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A review by tracey_stewart
Roma: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Steven Saylor
2.0
Roma is, as the title indicates, a history of the city following the tangled thread of two families’ stories through (usually) the eldest male child of the clan(s): the possessor of the amulet known as Fascinus. The book begins in 1000 BC (not BCE; huh), when it was simply a campsite among the used by salt traders and other migratory groups on their trade routes, follows the amulet and the families, united in marriage now and then, as they have the brainstorm of creating a settlement on the campsite, as the settlement grows and the name Roma becomes more permanent, as Romulus and Remus rise and fall and Roma becomes a city, as the city expands – all the way up through the first century BC and the murder of Julius Caesar and the reign of Octavius/Augustus. I find it a bit odd, some of the things that the rocks skip over – Caesar’s entire reign, for example…
The Potitii and Pinarii are never the largest figures in their stories, moving in the shadows of such as Scipio, Coriolanus, the twins … Hercules… The chapters are like stones skipped across a lake (or the Tiber), touching down every few years before they drop out of sight and the next one launches out, starting a few dozen or score years later than the last.
Prehistory’s a funny area between fantasy and history; there usually isn’t enough solid data to do more than speculate about the setting, given the fact that it’s called prehistory because it occurred before history could be written down … Five scholars could look at the same evidence from digs and later written sources and such and come up with five very different conclusions. This is speculative fiction at its, for me, least attractive. (I guess I’m just not a huge fan of stone knives and bearskins.)
Gladii and togas (togae?) aren’t my favorite, either, but fascinating when done well. And this isn’t done badly at all. The book is necessarily choppy as the stones skip over decades and centuries over 555 pages and 999 years, with the only constants being the place and Fascinus. The writing is stiff and sometimes redundant – almost unconfident, in the effort that is taken to make sure some points get across, which is strange in that a volume like this had to have taken a lot of sheer dogged confidence. “Show, don’t tell” is largely nonexistent here. The dialogue is fairly natural, but also fairly homogenous. I don’t think there’s much difference to be found between the dialogue of the early Potitii and the later ones, except in what they talk about. The characters … I don’t so much enjoy a book in which I can’t warm up to the characters, and I couldn’t here, between the brief rock-skips in which they appear and the fact that they mostly just (whether it’s the different mores and such of ancient Rome or simply a reader-writer disconnect) aren’t very likeable. Which in a way I suppose is just as well; it would be awful to love one set of characters only to be wrenched away to another set, and another, and another … So it’s not a bad thing that I just simply do not like these people.
The main thing I can’t enjoy is the sheer bloodthirstiness of the times. It’s easy to lose track of just how civilized we are now, until immersed in something like this. Two thousand years ago, apparently, it was perfectly fine to reassure a child by telling him that his uncle had escaped from the nasty pirates and then hunted them down and crucified them. It was also considered unfortunate but pretty much okay that three hundred men were executed here, a couple hundred men, women, and children there, heads placed on spikes and thousands enslaved. That’s the thing – it’s not only the blood and slavery and rape and mutilation – it’s the attitude toward all of this. It’s all normal.
The format of the book is much like Peter Ackroyd’s London, and Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, which I read last year and … felt very much the same about as I do Roma. I have a hard time looking at a book like this as a novel; but it isn’t a history either, despite what I’m learning. It’s an instructive time-travelogue.
The Potitii and Pinarii are never the largest figures in their stories, moving in the shadows of such as Scipio, Coriolanus, the twins … Hercules… The chapters are like stones skipped across a lake (or the Tiber), touching down every few years before they drop out of sight and the next one launches out, starting a few dozen or score years later than the last.
Prehistory’s a funny area between fantasy and history; there usually isn’t enough solid data to do more than speculate about the setting, given the fact that it’s called prehistory because it occurred before history could be written down … Five scholars could look at the same evidence from digs and later written sources and such and come up with five very different conclusions. This is speculative fiction at its, for me, least attractive. (I guess I’m just not a huge fan of stone knives and bearskins.)
Gladii and togas (togae?) aren’t my favorite, either, but fascinating when done well. And this isn’t done badly at all. The book is necessarily choppy as the stones skip over decades and centuries over 555 pages and 999 years, with the only constants being the place and Fascinus. The writing is stiff and sometimes redundant – almost unconfident, in the effort that is taken to make sure some points get across, which is strange in that a volume like this had to have taken a lot of sheer dogged confidence. “Show, don’t tell” is largely nonexistent here. The dialogue is fairly natural, but also fairly homogenous. I don’t think there’s much difference to be found between the dialogue of the early Potitii and the later ones, except in what they talk about. The characters … I don’t so much enjoy a book in which I can’t warm up to the characters, and I couldn’t here, between the brief rock-skips in which they appear and the fact that they mostly just (whether it’s the different mores and such of ancient Rome or simply a reader-writer disconnect) aren’t very likeable. Which in a way I suppose is just as well; it would be awful to love one set of characters only to be wrenched away to another set, and another, and another … So it’s not a bad thing that I just simply do not like these people.
The main thing I can’t enjoy is the sheer bloodthirstiness of the times. It’s easy to lose track of just how civilized we are now, until immersed in something like this. Two thousand years ago, apparently, it was perfectly fine to reassure a child by telling him that his uncle had escaped from the nasty pirates and then hunted them down and crucified them. It was also considered unfortunate but pretty much okay that three hundred men were executed here, a couple hundred men, women, and children there, heads placed on spikes and thousands enslaved. That’s the thing – it’s not only the blood and slavery and rape and mutilation – it’s the attitude toward all of this. It’s all normal.
The format of the book is much like Peter Ackroyd’s London, and Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, which I read last year and … felt very much the same about as I do Roma. I have a hard time looking at a book like this as a novel; but it isn’t a history either, despite what I’m learning. It’s an instructive time-travelogue.