Robert Harris's 2007 The Ghost was a political roman a clef par excellence — in its unflattering picture of Tony Blair it piled outlandish premise on outlandish event, until it came to present an astonishing lifelike image of the man.
His latest, Lustrum (published in the US as Conspirata, is a different beast — still about politics, but the politics of the dying days of the Roman Republic. It's a well-trodden story, with Cicero at its heart, and the giant characters of Pompey, Caesar and Cato stalking around — familiar at least in broad outline to anyone with a touch of classical history in their education.
As far as we know, it is true to life in outline, and makes reasonable deductions about the points of controversy, and the motivations of the main characters, so there is at one level no real surprises in the novel, despite its thriller-like opening with a mutilated body.
What it is, above all, is a superbly well-told, gripping tale, presented to us by a classic narrator, Tiro, Cicero's slave secretary — a man who has his own hopes, dreams and passions, yet whose life is entirely centered around his master's. He's that unfashionable thing these days, an honest, intelligent, caring narrator — and the Cicero he, and we, see is true to the nature of the political man that history has handed down to us — intelligent, skilled, marked by the classic flaw of a "New Man" eager to play up his own importance, yet ultimately buffetted and scarred by forces beyond his control.
Politics of our own day, as the latest British polls show, is turbulent, fast-moving and often surprising, but Rome was in another class of mercurial altogether - a single clever speech, a quip even, could swing the Senate, or a huge mob - Prime Minister's Questions has nothing on this.
Article comments
1 - ThePrince
I am a big fan of Harris and read and liked all of his previous books - but this one didn't live up to those. It suffers from being a first person narrative - Tiro has to tell us constantly how he knows things and ahs been places he shouldn't. And the plot is dull - Cicero saves the Republic - but we all know it isn't saved. Yes I see the irony - but irony never can replace drama in a work of historical fiction.