Conspirata by Robert Harris

Subtitle: A Novel of Ancient Rome

Published in Britain as: Lustrum

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

            This is the second book of Robert Harris’s trilogy on the life of Cicero.

            The first book, Imperium, I read and reviewed on this blog way back in 2006.  Although I gave Imperium a mostly negative review, I said at the time that in spite of all my complaints, I planned to read the rest of the trilogy when it came out.  I love historical fiction, even bad historical fiction, and besides which I’m particularly interested in the time period—the last hundred years of the Roman Republic—in which these books take place. 

            (In my youth I was particularly fascinated by Colleen McCullough’s epic - Masters of Rome series on the same time period.  Also, back in my schooldays, whenever I was assigned a research paper and had any flexibility on the choice of topic, I often picked a topic associated with precisely this time period.  See, for example, my old paper on the Catiline Conspiracy here, and my paper on Clodius Pulcher here.   Both the Catiline Conspiracy and Clodius figure prominently in Conspirata, so I was eager to read Robert Harris’s take on the events.)

           

The Review

          In my 2006 review of Imperium, I had a number of negative things to say about the book.  And though I stand by everything I said, it does strike me now that perhaps I put too much emphasis on the little flaws, and ignored the main merits of the book.

            The main merit of the book is that it is very readable.  This is worth mentioning, because there are a number of books out there that aren’t readable—books that are boring, or filled with thick unwieldy prose.  Like every other reader, I’ve struggled with these books, or given up on them in frustration.  So when you come across a book that’s well written, where the prose moves smoothly along and where you can easily keep turning the pages, it’s worth mentioning.  Whatever complaints I may have about Robert Harris, the man can write very readable books.

            When you add Robert Harris’s very readable prose to the pleasures of learning about history in the form of a novel, it makes for a very enjoyable book.  And I enjoyed this one.

            Despite Robert Harris’s disclaimer at the beginning of the book (“This is a novel, not a work of history: wherever the demands of the two have clashed, I have unhesitatingly plumped for the former”) the book is, as far as I can tell, pretty accurate.  (As I usually do when I read historical fiction, I kept double checking with Wikipedia to see how accurate this book was, and most of the events in the novel seemed to check out.)

            The biggest compliant I have is the same complaint I had with Imperium.  Most historians don’t seriously think Julius Caesar and Crassus were behind the Catiline Conspiracy—the Catiline Conspiracy was an act by a desperate group of men who had nothing to lose, whereas Caesar and Crassus still had very good traditional political careers open to them, and had no reason to fall in with the revolutionaries.  Robert Harris is well aware that nothing was ever proven linking Caesar and Crassus to the Catiline Conspiracy, but for dramatic purposes he finds it useful to imagine they were secretly behind the whole thing, masterfully pulling all the strings.

            Of course the whole point of a historical novel is that you’re supposed to be free of the strict rigors of academic history, and you can choose whatever version of history is the most dramatic.  Robert Harris wants to set up Cicero as the hero of the story, and every hero needs a good villain, so Caesar is the villain of the story.  In fact, in Conspirata, Caesar becomes an almost James Bond type villain, deftly manipulating everything, the unseen hand behind every scandal in Rome.  This is the story Robert Harris wants to tell, and for what it is, he does a good job of telling it.

            Except, I rather think the more interesting story is to imagine the politics as complex.  Instead of only two feuding groups (Cicero’s allies versus Caesar’s allies), I find it much more interesting to imagine this period of Roman history as a period of many different ambitious men with constantly changing alliances.  Cicero opposed Catiline, and Cicero also later opposed Julius Caesar, but that doesn’t mean that Catiline and Caesar necessarily had to be in league with each other just because they had a mutual enemy in Cicero.

            (I am also perhaps influenced by the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough, for the simple reason that I read it first, and whatever you first read on a subject makes a greater impact on you than anything you read subsequently.  While McCullough doesn’t attempt to deny that Caesar was ambitious, she portrays his populist program as motivated by genuine concern for the welfare of Rome’s poorest citizens.  Robert Harris, however, portrays Caesar’s populist program as simply demagoguery.  But as to which view is right, I cannot say.  I imagine a case could be made for either.  But I tend to find McCullough’s Caesar much more interesting.)

Notes:

* Add this book to my list of historical fiction.  

Addendum (September 30, 2014)
Inspired by this book, I've been continuing to browse around the historical records.  I've been browsing through Plutarch's Lives online [LINK HERE] and have been pleasantly surprised to find how much of this book seems to have been taken directly from Plutarch.  
For example, from the section on Cato [LINK HERE]:  When the trial was held, Cicero, who was consul at that time and one of Murena's advocates, took advantage of Cato's fondness for the Stoics to rail and jest at length about those philosophers and what were called their "paradoxes," thus making the jurors laugh. Cato, accordingly, as we are told, said with a smile to the bystander: "My friends, what a droll fellow our consul is!"
That scene, and that quote, is directly represented in the novel.  I assumed it was improvised by Robert Harris, but it comes directly from the history books.
It is to Robert Harris's credit that he's obviously done his research well.  Combining both the talents of an historian with an author is not the easiest thing to do, and, upon reflection, perhaps I've been focused more on criticizing this series for its shortcomings than highlighting its impressive accomplishments as a work of historical fiction.

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