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The Roman Revolution
Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press, 1939

As impossible as it seems, Ronald Syme’s classic study of ancient Rome, The Roman Revolution, turns 70 in 2009. The difficulty of taking this in stems not from mere temporality (seventy years being, as everyone knows, an unimaginably long time) but from the nature of the work itself: the lively insight and exquisitely controlled anger of The Roman Revolution read as fresh and vital today as they did when the book was first published.

Certainly the experience of reading it is every bit as invigorating as ever. Syme took a particular style of writing history – overlaying a sparse, almost telegraphic voice on a consummate mastery of the whole of the classical canon – and polished it to a level of art unseen in the writing of classical history since Gibbon laid down his pen. It’s a muscular, incredibly assured style, achieved through meticulous self-editing, and it everywhere reveals a keen ear for the perfect little twist of a concluding point, as in describing the Roman world’s last piecemeal surrender to dictatorship:

And now for a moment a delusive ray of hope shone upon the sinking hulk of the Republic. Two veteran legions from Africa arrived at Ostia. Along with a legion of recruits they were stationed on the Janiculum and the city was put in a posture of defence. Whether the Senate now declared Octavianus a public enemy is not recorded: these formalities were coming to matter less and less. Octavianus marched down the Flaminian Way and entered the city unopposed. The legions of the Republic went over without hesitation. A praetor committed suicide. That was the only bloodshed. The senators advanced to make their peace with Octavianus; among them, but not in the forefront, was Cicero. ‘Ah, the last of my friends,’ the young man observed.

Syme attempts to float the same standard dispassionate phraseology that historians of the 20th century typically employ, but he doesn’t try too hard; though The Roman Revolution is in many ways a stunning work of historical detachment, it’s never difficult to tell where Syme’s likes and dislikes fall. He loathes Cleopatra, for instance, and drips a quizzical contempt all over her besotted lover Antony. And his richest ambiguities he saves for the central character of his narrative, the willowy, hypocritical twentysomething Octavian, whose cynical attempts to re-invent himself as the benevolent dictator Augustus draw repeated jabs from our historian, who’s no fan of fascism:

Special commands were no novelty, no scandal. The strictest champion of constitutional propriety might be constrained to concede their necessity. If the grant of extended imperium in the past had threatened the stability of the State, that was due to the ruinous ambition of politicians who sought power illegally and held it for glory and for profit. Rival dynasts rent the Empire apart and destroyed the Free State. Their sole survivor, as warden of the more powerful of the armed provinces, stood as a guarantee against any recurrence of the anarchy out of which his dominion had arisen.

But Augustus was to be consul as well as proconsul, year after year without a break. The supreme magistracy, though purporting no longer to convey enhanced powers, as after the end of the Triumvirate, still gave him the means to initiate and direct public policy at Rome if not to control through consular imperium the proconsuls abroad. For such cumulation of powers a close parallel from the recent past might properly have been invoked: it is pretty clear that it was not.

(The unforgiving starkness of this becomes all the more evident when contrasted with the rhetoric used in standard biographies of Augustus, like this from a work popular when Syme’s book came out: “As he [Augustus] went on there gradually awoke in him a nobler ambition, that of restoring and directing a distracted state. Neither now nor afterward do the more vulgar attributes of supreme power – wealth, luxury, and adulation – seem to have had charms for him.” After Syme, such innocence was no longer critically tenable).

Watching how Syme handles all his sources –watching the intricate, hitherto unseen connections and uprootings that he effects by sifting through everything so carefully (he’ll find a passing comment in an epic poem that sheds light on legionary cooking techniques, or a well-known paragraph from Cicero that can be read in a startling new way) – is at once humbling and exciting, and it’s no wonder The Roman Revolution has cast such a long shadow. The subject matter – the carefully-implemented plan by which Octavian took sole, personal control of the Roman Empire (and the equally careful plan to prevent the Romans from realizing the full import of what he was doing) – has been taken up many times by many historians in the ensuing seventy years. Syme’s masterpiece is in all their bibliographies, and most of those later histories of Augustus or the end of the Roman Republic would have been unthinkable had not Syme so impeccably paved the way.

The sobering fact is how little any of those later books manage to offer even a small amplification of Syme. Even now, The Roman Revolution is the first, best modern history of Rome’s preventable and misunderstood transition from Republic to Empire. Surely a Penguin Classic of it is finally in order?

Steve Donoghue

Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England
Maria Hayward
Ashgate Publishing, 2009

Henry VIII issued four sets of sumptuary laws during his reign, in 1510, 1514, 1515, and 1533, each designed to place restrictions on what kinds of clothing (made from what kinds of materials) his subjects could wear. Warnings were frequent, like the one issued in 1520 in preparation for Henry’s meeting with France’s king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold: “All noblemen and others are to be apparelled according to their degrees, and no man must presume to wear apparel above his degree.”
Such warnings in such numbers were necessary (at least from the royal point of view) because 16th century England saw an explosion of ways to warrant them. The traditional strata of feudal society – the king, the nobility, the clergy, and then pretty much everybody else – were rapidly blurring as more and more of the ‘middling’ sort, lawyers, businessmen, traders and the like, were amassing fortunes and land holdings great enough to give them aspirations their grandfathers would scarcely have dreamt. Henry VIII was not hidebound enough to scorn employing such men, even swelling their fortunes – but their increasing power made him all the more protective of his own. And then as now, a great deal of power lay in perception.
Maria Hayward does remarkable, often eye-opening spadework on this subject in her comprehensive new book Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (solidly put together by Ashgate Publishing). She focuses her study first on the pinnacle of English power, the king – who was, as she shrewdly points out, “the one individual for whom there were no clothing constraints” – and then on downward, through the landed nobility, the clergy, and spreading out to that burgeoning mercantile class. She scrutinizes wills, estate inventories, guild regulations, import and export figures, and of course she’s as grateful as everybody else for the scrupulous details preserved in the paintings and sketches of court artists like Hans Holbein. Her goal is to lay before the reader as wide and detailed a picture of the role apparel played in Tudor times as the primary sources will allow, and she succeeds admirably.
Readers should be cautioned that this is expository, almost testamentary historical writing – there is no unifying narrative, no bursts of rhetorical fireworks, no argumentative conclusions. It can often be quite technical too, although here it’s uniformly saved by Haywood’s clear, evocative prose:

Taffetas and sarsenets originated in the East but by the fourteenth century were being woven in a number of Italian cities. Both were lightweight, thin silk fabrics that were often used for linings. Both could be woven incorporating metal threads, often to produce a striped effect. Taffeta could also be produced as a shot, tabby weave (with the warp and weft a different color to produce a slightly iridescent effect).

Rich Apparel contains many charts, and its appendixes feature the texts of several Tudor wills and inventories – coming after so many pages of Haywood’s astute use of their contents, the documents themselves prove unexpectedly interesting. The guiding intelligence here makes the entire book interesting, although the steep incline of the scholarship may deter all but the most dedicated fans of the Tudor era. The book’s one major shortcoming (an utterly astounding one, given the subject matter) is that aside from the cover portrait of insufferable hatchet-faced Tudor moneymaker wunderkind Thomas Gresham, none of the book’s other illustrations is in color. True, color plates would add to Rich Apparel’s already considerable price tag, but considering the fact that clothing’s appearance is at the very heart of Haywood’s topic, the addition would certainly be worthwhile in future editions.

Steve Donoghue

Girl Mary

Petru Popescu

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Simon & Schuster, 2009

Nothing in Romanian author Petru Popsecu’s best-selling anthropological thriller Almost Adam (in which a team of scientists finds a population of pre-human hominids living in Africa) could have prepared the reader for his stunning, utterly unforgettable new novel Girl Mary. This is a historical novel about a beautiful, opinionated young Judean girl living two thousand years ago on the fringe of the Roman empire, but of course the dramatic catch is that the girl is named Mary, and although she’s in love with the much older, stable Joseph, she must fend off the advances of two other suitors: an ambitious young Roman named Pontius Pilate, and God.

The book is told in poetically sparse prose, and although Popescu pays careful attention to all his various plot-strands, the one that clearly commands his deepest interest is the unfolding relationship between Mary and this half-visible, very old, compellingly inscrutable deity who’s taken an interest in her. The key to this is that she’s interested in Him as well, more so the more she gets to know Him:

Then I glimpsed his riddle, but it was even more puzzling than I had imagined. What had really happened, between him and us? He made us, so as to free himself from aloneness. But when we disappointed him, why was he not done with us? For obviously, he was not!

God cautions her from the depths of His immeasurable experience, asking her “What do you want, Mary, power? That comes with loneliness. Mine is the greatest loneliness. You don’t want that.” But as the story progresses, what Mary wants most is for the world God has created to make some sense to her, perhaps to contain a little justice, and it becomes increasingly clear to her that neither God nor the male-dominated Roman empire understands these concepts. The passages in which Mary identifies with that other archetypal Biblical woman, Eve, are among the book’s most fierce:

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This is me, a mere womb. That’s all I have to sell, all I have to trade. The road to it, between my skinny legs, a man could become tired of it in one night. That’s the way between men and women. But let me ask you, when was it decided that it should be that way? When you and the man were alone in the garden, and he still had all his ribs? And how was it decided? Did he say, Yes, Lord, my rib goes to her, but all else goes to me? Yes, Lord? Did you reply, Yes, that sounds fair, First Man. Done. And now lie down so that I may put you to sleep, to get that rib out of you. Won’t take even a whole day of creation. You’re asleep now? I’m tearing you open to take her out. Are you here, First Woman, all packed in one rib? Pay attention, I shall recite your rights: Be second to the man, and when you have children, be second to them, too.

As you can see, there’s great anger running through Girl Mary. There’s also great beauty and a breathtaking semaphore-clarity and (amazing juggling feat) a plot of imperial intrigue gripping enough for any fan of Popescu’s more formulaic earlier work. In short, it’s a tour de force. Don’t miss it.

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– Steve Donoghue

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Greg Ames
Hyperion, 2009

buy Boat Trip The worst, most complicated and draining kind of tragedy has struck the family of James, the narrator of Greg Ames’ deftly accomplished debut novel Buffalo Lockjaw

. Talented, outspoken, wise, and witty Ellen, James’ mother, has developed Alzheimer’s. After years of talking more or less seriously about taking her own life rather than suffer such a fate, Ellen has waited too long and is now incapable of killing herself – or doing much of anything else, including recognizing her husband or James, who returns home to Buffalo with dark ideas of “helping” his mother to commit suicide.

While he’s in back in town, he re-connects not only with his stern, pragmatic father (easily the book’s most involving character, apart from the magnificent Ellen herself, seen in flashbacks) but with a wide spectrum of old home-town cronies, friends, enemies, and ex-girlfriends. A fracture-line runs throughout the novel, weakening each half: Ames means this to be both a Buffalo novel and an Alzheimer’s novel, and if he’d had Ellen dying of liver cancer, it might have worked. But Alzheimer’s is too personal (James watches nurses change his mother’s diapers, he looks into her unchanged face and sees no hint of recognition there), and Ellen is too compelling – they take the typical novelist-settling-scores-with-his-hometown and push it right off the stage. Whenever Ames writes about this family struggle, his prose snaps into focus:

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I’m still confused. He has signed a number of legal documents – the do-not-resuscitate forms, the no-life-support contracts. Essentially he’s saying that we’re hoping she’ll die soon. We are hoping that. That’s no big secret. So my question is simple: If it is what we’re hoping for, why not bring it about ourselves and end her suffering right now?

“Mom advocated for the patient’s right to choose,” I remind him. “She felt that a terminal patient had the right to decide not to live anymore. She wrote about it. You’ve read her writing. You know where Mom stood on this stuff.”

“But she wouldn’t be choosing here. You’d be choosing for her. It’s murder.”

“It’s mercy.”

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Buffalo Lockjaw suffers from some predictable first-novel defects (the narrative is broken up by first-person vignettes that only distract, for instance, and it’s got, you’ll pardon the phrase, the mother of all deus ex machina endings), but it’s still a remarkably strong experience. Too strong, perhaps, for any reader who’s lost a loved on to Alzheimer’s, but a powerful dramatic help for the rest of us to understand what that’s like.

– Steve Donoghue

Royal Blood

Rona Sharon
Kensington Books, 2009

In paperback from Kensington Books is a bouncy, bawdy, surprisingly brainy and utterly beguiling new Tudor novel by Rona Sharon, who has previously written two unexceptional romance novels (proving again my theory that something about the Tudor era often brings out the best in writers who alight there). In Royal Blood she has written a historical novel fit to sit on the same shelf as Forever Amber — this is an immediate minor classic of Tudor fiction, and you should make a point of reading it.

The backbone of the plot is still heavily indebted to the romance genre: Michael Devereux, late of Ireland and a great lover of the ladies (even his Irish patron, the Earl of Tyrone, essentially tells him, “You know, I’m heterosexual – but you? You’re really heterosexual”), comes to the Tudor court and is thrown together with saucy Princess Renee of France, and quicker than you can say ‘Sweet Jesu’ the two are making Tudor goo-goo eyes at each other.

But where another writer (or perhaps Sharon, in another book) would have been content to follow such a meeting with page after page of bed-hopping with an occasional nod from Henry VIII or Thomas More, Sharon here embroils her good-looking paramours in a high-stakes political plot to assassinate the king and his chief minister Cardinal Wolsey. Here’s part of what the lovers overhear:

Yo Gabba Gabba! hd “You expect me to look the other way when you strumpet yourself in this brothel court with the usurper to my throne? He never cared for you, Anne. Making my lady sister his whore was another means wherewith to make me eat humble pie, to bring me to heel, to demonstrate to the court and to the entire world, for that matter, that we — the Lancastrians, the White Roses, the Poles, Abergavenny, progeny of purer Plantagenet blood — are nothing! That I am nothing! And now his henchman in scarlet robes, that overreaching venomous fox! That bawd! He has stolen by rightful role of chief adviser, curtails my policies, mocks and opposes everything I do on principle. He told his king that ‘certain personages’ were behaving in a manner that was not commensurate with the dignity and honor of the council. Fah! He spits in my face and is trawling for excuses to strike against me. How I disdain his ostentation, his presumptuousness. His very presence reviles me! He insults me openly, knowing his false king would protect him from my vengeance. I have sworn to rid myself — and England! — of them both, two boars in one valley.”

Tudorphiles among you will already have guessed the identity of the speaker: Ned Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, and although Sharon ladles on the histrionics a bit thick, she’s got the tediousness of the man down perfectly.

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Before he’s sent to court, Devereux is given some good advice: “Enthrall but do not love; be loved but do not become any man or woman’s thrall. Be a Spartan in an Athenian pelt, or all will be lost.” There’s a pithiness in that, something you don’t often find in run-of-the-mill Tudor fiction (or genuine Tudor-era advice, but let’s overlook that for the moment, shall we?), and it’s not the only pleasant surprise awaiting readers of Royal Blood. My main worry is that many such potential readers will take one look at the book’s front cover (a young woman in period costume, evincing a smoldering look), one look at the book’s back cover (a long-haired young man, also smoldering), and head for the nearest exit. That would be a shame: Sharon’s book deserves a wide readership.

– Steve Donoghue

Belisarius: The Last Roman General
Ian Hughes
Westholme Publishing, 2009

When the scheming, devious, brilliant, fearless, neurotic emperor Justinian I came to power in 527, he confronted his own paltry and fractured inheritance with his eyes wide open. The entirety of the old sprawling Roman Empire, of which he was the nominal head, had fallen onto evil times since the bright days of Trajan and Hadrian centuries before. Successive waves of foreign invasion had battered the once-magnificent ramparts of Roman invincibility, and faction had long since been bitterly codified at court. Supplicants kissed the earth as they approached Justinian’s throne, but the earth no longer belonged to Rome, as it once had.

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Justinian devised a mad course to change that; he set out to re-conquer lost Roman lands in North Africa and Italy. No amount of money or manpower would have seen this accomplished if Justinian hadn’t also had the right man for the job. He did have that man, his famous general Belisarius, and through skillful maneuvering, careful coalition-building, and, incidentally, large amounts of tactical and strategic brilliance, Belisarius actually managed to rekindle the light of lost Roman triumphs in virtually every theater where his forces operated. Ian Hughes, in his new book, refers to Belisarius as “the last Roman general” – he was certainly the last great Roman general.

It’s an incredible story, lure for historians, moralists, and novelists over the centuries (not even Robert Graves could make it dull, though his Count Belisarius gives it the old college try), and Hughes prosecutes it with the thoroughness of a municipal pipe-layer. No square foot is left untouched, everything is systematically addressed, and there is not an ounce of panache anywhere on the premises.

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Belisarius historians almost reflexively assume this stenographer’s approach, probably because their main source, Procopius, balanced his own sober public account of the great general with his Secret History, a wildly scandalous collection of anecdotes about Justinian, Belisarius, and their wives that’s still compulsively fun reading.

Nobody could call Belisarius: The Last Roman General compulsively fun reading. Hughes is instructively thorough, mind you – as a comprehensive introduction to Belisarius and his world, this book would be hard to beat. But Hughes spends a lot of time warning and re-warning his readers about Procopius, that scamp:

What is clear is Procopius’ dislike of Antonina [the general’s wife], and this should be remembered when reading his account of her; throughout Anekdota [that’s what classicists call The Secret History] she is ridiculed, especially concerning her nature, her reckless personal life, and her origins. For her grandfather and father were charioteers in the Hippodrome. Although as such they could be famous, and possibly rather well-off, they would not be acceptable in polite society.

Hughes, on the other hand, is always acceptable in polite society. And if that functions as a warning to you in reading his book, so be it.

–Steve Donoghue

We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals

Gillian Gill
Ballantine, 2009

When handsome 20-year-old Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married Queen Victoria in 1839, his new countrymen (Albert had wept during the ceremony in which he renounced his German nationality and officially became a British citizen) were baffled as to what to make of him. One one level, literally what to make of him: the Prince Consort needed an English rank of his own, but what should it be?

As Gillian Gill writes in her clear-eyed and wonderfully antic new history of the celebrated pair, We Two, the debate over the Prince’s rank was awkwardly complicated by the Prince himself:

For his part, Albert [in 1839] declared that he would never stoop to an English dukedom, since a don of the royal house of Coburg outranked any English peer. In England, where many lords had genealogies as long and estates much larger and richer than Coburg-Gotha, this came off as a piece of pathetic rodomontade from a youth of twenty.

Gill’s account takes readers at a brisk pace through the twenty-year marriage at the heart of her book, tracing the slow, grudging steps by which the ruling elite of Victoria’s realm came to re-evaluate and then appreciate Albert’s many fine qualities. He was a hard worker, a temperate, responsible figure in an extended family of extremely dissolute morons (his family was Victoria’s family – they were first cousins, her mother being sister to his father), and in addition to what Gill calls his “theoretical brilliance,” he held a number of forward-thinking social attitudes, unlike his wife. Gill clearly likes Victoria, so perhaps she’s unaware of what a dithering, clueless portrait she inadvertently paints of the monarch who gave her name to an era:

Queen Victoria saw foreign affairs as an extension of family affairs. She was related in some degree to virtually every royal house in Europe, and in genealogical lore even her husband could not compete with her. Foreign policy for Victoria consisted in no small measure of her writing careful missives in beautiful French (the international language of diplomacy) to her kinfolk. One day she might advise her first cousin’s wife the queen of Portugal to be more careful in choosing her intimate associates. The next she might beg her distant Austrian relation for his own good to be kinder to the Italians and the Poles even if they did show a foolishly rebellious spirit: or her Dutch cousin to stop bothering dearest Uncle Leopold in Belgium; or her French uncle Louis Philippe to drop the idea of marrying one of his sons to the Spanish infanta. When war threatened to break out in any part of Europe, the Queen was stricken with angst. If Uncle France started fighting Uncle Austria over Italy, whose side should she be on?

By the time Albert died (young, overworked at age 42), he had succeeded by sheer strength of personality to carve for himself a position of real power out of what had begun as the greatest of all purely ceremonial appointments. The Queen, at first reflexively possessive of her prerogatives, gradually realized that Albert was never indiscreet, never unprepared on any issue, and perhaps most importantly, virtually never wrong. Not since Lord Burleigh had an English Queen been so well advised, and although Gill is not the first biographer to adjust upwards the dismissive estimates some historians have made of Albert, she just may be the most delicate in her discretion – a quality perfectly capable of handling even the most awkward question about Albert:

Nonetheless, even if it is easy to document that, after the age of five, Albert’s intimate relationships were all with men (except for his love of his wife, the Queen), even if it is possible to argue that the young Albert could have experienced homosexual love, there is not one scrap of hard evidence that he did. This is not surprising. He was a man of great renown, major achievement, and small popularity who died tragically young and had a loyal band of friends and relatives. In the years following his death, the person who assiduously collected and lovingly savored the records of Prince Albert’s boyhood was his wife. Queen Victoria was the last person likely to uncover evidence that her husband had not slept with women because he preferred to sleep with men.

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It’s so smoothly done you almost don’t think to re-read it for the whisper-soft suggestion that evidence was destroyed, and that’s as it should be. Despite its famous subjects, We Two is a heart a very Edwardian production: it’s smart but chatty, responsible but slightly purple, and best of all, it expects you to do your own thinking. It would be claiming too much to say Gill has written a book Victoria would have liked – the Queen wasn’t much of a reader. But Albert would have filled this book with his spidery, passionate marginalia, and there’s high praise in that.

-Steve Donoghue

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I was leafing innocently through the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, to learn what the poets in Ghana are doing these days, when I came across a review by Tom McCarthy of Clancy Martin’s How to Sell and had the settled order of my literary world violently detonated. We’re talking comedy-style glasses-falling-off spewing-milk-out-the-mouth slapstick here.

It had been a fairly tranquil Book Review up to that point. True, the cover illustration by Matt Dorfman was almost comically hideous, but that was to be expected (the illustrations in the Book Review are always either working hard to be hideous or working hard to upstage or out-clever the review they  accompany – sometimes both). The book chosen for the first review, Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, wasn’t bad, and the review, by Bruce Barcott, was spirited. And in the letters page, former Metropolitan Opera violinist Les Dreyer told a charming anecdote about spotting the great opera singer Marian Anderson sitting demurely in the audience during the Met’s Farewell Gala in 1966 and wondering why she wasn’t up on the stage with opera’s other luminaries. At intermission he works up the courage to ask her:

She lowered her eyes. I peered over the pit railing and beheld her slender hands folded over the crook of a cane. I reached over and extended my right hand, which she enclosed firmly with her. For several silent minutes we held hands, while tears flowed on both sides of the pit railing. At last she said softly that she hoped to be remembered as Ulrica (in her 1955 Met debut in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera”), not hobbling about with a cane or being a “nuisance” onstage in a wheelchair.

Delightful, and pure Marian Anderson. But trouble was brewing, and I, bemused by Dreyer’s vignette, didn’t pay proper attention or I’d have seen it. I’d have spotted dark clouds, for instance, in David Gates’ long review of Counterpoint’s new reissue of talentless novelist Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer, in which he compares Frame to some other female writers and draws an artistic equivalence between Virginia Woolf and Mary Gaitskill, but no … it was a drowsy morning, after all, and I was pinned rather agreeably under roughly 140 pounds of sleeping basset hound.

And the next piece was fantastic, a lively, hugely readable review by David Leavitt of Reynolds Price’s new memoir Ardent Spirits. The fun of this review was virtually built in: Price’s memoir is as dicey and circumspect on the subject of gay life as Leavitt’s writings have always been direct and dramatic – the pairing here was inspired, and it paid off.

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There followed some standard Book Review stuff, and I was further lulled. I smiled to see the great Jonathan Rauch delivering up a generous helping of prose (reviewing the latest trifle from Richard Posner – the title escapes me, but the subtext-title would be the same as it is for all of his books: Something I Just Read About in the Paper This Morning). This essay had me smiling so broadly that as I sailed into the next – McCarthy’s – my heart was light and my eyes were sparkling, the snail was on the thorn, and all was right with the reviewing world.

And at first McCarthy didn’t disappoint. He’s a smart writer, and he opens his review by publicly doubting the hyperventilating blurbs accompanying Martin’s How to Sell (Jonathan Franzen wrote one, and somebody called Benjamin Kunkel). Even when McCarthy’s prose occasionally faltered (”To argue out the merits or otherwise of claiming originality when some types of repetition are nothing to be ashamed of would take more space than I have here” – well, yes, if you write like that), I read on, naive and serene.

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Then I came to it, and the Peace of Versailles was shattered. It happened during a sentence in which McCarthy’s talking about Faulkner. I’ll never forget where I was the moment I read it (well, I was still pinned under the aforementioned basset hound, but that’s not the point). All unsuspecting, I read this:

Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury, perhaps the greatest of all American novels (or, for that matter, of all novels) …”

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Naturally, I read no more that day.

After the initial paroxysms of anguish had subsided, I thought of calling friends at the Times – surely the editorial ranks had been decimated by the swine flu? How else to explain such a howler, such a glaring, blaring monkey’s ass of a line slipping through into print? McCarthy himself can’t take all the blame – he’s young, after all, and Faulkner’s fat, lazy, rambling, incoherent blatherings appeal especially to young people (most of whom think if they are similarly fat, rambling, and incoherent, they might be able to dodge the boring old work of crafting fiction). But young or not, swine flu or not, he shouldn’t have been allowed his True Confessions moment – how can anybody take the rest of McCarthy’s review seriously, having read that scream of delirium? How can anybody take the rest of the Book Review seriously, having found such a nugget of appalling surreality lodged in an otherwise straightforward essay?

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The Sound and the Fury is not the greatest of all novels. In comparison with such works as (pause for literally a nanosecond to summon a mental list) War and Peace, Tale of Genji, or Tom Jones, it’s a speck of dirt, an entirely forgettable burp of bad taste. In comparison with such American works as (another nanosecond) Moby Dick, The House of Mirth, or The Recognitions, it looks like just the amateurish scrapbook it is. Hell, in comparison with other 1929 novels, it gets spanked around the room like a band camp nerd – what can it do against competition like All Quiet on the Western Front, for instance, or the most dominant example imaginable, Look Homeward, Angel?

Still, nonsense can work its deviltry. Don’t believe me? Wait for a dramatic pause in the action the next time you’re taking in “Hedda Gabler,” then stand up and shout “Hedda looks like my mum!” You’ll be escorted from the theater, but I guarantee: you’ll have ruined the evening for everybody else.

Will I return to the Book Review, or has the McCarthy Incident forever torn us asunder? I don’t know. I just don’t know. To quote Cletus T. Judd, perhaps the greatest of all American country music singers (or, for that matter, of all singers), “If I can’t trust you with my heart, how can I trust you with my truck?”

Steve Donoghue

Mary Jo Duffy, in the latest New York Times Book Review Shut Up and Sing aka Wedding Weekend dvdrip

, turns in a short, punchy piece on R. A. Scotti’s new book The Vanished Smile, about the 1911theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, a crime that astonished the world and has puzzled investigators ever since. Duffy sorts through the case as Scotti presents it, at one point provoking my writer’s envy by making an offhand reference to “vermilion herrings.” And when Duffy gets around to assessing the qualities of Scotti’s prose, there’s this choice bit:

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Needless to say, if I paid “vermilion herrings” the compliment of wishing I’d written it, I paid that “vanished simile” an even higher compliment, indeed the highest a writer can pay: I wish I’d stolen it.  Once you’re done enjoying Duffy’s review here, you can go here to a longer review of The Vanished Smile by squinty-eyed and perhaps overly-suspicious Jan Van Doop. Then book a flight to Paris and take a long hard look at the lady herself.

Steve Donoghue

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Cleopatra and Antony
By Diana Preston
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Walker & Company, 2009

Antony and Cleopatra: the nomenclature is so enshrined in the modern mind that this book’s title jars a bit. Given that entirely pleasant sensation, readers will ask if Diana Preston’s Cleopatra and Anthony actually delivers the steak after providing the sizzle: does she subvert, re-align, or somehow enhance our appreciation of Egypt’s last and most famous queen, especially in that queen’s relationship with Marc Antony, the most misunderstood Roman of them all?

The Other Boleyn Girl The answer? Not really, though not for want of awkward trying. Readers won’t need to go much further than the table of contents to guess this (they’ll encounter chapter-titles like “Mighty Aphrodite,” “Death on the Nile,” and “Like a Virgin” – presumably “Denial is a River in Egypt,” “Toga! Toga! Toga!” and “Walk Like an Egyptian” are being saved for the sequel), but those who do will find the usual suspects in any study of Cleopatra and Antony: the letters of Cicero, the histories of Suetonius, Plutarch, Dio Cassius, and a sturdy but manageable list of secondary sources like Balsdon, Carcopino, and Grant. The Journal of Roman Studies is not on the list of five learned journals consulted, nor is there any mention of epigraphy.

What is here, in vast heaps, is the kind of speculation that has always padded out books on Cleopatra. We’re constantly told that things “might have” been true, “must have” been true, and “surely were “true:

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Cleopatra must have been relieved by the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. She also must have been pleased that Antony, whom she knew, rather than Caesar’s heir Octavian – an unknown quantity and potential threat to Caesarion – had emerged as the Roman Empire’s new leader in the east.

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In addition to maneuvers like this, slang and idioms abound in the text, which also features giggle-inducing solemnities like: “Feasting is an age-old metaphor for sexual pleasure as well as its frequent precursor in practice.”

Readers seeking a quick, engaging run-through of Cleopatra’s tumultuous dealings with Rome might get some enjoyment out of Cleopatra and Antony; the rest of us can switch those famous names back to the way we found them and let this barge sail on by.

-Steve Donoghue