...and a book

[winterbadger]

31. Roma by Steven Saylor. My mother was very fond of Edward Rutherford's historical novels, which are each of them set in a place and track the lives of people there over centuries. I tried one and didn't care for it at all; he didn't strike me as a very good writer.

In Roma, Steven Saylor gives the city of Rome the same treatment, in my opinion to better effect. I like his Roma Sub Rosa novels, detective stories set in the late Republic, very much. This isn't as good (I think I just don't think the whole place-over-time novel idea works very well), but parts of it are engaging, and he does a good job of tracing some of the important events in Roman history and working them into the narrative (it really took me back to my undergrad class in Roman studies). I'd give it a solid three stars out of five.

I need to polish off some of my low-hanging fruit (the half-dozen or so books I've half-read) if I'm going to get close to 50 at this rate...

Comments

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

I read his Dublin Saga book. Hated it so, so much. I agree the format is unwieldy and not really very interesting. I kinda thought it was a cool concept until I read it.

[winterbadger]

The only way it works, IMO, is as a series of related short stories. Which means, inter alia, you have to be a good short-story writer. From my brief acquaintance with him, Rutherfurd isn't.

The business of trying to connect the stories not only through the place but by having characters in each generation be part of the same family or families is, IMO, a weakness rather than a selling point. It's a contrivance, and I find pointless contrivances in books somewhat conceited and very annoying. Saylor isn't too tiresome about it (he even kills off one family line partway through the book), but it seems unnecessary and forced (in the same way that the little foreshadowings of Christianty he throws in at the end are, to my eye, contrived and twee).

As I've said before in reviews, I've come to loathe the practice of trying to insert famous historical (or, in other books, literary) characters into the ambits of the fictional figures (instead of just writing about them themselves). It generally comes off as heavy-handed and clumsy, like the president or an archbishop or a rock star showing up in an established TV drama or sitcom and then breaking the fourth wall to deliver a 'personal' message ("What happened to Johnny could happen to you or me; remember kids,...") Saylor can manage these OK for the most part, but even in his book it becomes wearisome. Really, members of this family that isn't recorded in history anywhere were related to or friends with every single Roman ruler for 700 years. Really?

I'm kind of sorry to see he's written a companion volume covering the Empire. I don't plan on rushing out to buy it.