Rome trilogy, by Robert Harris
3.0 Stars
6-30-2022
A solidly written and occasionally moving but also somewhat awkward series of books.
From one angle, these books are what happens when someone gets a detailed classical education and decides to take the historical info that they learned for their degree & transform it into plot points for their novel. I'm not a Cicero scholar, but I would not be surprised if every single historical fact that is known about the man makes its way into these novels in some form. So this gives the novel some awkwardness, as the story is not driven as much by narrative concerns as it is by the surviving historical record. Does Cicero serve a governship for several years, of which no real records survive? Then the novels skip over those years with just a paragraph or two about how they were not exciting & memorable. Does Cicero try a minor court case over 2 weeks, where records of the court case survive? Great, there's now a 5-20 page section in the novel about that court case. And so on. Another artifact of this method of novel generation is that these books are absolutely *crammed* with plot. There's so much plot. So much. So these novels read differently than most, as they are almost like a transcription of a game of Republic of Rome rather than a story with a definite arc. I am in general a fan of plot & so I mind this extremely plot driven stories less than most, but it does make the novels much more dense than you would expect from the page count.
From another angle, these books are a Hamilton-like story of ambitious man makes good through a combination of intellect, hard work, luck, and marrying into money. Unlike Hamilton though it has almost a horror-story vibe, as the initial rise of the protagonist is mirrored by his eventual fall, and then further fall, as he and his society descend through deeper and deeper levels of violence, chaos, and barbarity. It is kind of a tough read? Like the main character has completely failed & has zero real hope, but there's still another book & 400 more pages to go. In addition to it being a tough read, you could also criticize the book on the grounds that it centered on the absolute elites of Roman society, and that while Cicero is bemoaning the increasing lawlessness & violence around him, he is eliding the fact that every other aspect of his society is already built & maintained by enormous levels of violence. E.g. the massive wealth inequality between citizens, the ubiquitous slavery of non-citizens, and the utter rapacity towards conquered and foreign territories that allows the center to maintain its standard of living. The author isn't blind to this; he does tell the story through the words of Cicero's private secretary & slave, and it does mention Cicero's own briberies and corruptions as well as the atrocities committed by various other Roman figures. And yes, Lawful Evil is probably a better way to run a society than pure Chaotic Evil, and yes small bubbles of law existing is better than no law at all. But still, the story is not so much "The fall of the noble Republic" as it is "society converting from 95% brutality to 98% brutality". It is not quite as effective as it might otherwise be. Doubly so since so many of the new problems in the story are the result of old entrenched evils within the Republic, e.g. you have the Roman Senate who absolutely refuses to make any concessions to starving citizens, or to give up any land to the soldiers who have spent 20 years fighting their wars. And since the Senate/oligarchy will not make concessions due to their unyielding and inflexible greed, ambitious generals and future dictators are left to claim these low-hanging fruits. Oh right, another downer, you don't have to read too hard to find parallels to our own time. These books were written in 2006 & by a British guy, so they don't have any direct references to US politics except for some extremely dry and gentle jabs at the War on Terror. But there's plenty of less direct inferences to be read. Where's our student loan forgiveness, Biden? Hmmm? Hmmm?
So, that has been a lot of criticisms. The thing is, while many of Harris' stories have macro level problems, at the level of sentence-to-sentence and scene-to-scene he's quite a skilled writer. He consistently has well written & well described characters that you care about doing interesting things. So in many ways these books are an easy, if slow, read. Also, the fish ponds. So many wonderful fish & eel ponds. All I really want after reading these books is a pool of giant fat eels bedecked in gold jewelry.
(interesting factoid from the book: the Roman's made explicit what we only imply, and require a Senator to show proof of ungodly wealth before they could be admitted to the Senate)