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My goodness! How can one write a review about a book he admires and yet has issues with? Yes, this is the case of John Williams Augustus.
Here is this young man, somehow rejected for a time by his mother and stepfather, brought up by his grandmother, and having to show his great-uncle his worth. As a kind of scholar and a soldier, Octavius became Rome’s first Emperor, the one that brought peace, stability, and prosperity to a vast reign riddled with the corruption and evil ideals of a dying republic. After Augustus, Rome came to be a peaceful and prosperous empire only when the Nerva-Antonino dynasty came to power in A.D. 96. Despite the great mind and political capabilities of Augustus, as any human being who is met with the power to govern upon others, he had to play the political chess he thought to be the best for Rome. Regardless of the conquests he achieved, his biggest failure seems to be the problems he had with his succession, not to mention that some of his chosen successors might have been poised and brought to death before his own death. Yet, somehow, his long reign and what it meant to Rome was his greatest legacy and one that might have avoided a worse destiny for the Roman Empire.
As for Williams’ book, it is clear that he opted for a different path in writing his novel. While his previous novels, Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner, followed a usual narrative style with superb results, Augustus is an epistolary novel, resulting in closer emotional contact with the characters by the reader, and a sense of pertaining to the historical moment as it took place in the world. Yet, the documents that form the novel and give the reader a sense of who was Augustus and what the world was like then, I don’t think I could sense that each person had its own voice, but a single one that spoke for them. I mean, I could not notice different stylistic usages of speech or self-expression, thus Julia’s writing in her journal was no different from Agrippa writing to Augustus, or Cleopatra writing to Marcus Antonius, or Maecenas letters, and even the long letter Augustus writes to Nicolaus of Damascus, and so on. The only difference in these documents was some tone used to differentiate the documents written by the women from that by the men. In some ways, these letters had a melodramatic feeling to it, like Augustus' long letter. And regardless of the fact that Williams wanted to write something different from a historical novel, it ended up reading just like one.
For all of this, I believe the novel didn’t reach its full potential, regardless of the fact that I respect Williams’ options and I admire him even more for that because taking risks is no easy deal in everyday life; just imagine in the literary world, then.
As a final note in relation to John Williams 3 great books, there is this feeling that Stoner, Andrews and Augustus, these three men long for something they can only have a hint of what it is, but hardly apprehend it because fortune has ways that we are not meant to know in advance; it is something much wider than power or money, which are means to something, not its final destination. It is not happiness either, this very contemporary object of desire. It is something closer to a fair and properly lived life.
As for any comparison to Yourcenar’s “Memoirs”, an epistolary book that also deals with the life of a Roman emperor, Hadrian, these are the only two possible connections between the two of them. There's a tendency to see the "Memoirs" as historical fiction, but it is something very different, it is more philosophical than historical or political.
Here is this young man, somehow rejected for a time by his mother and stepfather, brought up by his grandmother, and having to show his great-uncle his worth. As a kind of scholar and a soldier, Octavius became Rome’s first Emperor, the one that brought peace, stability, and prosperity to a vast reign riddled with the corruption and evil ideals of a dying republic. After Augustus, Rome came to be a peaceful and prosperous empire only when the Nerva-Antonino dynasty came to power in A.D. 96. Despite the great mind and political capabilities of Augustus, as any human being who is met with the power to govern upon others, he had to play the political chess he thought to be the best for Rome. Regardless of the conquests he achieved, his biggest failure seems to be the problems he had with his succession, not to mention that some of his chosen successors might have been poised and brought to death before his own death. Yet, somehow, his long reign and what it meant to Rome was his greatest legacy and one that might have avoided a worse destiny for the Roman Empire.
As for Williams’ book, it is clear that he opted for a different path in writing his novel. While his previous novels, Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner, followed a usual narrative style with superb results, Augustus is an epistolary novel, resulting in closer emotional contact with the characters by the reader, and a sense of pertaining to the historical moment as it took place in the world. Yet, the documents that form the novel and give the reader a sense of who was Augustus and what the world was like then, I don’t think I could sense that each person had its own voice, but a single one that spoke for them. I mean, I could not notice different stylistic usages of speech or self-expression, thus Julia’s writing in her journal was no different from Agrippa writing to Augustus, or Cleopatra writing to Marcus Antonius, or Maecenas letters, and even the long letter Augustus writes to Nicolaus of Damascus, and so on. The only difference in these documents was some tone used to differentiate the documents written by the women from that by the men. In some ways, these letters had a melodramatic feeling to it, like Augustus' long letter. And regardless of the fact that Williams wanted to write something different from a historical novel, it ended up reading just like one.
For all of this, I believe the novel didn’t reach its full potential, regardless of the fact that I respect Williams’ options and I admire him even more for that because taking risks is no easy deal in everyday life; just imagine in the literary world, then.
As a final note in relation to John Williams 3 great books, there is this feeling that Stoner, Andrews and Augustus, these three men long for something they can only have a hint of what it is, but hardly apprehend it because fortune has ways that we are not meant to know in advance; it is something much wider than power or money, which are means to something, not its final destination. It is not happiness either, this very contemporary object of desire. It is something closer to a fair and properly lived life.
As for any comparison to Yourcenar’s “Memoirs”, an epistolary book that also deals with the life of a Roman emperor, Hadrian, these are the only two possible connections between the two of them. There's a tendency to see the "Memoirs" as historical fiction, but it is something very different, it is more philosophical than historical or political.