Shogun - James Clavell

I was slow to warm up to Shogun, owing mostly to having read Lonesome Dove immediately before. It suffered a bit by comparison, especially given their parallels as sweeping historical epics with broad ensemble casts. This isn’t a slight on Shogun, but rather a testament to Lonesome Dove’s singular narrative power. Shogun felt like commercial fiction; Lonesome Dove felt like literature.

This is not to denigrate commercial fiction (I’d describe my own work the same way), and as I got deeper into Shogun I became absorbed in the rich world it created, full of evocative period details and exploration of feudal Japanese culture. The book’s hero, pilot John Blackthorne, is an accomplished sailor seeking to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. He becomes shipwrecked on the insular island of Japan, and is quickly pulled into their politics, where an uneasy peace following the death of the Taiko has left the feuding kingdoms teetering on the brink of war. He becomes a vassal to Lord Toranaga, one of the five regents ruling the fractious empire and the man the others see as the greatest threat. Toranaga is a shrewd strategist, and much of the story concerns his machinations to become shogun, or undisputed military ruler of Japan.

It reminded me a bit of the works of Ken Follett, only without the clear dichotomy between heroes and villains. This might be because the characters were largely based on real historical figures, or simply because Clavell felt that the difference in cultures made clear moral judgement difficult. Even a detestable character like Yabu can be at times admirable, and demonstrates honour in line with his values as a samurai.

Clavell’s style is clear and unadorned, and his characters are engaging, though the broad cast can make it easy to confuse people, and I often forgot who people were or mistook one character for another until context proved me wrong (this is a challenge for me with any story where the characters have non-European names; even Russian novels give me no end of trouble). Though I was slow to warm to it, I enjoyed the book and by the end was open to picking up the next in the series.

The Cloven Viscount - Italo Calvino

The Cloven Viscount is the first book in a trilogy called Our Ancestors. I read the second book, The Baron in the Trees, already, but the sequence of books doesn't seem especially important, as there is no connection between them in terms of plot or characters. Instead, the link between them is thematic, as each is set in a period of Italy's past and uses fantasy to explore the society found in that time.

In the Cloven Viscount, the eponymous nobleman Medardo of Terralba is cut in half by a cannonball. His two sides both live, with his right side encompassing all of the Viscount's evil, and the left side all of his good. Medardo's nephew narrates the story, but he remains so firmly in the background that you often forget he is a character.

The story reads as a parable, eschewing realism in favor of archetypes. The characters aren't psychologically complex, but the structure of the story is such that this feels like a deliberate choice and not a weakness. It reads a little like a fairy tale, in that the characters aren't meant to be seen as actual people, but rather as instruments to get at some deeper truth embedded in the story itself. The writing likewise reflects this approach, it simple eloquence belying its poetic richness and depth.

I adored The Baron in the Trees, and though Viscount didn't grip me with quite the same intensity, it was still excellent and encourages me to read the final book in the trilogy.

Spartacus - Howard Fast

Sometimes, a book suprises you. I picked up Spartacus expected a straightforward telling of a fraily well-known story: a slave rises up against his masters, raises an army, and fights against the tyrannical forces of Rome until cut down in a blaze of glory. What I did not expect was a strange, cubist masterpiece that resonates across time and place, to make a profound statement on what society is and what it costs us.

The novel begins in the months after the Roman general Crassus has defeated Spartacus and put down his rebel army, and returns to the life of the eponymous character only in flashback. His story emerges through the recollections of various characters who either knew him or knew his reputation: Crassus, the above-mentioned general, who did not meet Spartacus on the field of battle but came to admire his tactics even as he abhorred his insurrection; Batiatus, the owner of a gladiator school whose scouts rescued Spartacus from a Nubian mine; Gracchus, a corpulent Roman senator, whose dealings with Spartacus, however indirect, spurred an existential crisis; David, a Jewish gladiator who fought beside and idolized Spartacus.

The narrative shifts fluidly between these characters, and is not bound by the limits of their own knowledge. We gain direct access to Spartacus’ thoughts on some occasions, even though the ostensible teller of the story whould have no knowledge of them. The result is a panoramic tale that is less about historicla accuracy—much of the occurences Fast recounts are completely lost to history, and he plays fast and loose with details even in situations where they are known—than about the creation of myth, and the way such myths can ripple through time.

Fast’s prose is sumptuous, grandiloquent, unafraid of lofty pronouncements and detours into philosohpical speculation. He manages this without growing tedious or unduly absorbed in his own musings. Rather, it captures the broader tone of the book, pulling out the few threads of fact (or assumed fact) that remain of Spartacus’ legacy, and weaving them into something wondrous and whole.

Rarely has a book so exceeded my expectation. And what makes its triumph as a work of art all the sweeter is this: Fast was forced to self-publish the book after blacklisting censors bullied every publisher in America into rejecting it. It ended up becoming a runaway best-selle,r and inspired the movie that arguably delt the deathblow to the blacklist itself. All this from a book about rebelling against impossible odds.

If that isn’t justice, I don’t know what is.

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

My god, I wish I came across this book when I was 13. I loved it at 33, and don't doubt I'll love it just as much when I eventually reread it (which I'm sure I will), but I think I would have loved it even more then. And not simply for its content—though as an avid tree-climber it would doubtless have gripped me--but for its melancholic whimsy. It reminds me in tone of Winnie the Pooh and, in a sense harder to define, of Louis Sachar’s Wayside books. Stories that seemed so fully realised that as a child I fell into them, walked about their pages for a while, and emerged at the final chapter ever so slightly changed.

The main character is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, who at the age of 12 has a fight with his father over dinner that leads him to climb into the trees and never come down. The story is narrated by his younger brother, who often relies on secondhand information and freely admits that certain passages are supposition on his part--a device that lends both uncertainty and verisimilitude to the story. The rest of the book is an episodic chronicling of Cosimo's life in the trees, with passages both prosaic (his inventive solutions for toiletry, sleep, and commerce) and heroic (battles with pirates and treacherous Jesuits). I loved the former as much as the latter, and the whole story flows effortless as a long campfire fable.

The prose is translated from the Italian, but retains a bit of Mediterranean flavour, evocative but not florid. It avoids the common pitfall of first person narratives where the narrator takes on the cadence of capital N Narration, losing the voice of the person who is supposedly telling the story. I never doubted the voice used here.

Italo Calvino is a name I'd heard for some time but never pursued, knowing nothing about him apart from that he was an author. I found The Baron in the Trees as a fluke, as it was mentioned in the comments of a Guardian article about a man who spent 2 years in a tree. Such happy accidents reinforce the value of always keeping an ear out for new titles. Sometimes the best stories come to you from unexpected places.

The Wall - John Hersey

The Wall tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto during the second world war, from the creation of the wall that formed its perimeter to the final savage thrust of noble—if ultimately hopeless—rebellion in which the Jews finally struck back at their oppressors.

The story itself is inherently dramatic, based as it is on a true and monstrous period of history, but the most defining feature of The Wall is not the plot or the characters, but the way it is told. The entire book, from its editorial introduction to its final pages, purports to be extracts from the copious notes of Noach Levinson, a citizen of the ghetto who becomes its de facto archivist.

The opening pages, written in the style of an introduction by an outside academic, describe how the archive was found, and give us a first glimpse of Levinson through outside eyes. The remainder is structured as an assembly of different notes, with each passage marked with the date of its occurrence, the date of its recording, and the source of the material, though every word with very few exceptions is supposed to be written by Levinson.

It’s an interesting structure, giving the impression of something between an oral history and a non-fiction account, and the frequent use of dates helps situate the reader in the broader story. Occasionally notes from other “entries” are inserted as asides to add context, thereby circumventing one of the challenges of the epistolary novel, with its rigid limitations of chronology and perspective.

There are times where the format can be a bit distracting, and while I admire Hersey’s commitment, I occasionally wanted him to just write the novel in a more traditional way, with multiple POV characters undergoing experiences in real time, rather than having everything filter through Levinson’s notes. However, it’s not fair to judge a book on something it’s not, and I have to say it held my interest, and the second half moved much quicker than the first. Hersey apparently wrote a non-fiction account of Hiroshima, and given the talent for historicity he demonstrated in The Wall, I intend to check it out.

Claudius the God - Robert Graves

It’s been a couple of years since I read I, Claudius, but I remembered liking it enough to request Claudius the God from the library, and the first few pages wasted no time in reminding me why.

The story picks up where I, Claudius left off. While the first book detailed the lives and reigns of Rome’s early emperors through the eyes of the stammering, sly, perennially underestimated Claudius, the second chronicles the reign of Claudius himself. Written under the same conceit as a purported autobiography, it retains much of the flavor of its predecessor, reading more like a second volume of a single work than as a standalone sequel.

Graves writes with supreme confidence in his subject matter. He adopts the persona of Claudius with impressive commitment, the style and substance of his prose lending a great sense of authenticity to the story. He clearly knows the history of the Roman Empire inside and out, and this knowledge comes across in the tiny details, and in references to historical figures great and small.

While I, Claudius stayed largely in the confines of Western Europe, Claudius the God ventures farther east, spending many pages chronicling the machinations of Herod Agrippa in consolidating his grip on the Jewish throne. There’s also a recurring reference to Christianity, which in Claudius’ eyes is little more than a bothersome sect with bizarre practices. It’s interesting to consider how Claudius would view Jesus, and Graves paints his reaction in mingling tones of amusement and contempt for a figure he doubtless assumed would be a footnote in history whose presence he would easily dwarf.

Writers of historical fiction walk a fine line between drowning their reader in explanatory text and stranding them in a world they little understand. This is especially true for books like this one, which don’t merely adopt a historical setting, but set out to retell the stories of men and women who actually lived. Graves strikes the right balance here. While I occasionally got lost in the thicket of Roman names, particularly while Claudius described some finer points of palace intrigue, I generally had a good sense of what was happening politically and socially, and why people were acting the way they were. Descriptive passages felt authentic, less the shoehorning of key details than the lectures of a ruler with a solidly academic bent, which the real Claudius had.

The story itself isn’t quite as engaging as I, Claudius, but I wouldn’t fault Graves for that—when you’ve got a guy like Caligula running things in book one, a steady hand at the rudder doesn’t allow for quite as much intrigue. Still, I read it quickly and with pleasure, and even find myself considering a reread of I, Claudius at some point.