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A review by tessisreading2
Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis
3.0
This was an interesting one - I admire the fact that Davis chose to grapple with slavery, which must surely be one of the more difficult aspects of ancient Roman life for a fiction writer: abhorrent to modern readers, it was taken for granted by Romans. That said, the end result is somewhat discomfiting. The narrator, Flavia Albia, narrowly escaped a life of slavery herself, and knows it; she does not have slaves and prefers to live independently. She is sympathetic to the concerns of slaves. At the same time, the narrative demands of the mystery mean that she can't be too sympathetic to the slaves, and that's where it starts to get dicey: Albia happily pals around with slave owners who complain about the bad attitude of a slave (who was, as Albia admits, forced into her owner's bed probably at puberty, bore him as many as ten children, had all of the children taken from her and sold off, then was scheduled to be sold off herself when her owner remarried), and dislikes the slave herself, in part because she keeps making eyes at men. Albia can't stand women like that, who rely on men for everything, who are not independent! Oh. Well, that's nice. Albia is a Roman citizen with a (probably ahistorically) loving and protective yet independence-granting family, so this is intensely grating to read, and the fact that Albia acknowledges how rough the slave had it doesn't actually help. The power differential makes it difficult to read the conflict neutrally. At the same time, Albia is sympathetic enough (and her voice and attitudes are modern enough) that I think we're supposed to read her as somehow better than the Romans who mistreat their slaves or take them for granted - but Davis doesn't pull that off. I almost wish she'd just gone whole hog and made Albia dislikeable in her attitude towards slaves.
It's very difficult, from the mystery-reader perspective, to view a slave character the same way you view a free character, because the back stories and motivations are so horrifying to the modern reader that murder seems entirely justified. When the novel begins there is a temple full of slaves who are fleeing execution for not preventing the murder of their owners. I mean, from page one they're operating at a disadvantage that makes it hard to view them critically, and the free Romans are working within a system that is horrifyingly unfair. Yet the book read as though we were supposed to be reading these characters the same way we'd be reading, say, suspects in a Sherlock Holmes story - but Victorian servants, at least, would not be facing this kind of arbitrary execution, and at least hypothetically could find new employers. Awful though the situation of Victorian servants was, it's a different level of awful. This level of awful is so high that the narrative just didn't work for me. Like I said, interesting.
It's very difficult, from the mystery-reader perspective, to view a slave character the same way you view a free character, because the back stories and motivations are so horrifying to the modern reader that murder seems entirely justified. When the novel begins there is a temple full of slaves who are fleeing execution for not preventing the murder of their owners. I mean, from page one they're operating at a disadvantage that makes it hard to view them critically, and the free Romans are working within a system that is horrifyingly unfair. Yet the book read as though we were supposed to be reading these characters the same way we'd be reading, say, suspects in a Sherlock Holmes story - but Victorian servants, at least, would not be facing this kind of arbitrary execution, and at least hypothetically could find new employers. Awful though the situation of Victorian servants was, it's a different level of awful. This level of awful is so high that the narrative just didn't work for me. Like I said, interesting.