The Idea Of Rome

Over the years writers from Suetonius onwards have created ruts in the road by focusing on a biographical approach to the history of Ancient Rome. Mary Beard prefers to avoid those ruts, concentrating instead on the idea of Rome, and the many ways of defining oneself as Roman, as evinced in the everyday lives and pre-occupations both of the ruling classes and of those who were ruled, including the very poorest and the slaves.

She is particularly interesting when examining what foundation myths tell us about the mind-set of Romans, how they projected their anxieties and identities backward into the past and how those identities were changed by the processes of empire.

Of course Beard cannot avoid the temptations of biography altogether. This is the history of Rome after all and we are dealing with the likes of Nero. However, one of the more intriguing conclusions she comes to is that the empire created the emperors as much as vice versa.

It's a development that begins with Pompey who could arguably be described as the first emperor, and who was defined by territorial acquisition and the power and wealth it provided. The process was formalised in the life and legacy of Augustus who was transformed into a model of imperial identity to which his successors were obliged to conform for the next millennium.

Beard's main argument, however, is that what made Rome unique in the Ancient World was not that its rulers were more cruel or excessive than those of other people, or that its people more ingenious, or even that its soldiers were more ruthless, but the fact that from very early on its rulers untethered the concept of being Roman from its geographical limitations. You could be a Roman and a Greek, even a Roman and a Briton.

In an age of identity politics, this doesn't sound so startling but more than two thousand years ago it was a radical development that made possible the construction of an empire which assimilated local customs, incorporated many different languages, and in which many different gods were worshipped - at least until the appearance of Christianity which refused to co-exist alongside other religions and ended up assimilating the Roman empire itself.

Variations On A Theme

Enjoyable and emotionally satisfying, All The Hopeful Lovers is a set of variations on an age-old theme. A large cast of inter-connected characters struggle with their emotional lives and find themselves caught between twin poles of idealism and compromise.

Young, old and middle-aged, they weave in and out of each other's lives, some impeded by selfishness, others by honesty; some gifted with good-looks, others with sensitivity, some borne aloft on confidence, others crippled by self-consciousness, all in search of love.

It's a challenging narrative structure - so many plot-lines, so many different solutions to the same essential problems. What carries the novel forward is the acute observation of human nature and the authenticity of the characters. These feel like real people, their weaknesses and strengths are familiar to us all.

Nicholson is always looking for the truth about the individual under the chaos of impulse and he finds that truth in the small details. As one of his characters, an elderly artist whose portraits have long ceased to be fashionable, observes, "You paint what you see and what you feel. I can see you but I can't feel what you feel, I can only feel what I feel. So I latch on to the little clues I get from your face that take me to my own feelings."

A Society On The Brink

Set in nineteen thirties London, Curtain Call depicts a network of contrasting characters - a pompous gay theatre critic, his long-suffering secretary, a West-End actress, a prostitute, and a society portrait-painter - all caught up in a series of sadistic murders that changes their lives irrevocably.

What sets this novel apart from the average run-of-the-mill thriller is the skill with which the author summons up a picture of London between the wars. It is a two-faced society, proffering glittering rewards to those who succeed, but merciless towards those who fall by the wayside.

It is also a society on the brink of radical transformation, the gaze of many of its inhabitants still fixed upon the end of the nineteenth century while a series of seismic events - the rise of fascism, the abdication crisis, the dawn of the movie industry - are beginning to change their world forever.

Intent upon their own desires or simply struggling to find security, the characters are oblivious to the changes being wrought around them. Only Madeline, the prostitute around whom much of the plot revolves, glimpses the truth about the killer hiding in plain sight as well as possessing an intuitive awareness of the impending catastrophe that will overtake them all and end in the cataclysm of world war; but she has no idea what to do with this knowledge.

Colourful and well-researched, Curtain Call is an intelligent and richly-textured novel that manages to transcend the limitations of its genre

A Convenient Fictional Landscape

Set in suburban England in the long hot summer of 1976, The Trouble With Goats And Sheep is a study of a community with something to hide. The story is largely narrated by ten-year-old Grace who, together with her side-kick, Tilly, sets out to uncover the dark secret festering at the heart of her neighbourhood.

Joanna Cannon has a real way with words and she is always crafting neat little vignettes of her characters e.g. "There was always a glaze of anxiety to Dorothy, even when she was younger. She combed the landscape for the next catastrophe, whittling at her thoughts until she'd shaped a problem out of them and then grooming herself with the satisfaction of worrying about it."

There is a lot of really excellent observational writing here. But, actually, that's my issue with this book. The whole focus is on observational writing. It's all little tics of behaviour coupled with period details - pop songs, TV programmes, adverts, hairstyles, popular foods etc.

Despite this attention to detail, characterisation, while amusing, is not entirely credible. There is too much reliance on stock traits. This is one of those convenient fictional landscapes where everyone knows everyone else, where the vicar is at the centre of the community and where the local policeman licks his pencil before he starts writing in his notebook.

Grace, the juvenile detective, is a combination of intuitive wisdom and charming naivety which allows the author plenty of scope for ironic observation of adult behaviour but which also comes over, after a while, as irritatingly twee. After a while I began to feel like I was listening to a stand-up comedian rather than reading a novel. Clever but not very challenging.

Exciting But Ultimately Unsatisfying Fantasy

Set in the nineteen twenties, this is a dark fantasy about twelve year old Anna, a refugee from the Greco-Turkish war who ends up living in Oxford with her bankrupt father where she is briefly befriended by C S Lewis and J R Tolkien.

When her father is murdered without warning, she finds herself drawn into a battle between ancient forces who compete to win her allegiance. It seems that Anna is heir to a legacy stretching back to the world of Homer and beyond, and capable of powers she is only dimly aware of.

Often beautifully written and always wonderfully evocative, The Wolf In The Attic, nevertheless fails to live up to its promise. Nothing is explained properly, the overarching mythos is a jumble and the plot feels as though the writer has made it up as he went along. What are Lewis and Tolkien doing in the book, for example? They appear and are carefully drawn but then they just seem to get forgotten.

Kearney is a talented writer and the possessor of a vivid and poetic imagination. The Wolf In The Attic  is an attractive and exciting read but lack of attention to structure makes it ultimately slightly unsatisfying.

A Study In Suspicion

Charismatic, unorthodox and utterly unpredictable, Raymond Ess, the founder of Resolute Aviation, a once trail-blazing aeronautics company on the brink of collapse, is either about to change the history of the world or he's having a nervous breakdown. Steven, his personal assistant, isn't sure which.

Steven is accompanying Ess on a trip to the wilds of rural India where Ess believes a brilliant inventor called Tarik is hiding from a hi-tech corporation that wants to get its hands on his astonishing invention - an anti-gravity machine. But is the whole thing a fantasy caused by the impending collapse of Ess's company?

At the centre of this book is Trevelyan's intense sense of India - the teeming chaos of Mumbai and the and the vast open spaces of the countryside where the edges of the evening sky are like a gas flame. Against that backdrop the characters play out their little drama of bluff and double-bluff. Funny, clever and always entirely plausible The Weightless World keeps the reader guessing to the end.