The Little Emperors, by Alfred Duggan. Book review

The Little Emperors is set in Britain in AD 405–411 and tells the story of the decline of Roman government in the diocese of Britannia.*

This book paints a convincing picture of the end of Roman administration in Britain. No cataclysmic barbarian invasion. No official withdrawal of the legions. Instead, the political class destroys itself in internecine squabbles and ill-judged military adventures, while the rest of the population ignores them and gets on with life.

The central character is Felix, the Praeses (treasurer) of Britannia Prima, based in London. He is trying to balance the government books, despite a moribund economy and constant demands for extra military spending. Preoccupied with bureaucratic minutiae, Felix finds himself embroiled in a succession of ever more disastrous military coups. First his wily British father-in-law, Gratianus, conspires to declare Britannia independent of the rest of the Roman Empire and elevates a soldier called Marcus to Emperor of Britannia. Marcus proves to be an unsatisfactory puppet, so Gratianus and his daughter, Felix’s wife, assassinate Marcus and replace him with Gratianus. Felix, who is not nearly as good at high politics as he thinks he is, now finds himself surplus to their requirements and in danger of assassination himself.

Meanwhile, the machinery of Roman administration in Britain is grinding to a halt under its own weight. Progressively less of the island is under the control of the Emperor of Britannia, and progressively more is handed over to ‘barbarian’ client kings, who very soon stop being clients. Poor Felix slowly comes to realise not only that his orderly bureaucratic world has ended, but that it was irrelevant to most of the population in the first place.

The character of Felix, the pompous, well-meaning civil servant getting increasingly out of his depth, is very well drawn. All the events are told from Felix’s perspective, and as he is a stoical individual who doesn’t like hurry or excitement, some readers may find the pace a little slow, although I thought it suited the book. I would have liked to see some other perspectives on the collapse of the Roman governmental system. Apart from a peasant family, who seem blissfully unaware of all the political turmoil, we only see the effect on Felix and his political colleagues. How did it affect the craftsmen and traders? Did the client kings consciously manoeuvre for power or did it fall to them by default? How did the less-Romanised or non-Romanised populations in other parts of the island react? But these questions are outside the scope of the book.

One very welcome feature is a helpful Historical Note, in which the author sets out what is documented history (not very much) and what he made up to fill in the gaps. Much appreciated by this reader.

An excellent read for anyone interested in the end of Roman administration in Britain.

*Note: at this time, Roman Britain was a diocese divided into five provinces, of which the most important was centred on London. Alfred Duggan calls this province Britannia Prima. Other historians have argued that Britannia Prima was elsewhere and the London province was called Maxima Caesariensis, but this doesn’t matter for this book.

Has anyone else read this? What did you think? And have I covered the sorts of things you find helpful to see in a book review?

The Blookreader Awards

If you haven't already heard about it, you may like to know that Bill Liversidge has generously started a new literary award on his blog View From The Pundy House: The Blookreader Awards. It has two highly unusual features.

First, it rewards the reader rather than the writer. If you read an online book, write a review of no more than 200 words and post it as a comment on Bill's blog, you are eligible to win book tokens worth £100, £50 or £25. I'm not sure if book tokens are international or UK-specific, but don't let that put you off; I'm sure he'd think of something if the winner happens to live somewhere where book tokens don't work.

Second, the book you review has to be published online. It can be on a website, or a downloadable e-book, or a book published on a blog (apparently this is called a blook, hence the award title). But it has to be online. Printed books don't count.

The full rules and the entries so far can be found on Bill's blog.

Can't think of an online book to review? Bill has a helpful list in one of his posts, and he's been adding others so it's worth scrolling through the recent posts. He also has a blook of his own, A Half Life of One. I mentioned some earlier. You can find a long list of free online novels at Free Online Novels.com.

Here's a suggestion that might appeal specifically to readers of historical fiction: Octavia Randolph's Ceridwen trilogy set in England at the time of Alfred the Great's war with the Danes. All three books are available on her website www.Octavia.net, together with a novella about Lady Godiva.

I've submitted an entry on The Circle of Ceridwen, Book 1 of Octavia Randolph's trilogy, as follows:

Lady Ceridwen had a strange fate
As maid to Viking chieftain's mate
She was wooed by a Dane
Bravely rescued a thane
Married him and met Alfred the Great

Come on, I'm sure you can do better than that. Why not pick an online book that appeals to you and give the competition a go? Publicise it on your own blogs. Spread the word. It's not often that you get offered a chance to win £100 to spend on books, just for the pleasure of reading something and writing a review of it. The closing date for the Blookreader Awards is 31st March 2006. Don't forget to take a look at Bill's blook A Half Life of One while you're there.

Narrative causality and the seven basic plots

Not as catchy a title as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but never mind. I'm indebted to Sarah for the reminder of Christopher Booker's book The Seven Basic Plots. I confess I haven't read it, nor at 700+ pages of heavyweight philosophy am I likely to, but I remembered reading a review when it came out, so I went and found it (Three cheers for Google and the Guardian archive). The review helpfully listed the seven plots. They are: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth.

Now, I don't know about you, but these seven 'plots' seem to me to be very generalised. They remind me of the statements in horoscopes (Something significant will happen to you this week. You should look for and seize an opportunity. You will experience conflicts and setbacks but you must persevere).

Apparently Booker then further distils these seven basic plots down to "master-narratives, one inspirational and one cautionary - comedy and tragedy. In comedy, proportion is restored and the ego overcome; in tragedy, distortion becomes so severe that the ego that suffers it must be destroyed for the renewal of the wider order. Proper stories end in marriage or death." The review is worth reading in its entirety because there are some interesting ideas in it, at least at the heady level of coffee-at-midnight student discussions when the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything feels almost within your grasp. I suspect that trying to apply it in practice would have the same sobering effect as a nine-o'clock lecture.

Perhaps Terry Pratchett's narrative causality and Booker's Seven Basic Plots are drawing on the same things in human psychology. The human brain is very good at finding patterns, and arguably a story is a kind of pattern. However, they don't seem quite the same to me. The concept of Seven Basic Plots (or three, or thirty, or whatever number) is about classifying and analysing. What plot(s) is this? Where does it fit? Does it follow the rules for that plot(s)? Whereas what I took from 'narrative causality' was the sense that a story can take on a 'life' of its own and find its own satisfactory shape. I couldn't begin to define that concept in any detail, but I recognised it.

It may be significant that Booker's title is 'Plots', whereas Pratchett talks about story. I interpret the two to mean slightly different things. Many books seem to me to have plot in abundance but not much story. Mechanical thrillers (and action films), for example, or plodding sub-Tolkien epic fantasies that have 600 pages of plot but no story. I'd guess that the mystery series The Toff (apparently an inferior imitation of The Saint) that Bernita was discussing recently had plenty of plot, whereas The Saint had story. Plot can be planned, organised and analysed. Story is some ill-defined but distinctive spark of narrative life, or some satisfying sense of rightness or completeness.

Needless to say, everyone has their own view of what counts as satisfying, so one person's plot is another's story, just as one person's cliche is another's classic and one person's life-changing book is another's empty read.

Does this make sense? Have you read books with 'plot' but no 'story'? Or the other way round?

Narrative causality

In the discussion about implausible coincidences in plots, Rick said:

"Though maybe it is much the same thing as the current convention by which the hero defuses the bomb just as the bright red timer readout reaches 00:00:01."

I said I thought this was an example of Terry Pratchett's concept of narrative causality and promised to post an extract. Here you go:

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling...stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.

Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.

[...]

Normally the future is branching off at every turn and it's only possible to have the haziest idea of what is likely to happen. But here there were stories coiled around the tree of events, bending it into a new shape.

-Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett

This concept seems to me to be much more complex than deus ex machina, where events are altered by the interference of some external power, whether that be Fate, Providence, the gods or the author. The story itself has a desired and desirable shape.

Does this concept explain why some plot twists and some endings 'feel right' while others don't, as Ian Hocking and Bernita have both been discussing recently? The hero has to save the world in the nick of time, because it wouldn't feel right if he failed, or if he succeeded with several days to spare. Success in the nick of time is a pleasing story shape, in the same way that some geometric shapes are inherently pleasing to the eye, such as the 'golden ratio'.

Does it also explain why the beginning is always the hardest part to write, since the story hasn't yet got a shape?

What do you think?

The Virgin Queen. TV review

Well, well, you wait thirty years for a TV drama series about Elizabeth I and then two come along at once. I wonder if someone noticed in 2003 that it was the 400th anniversary of Elizabeth's death and this is the production lag? First up was Channel 4's drama Elizabeth, screened before Christmas. I missed the first episode so can't comment on that, but I watched the rest. I recall being mildly annoyed by some of the (to my mind) over-dramatic non-events, such as having Elizabeth meet Mary Queen of Scots in person (at least they made it a clandestine visit), having Elizabeth narrowly escape assassination by a knife-wielding Catholic, and having Elizabeth present at Robert Dudley's deathbed. But none of these mattered to the story, and Helen Mirren's superb portrayal of Elizabeth outshone any such minor quibbles.

So how did The Virgin Queen compare? On the evidence of the first episode, I would say it's not brilliant, but it's not bad either. The script was free of annoying dialogue, though I thought it was rather low on complexity and depth. I didn't get a strong sense of Elizabeth as a clever young woman surviving the aftermath of the Wyatt rebellion by her own wits, or of a keen political mind playing off factions, or of the deeply divided country she inherited. Elizabeth came over as a girl who happened to outlive her sister, rather than one who made her own fate.

Despite the dark, grainy shots of Traitors' Gate, dungeons and torture chambers, the Tower didn't conjure up for me the intended sense of dread. I got no strong sense that Elizabeth really feared she was about to die; perhaps the script was intended to show her being calm under pressure, but if so it didn't work for me. Sometimes the script also seemed excessively obvious; for example, it reminded us of Anne Boleyn's fate by having Elizabeth find her name carved on the wall of her chamber in the Tower. Compare that with the lines in Elizabeth R that do the equivalent job, which run something like "I shall have a swordsman from France. She could not deny me that. There is a precedent." Much more subtle, and to my mind much more effective.

Anne-Marie Duff made a convincing Elizabeth, although I didn't feel that the script gave her as much to work with as it could have. There seemed to be rather less steel in this Elizabeth and rather more of the giddy girl.

For me, the big disappointment was the portrayal of Robert Dudley. Given the series title, I imagine that Elizabeth's love life or lack thereof is going to be a key thread in this drama. For that to work, you need a powerful screen presence for Robert Dudley. I assume that if you're reading this blog you already know the story, but if not, Robert Dudley was widely believed at the time to be Elizabeth's lover, and their relationship (whatever its details) scandalised the courts of Europe and made ELizabeth deeply unpopular in her own country. Unless Elizabeth was a very silly woman, Robert Dudley must have exercised a tremendous attraction for her to risk her throne for him. In a TV drama, this demands that the actor has to be alpha-male hot. He should make the cathode ray tube sizzle and the remote control swoon. In James Bond terms, we're talking Sean Connery, at least. You know what I mean, ladies. So what possessed the casting director to choose someone who looks more like Roger Moore's kid brother? Tom Hardy does his best with the role, but he simply looks far too young for the part. He looks like a pampered boy, not even old enough to be married, let alone to be a charismatic adventurer bent on royal adultery. The script gives him no help either; he is made to say to Elizabeth that he married his wife because his father told him to. Not very alpha-male, poor boy. Unless later episodes reveal some hidden depths, I'm afraid I'm not going to find this a very convincing relationship. (Channel 4 cast Jeremy Irons, by the way. Now that's more like it).

Has anyone else seen either or both? (I make no apologies for insularity this time; both these series have 'Export' written all over them). What did you think?

Greenmantle. Radio review

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatic adaptation of John Buchan's Greenmantle on Mon 26 and Tue 27 December 2005. Thanks to the marvels of technology, both episodes are available for the time being on the BBC's excellent Listen Again service, on the Classic Serial page.

I read Greenmantle a long time ago when as a not-quite-teenager I discovered the books of John Buchan, Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle at the local town library and got hooked on their adventure stories. Strictly speaking these don't count as historical fiction because they were contemporary when written, but never mind. I have fond memories of Greenmantle as a derring-do spy story in which our hero Richard Hannay foils a dastardly German spy plot in the Middle East around the time of the First World War. (I wonder if there's an equivalent cadre of popular German fiction from the period in which clean-cut German heroes foil dastardly British plots? I'd be most interested to hear from anyone who knows). Certainly that's how Radio 4 pitched the adaptation in their trailers. However, it turned out to be a disappointment.

All the heroes seemed to be identikit upper-class, stiff-upper-lip, I-say-steady-on-old-chap jolly good fellows, even the Dutchman and the American. The villain was a stereotyped bull-necked Hun. The principal female character, German aristocrat Hilda von Einem, was a mysterious, beautiful, enigmatic ice maiden with some mystical power over men and a plan for world domination, who reminded me irresistibly of CS Lewis's White Witch of Narnia. Not necessarily a problem so far; I don't go to a John Buchan spy story for subtle or complex characters.

But I do expect a rattling good yarn, and that seemed to be missing. The set-up was promising - German agents are trying to stir up a holy war against Britain in the Middle East; the only clue is a mysterious code scribbled on a scrap of paper by a dying British spy; Richard Hannay and friends are despatched across war-torn Europe to Constantinople in a desperate race against time to crack the code and foil the plot. But the most exciting thing that happened in the whole of the first episode (the journey across war-torn Europe) was a rather lacklustre fist-fight between Richard Hannay and the villainous Hun. The plot relied on a string of implausible coincidences; Richard Hannay's journey happens to bring him into contact with the Hun villain; he overhears a conversation that links Hilda von Einem to part of the code; he and the Dutchman get lost while out hunting and happen to walk into Hilda von Einem's villa to ask the way; he happens to look into the Hun villain's study (which conveniently happens to have shutters that don't meet) at just the moment that the villain is studying a map of vital strategic importance and just then the villain happens to walk out of the study so that Hannay can break in through the ill-fitting shutters and steal the map. Oh, please. By this time I'd given up and picked up my embroidery. The Russians came into it later, there was a battle, the villains all got killed and that was the end.

I shall have to re-read Greenmantle and find out whether my memory is at fault, or whether it's suffered in the adaptation process. Did anyone else hear the adaptation? Anyone else read the book?

Balderdash and Piffle: TV review

Balderdash and Piffle is a new BBC TV series exploring the origin and use of English words. It has a magazine format, with the main presenter Victoria Coren and various guest presenters each doing a piece on the origin of a particular word, interspersed with numerous short spots in which celebrities choose their favourite word and explain why they like it in about one sentence.

So far, the series has been consistently excellent. Victoria Coren is an intelligent and interested presenter. The guest presenters vary from charming to ebullient to erudite to irritatingly bumptious. Some of the stunts have real style; the first episode featured a Tiger Moth doing aerobatics to illustrate an appealing (but, sadly, unproven) derivation of the phrase 'pear-shaped'. Here are some of the other highlights from the first two episodes.

Ian Hislop, of Private Eye fame, demonstrating the principles of 'management-speak', complete with multicoloured Powerpoint presentation. I am normally sceptical about the concept of immutable 'rules' in writing, but management-speak suits rules. Here they are:
1. Take a noun (incentive)
2. Verbify it (incentivise)
3. Add some extraneous words - adverbs are good (proactively incentivise)
4. Convert to the passive voice (the team will be proactively incentivised)
5. Get the word 'stakeholders' in somehow (for the benefit of all our stakeholders, the team will be proactively incentivised)
Anyone who's worked in or for a corporation in the last 20 years will recognise this language; for anyone who hasn't, regular reading of Dilbert should help.

'Ploughman's Lunch' is not a traditional meal going back to the dawn of time, but was invented by a marketing executive in 1961 to increase sales of cheese (this has long been rumoured, but Victoria Coren unearthed documentary evidence and proved it).

In Old English, the word 'man' meant 'human' and did not become gender-specific until much later. Moreover, it goes back thousands of years to Sanskrit, and (rather wonderfully) is cognate with the same root as the word 'mind'.

A thought-provoking, informative and entertaining programme. A delight. I hope there's a second series.

For those of you who live beyond the shores of this sceptred isle and are shaking your heads at me for an insular Brit ('Fog in Channel. Continent cut off,' as the [apocryphal?] newspaper headline has it), there is a point to this post. If you think Balderdash and Piffle sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth, which also explores the origin and use of English words in all their infinite variety. When there's a series being broadcast, the most recent episode is available over the Internet for a week after the broadcast (look under 'W' on the Listen Again page). You don't get the stunts, but you do get twice the content in half the time. Radio is like that. Whether by accident or design, the current edition (Sunday 15 January) also had an item on management-speak, called by their contributor 'Office English' or 'Offlish', and featuring that most diverting of corporate entertainments, Buzzword Bingo.