancient Rome, where he weaves myth with fact and history with fiction. Saylor's story lasts a thousand years, involves three or four family trees, and introduces a myriad of supporting characters. ROMA begins with Rome's pre-history as a tribal riverside rest stop and culminates with the dissolution of the republic under Julius Caesar and the rise of his nephew, the emperor Augustus.

The details of the story are inspired by, and largely faithful to, the accounts left by several of Rome's own historians: Livy, Plutarch, Ovid, Virgil, and Polybius. As you may have already guessed, Saylor's history is a much lighter read than the annals of our first-century friends. In the opinion of this reviewer, herein lies the book's greatest merit. One can read it, as I did, from cover to cover in the space of a weekend, and fortunately, the book is sufficiently gripping to facilitate the desire to actually do so. By the conclusion, I enjoyed a smug sense of self-satisfaction for having acquainted myself with so much history, rather than empty pages in a novel. In this spirit of appreciation, let me point out two (inescapable?) weaknesses of the book:

1. With a thousand years of history to cover, life-stories must be told in a few pages, and as soon as the reader feels any attachment to a character, we find the character dead and the narrative quickly advancing by 50 or 100 years. As a result, character development is reduced to a simple and recurring pattern: (a) coming of age, (b) a flurry of violence and/or a political fiasco and/or a sexual tryst in which the next generation is conceived, and (c) death. In an attempt to salve this disconnect, Saylor has introduced into his story a golden heirloom (a winged phallus to be worn about the neck) shrouded in mystery and intrigue, passed down through the generations from the first episode in the book until the last. (Speaking of phalli, Saylor has included a healthy dose of gratuitous sex and very nearly reduces certain characters to walking diaries writ full of lust.)

2. Integrating the genre of "novel" with "history" can be a challenging task, and the awkwardness of the fusion shows up frequently in the book with strained and artificial dialogues that go something like this:

"Claudia! How have you been my friend?"

"I couldn't have been better. I just came from the Temple on the Capitoline."

"The Temple on the Capitoline? Tell me, what has been happening in Rome during the last 75 years?"

"Of course, I'd be happy to! Well, while your great-grandfather Publius Flaccus strove to convince the Senate to accept Lucius Germanicus' civil reforms, the Parthians were secretly mobilizing an . . ."

Despite these two inconveniences--the first of which is unavoidable in a project of this nature and the second of which is awkward, but bearable--Saylor's book does an admirable job of "making history exciting" and deserves the widespread recognition it is receiving. Who knows? Maybe it will encourage some lucky souls to read Virgil and Livy for themselves, or fill in certain blanks for a reader later exposed to Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar." At the very least, it will leave its readers with an introduction to and new appreciation for one of antiquity's most important civilizations.

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