UPDATE:- You might like to also read “TERROR OF CONSTANTINOPLE”  – the SEQUEL.  Available from 5th February 2009 HERE. You may pre-order!

Book Review by Margaret Richardson

Conspiracies of Rome (order it here now.)

Richard Blake

Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2009, 356pp, £7.99 (pb)

(ISBN 9780340951132)

When released in hardback, this novel was described as “the publishing sensation of 2008”. According to L. Neil Smith, the giant of modern science fiction,

It’s simply the best historical novel I’ve ever read, perhaps short of C.S. Forester. It’s a very great deal better than any of the ancient Roman detective novels I’ve seen.

According to Derek Jacobi, one of the greatest actors of his generation, and star of I Claudius and, with Russell Crowe, of Gladiator,

[It is] fascinating to read, very well written, an intriguing plot and I enjoyed it very much.

The first printing sold out within three days, and the export paperback had to be diverted to the British market to fill the demand. Even so, copies were selling on E-Bay at five times the cover price.

Now available in paperback, the novel is selling faster in W.H. Smith than The Diary of Anne Frank, which has just had an entire week’s outing on the BBC.

What has made this book such a success? Well there is in the first place a very well-constructed plot. Rome in 609 AD. The Empire has fallen. The City itself is rapidly falling into ruins. The streets are blocked with filth and rubble. Killers prowl by night. The Emperor, far off in Constantinople, has other concerns. The Church is the one institution left intact, and is now flexing its own imperial muscle.

But for getting that girl pregnant, and but for King Ethelbert’s “suggestion” that he try his luck elsewhere, Aelric might never have left Kent. Now he is in this post-imperial snake pit—as secretary to Maximin, a priest sent back to gather books for the new English mission.

A chance encounter on the road to Rome sucks them into a mystery. There is fraud. There is pursuit. There is murder after murder. Soon, Aelric is involved in a race against time to find answers. Who is trying to kill him? Where are those letters and what do they contain? Who is the one-eyed man? What significance to all this has the Column of Phocas, the monument just put up in the Forum to celebrate a tyrant’s generosity to Holy Mother Church?

Blundering via lechery, drunkenness, blasphemy, drug abuse, market rigging and pedantry, Aelric at last gets his answer. What he chooses to do with that answer will shape the future history of Europe and the world….

But so much for the plot. If you like historical thrillers, this one is about as good as they get. What I found so striking about the novel is its imaginative reconstruction of a vanished world – but a world that is often disturbingly close to our own.

The sort of Rome we normally read about in historical novels is the Rome of the great days, or at least the Rome of early into its decline. The Empire is still building up, or holding firm, or perhaps in danger of being wrecked by some profligate individual. But this is a Rome after its fall.

Imagine how it must have been to live in Rome during the seventh century. For a thousand years, your city was the centre of the world. For good or ill, everyone looked to your government to see what it would do in any situation. Your ancestors could boast that they were a race of conquerors, of lawgivers, of poets and architects and engineers, that they had imposed their ways and language on a large part of the world. But that is all over.

Your city that was once the capital is now a border town in a continuing Empire that is ruled from elsewhere – an elsewhere run by people who call themselves your heirs or brothers, but who never liked you and who lose no opportunity now to let you know that you are fallen from greatness. All the arts and other ancient virtues are visibly dying. The city is falling, physically as well as morally, into ruins. Your own territory is filled up with often dangerous immigrants who do not share your ways or are actively hostile.

The one flash of brightness is that the city is host to an organisation that exercises a non-military sway over much of the former Empire. Its ideals are different from those of your ancestors. Its personnel are mostly foreign. Such natives as rise high within it do so by suppressing all feeling of patriotism or other local pride. But this remains a great organisation, and it is useful for providing the money that keeps most people alive.

Are there any resonances here? I think there are. But then, if science fiction is often a critique of the present, so too is historical fiction. It allows things to be said openly and bluntly in ways that would not be tolerated in mainstream fiction.

But I come back to my question. What is it like to live in a place from which all its ancient glory has departed? One answer given in Conspiracies of Rome is that life goes on for most people much as before:

Choosing at random, I took one of the exit streets, and walked briskly past arcades of bright, cheerful shops. I’d normally have stopped and looked in these. Rome, you see, wasn’t just a depopulated slum. If much fallen away from its old magnificence, it was still, here and there, by any other standard, a great and wealthy city. There was a continuing demand for goods and services that had to be satisfied somewhere.  And I’d wandered by accident into one of the few districts where life went on much as it always had. But I was in no mood for shopping.

I walked, it seemed forever, through the sometimes crowded, sometimes dead streets of Rome, I stopped at last by one of the crumbling embankments of the Tiber. I sat down on a stone bench and looked across to the far side.

You could see that there had once been elegant gardens there—trees and shrubs brought in from the limits of the known world, carefully arranged paths, little grottoes, and so on but nature had long since reclaimed the site, and I looked over at a jumble of local and exotic foliage that seemed to owe nothing to human action. The vividness of the flowers aside—and that glorious Italian light that even I, in my present frame of mind, couldn’t wholly ignore—it reminded me a little of the forests back home in Kent.

Down by the river, slave women and the poor did their washing. Some children ran in and out of the water. Their faint cries of joy floated up to me on the still, warm air. These joined the louder chattering of the birds across the river. Closer by, the respectable classes of Rome went about their business—exchanging gossip, doing business, getting up an appetite for lunch. I sat watching in the bright, hot sunshine of a day late into the Roman spring. Everything was surprisingly normal.

(pp.148-49)

Life goes one. And where there is life, there is hope. Indeed, while this novel is set after the collapse of a great civilisation, and while the Narrator has no love of the present, there is no simple contrast here between ancient glories and modern squalor. The civilisation that has fallen was grounded at all times and in all respects on systematic exploitation of the weak. Even now, slavery remains an omnipresent fact. Those most attached to the past are also those most attached to the view that slaves are brutes in human form.

Rome has fallen. The world is sinking lower by the year. But one day, the Narrator is convinced, there will be a recovery, and this will be better than what has fallen.

Where there is life, there is hope.

To buy Conspiracies of Rome (Released in paperback on the 8^th January 2009):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Conspiracies-Rome-Richard-Blake/dp/0340951125

To buy The Terror of Constantinople (the sequel, released 5^th February 2009):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Terror-Constantinople-Richard-Blake/dp/0340951141