Davis' Roman super-sleuth Marcus Didus Falco returns to Britain in this tale and must investigate the death of a roguish courtier of King Togidubnus who ends up head first down a tavern well in a rather primitive Londonium. The town, still scarred by fires and devastation wrought by Queen Boudicca in the Iceni Revolt a little over a decade before, holds no pleasant memories for Falco, who served there with the Second Augusta. The Second Augusta Legion, under Petillius Cerialis, met Boudicca's eighty to one-hundred thousand rebels near Verulamium (modern St. Alban's ) with only two thousand Roman troops. Needless to say, few of the legion survived although Falco and his old friend Petro were among them.Now, it seems gangsters from Rome have decided to exploit the new province. Falco discovers their hired muscle leaning on bakers, tavern keepers and even the local familia gladiatorix. Davis does a good job of conjuring up the rough and tumble world of this colonial village on the Thames but I found passages to be exasperating as Falco would discover important information that should have been reported to the governor right away but instead, Falco decides he's too tired and figures it can wait until the next day which, of course, is too late. The showdown between the imported thugs and the women gladiators seems more contrived than exciting and the villain's escape borders on the ridiculous.
I listened to the unabridged audio version of this book while I was exercising alone on my exercise bike and it's a good thing since I found myself blurting out derisive comments about Falco's contrived missteps.
Davis also has Petro acting remote and brooding for no particular reason and when the reason is finally revealed it doesn't really make any sense since Petro acknowledges he figured Falco would be watching his back. I also found it pretty implausible that Helena Justina would be wandering the seamier neighborhoods of this grimy little backwater with her young children in tow and no escort.
The frustrations I felt while reading this book were roughly equivalent to my generally negative reactions to "Last Act in Palmyra" and "See Delphi and Die". Each time I read one of the Falco mysteries, I am hoping to catch a glimpse of the solid writing and plot development I experienced reading "The Course of Honor", "Silver Pigs", and "The Iron Hand of Mars". Perhaps my biggest problem is that I don't really enjoy reading about a man who has such a negative view of life in general. I guess some people consider Falco an interesting curmudgeon but I've had enough interactions with negative personalities in the real world that I prefer not to spend my fantasy world with them.
"The relation between the visual and the verbal spheres has been much contested in recent years, from laments about the 'logocentricism' of the academy to the heralding of the 'pictorial turn' of the multimedia age. This lavishly illustrated book recontextualises these debates through the historical lens of Greek and Roman antiquity. Dr Squire shows how modern Western concepts of 'words' and 'pictures' derive from a post-Reformation tradition of theology and aesthetics. Where modern critics assume a bipartite separation between images and texts, classical antiquity toyed with a more playful and engaged relation between the two. By using the ancient world to rethink our own ideologies of the visual and the verbal, this interdisciplinary book brings together classics and art history, as well as a sustained reflection on their historiography: the result is a new and explosive cultural history of Western visual thinking." - Product Description, Amazon.com
Paul Cartledge's latest book exploring the historical accuracy of Oliver Stone's film "Alexander" and reasons for its less than enthusiastic reception at the box office sounds really interesting. I was so anxious to see the film and so disappointed with the result that it would be interesting to read why others were equally disillusioned. I actually found the critics who harped on such things as Colin Ferrell's bleach job to be just so uninformed they couldn't critique the film from a historical perspective (and too lazy to do any research). Although there were historical inaccuracies, I just found the pacing of the film way too slow - especially the long droning voice over by Anthony Hopkins (and I personally normally like Anthony Hopkins). Alexander was an exciting, charismatic personality and I felt the editing of the final cut was just poorly done or at least not done by someone with the same vision of Alexander as I had developed after reading the trilogy of novels written by Mary Renault (Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games) and the ancient biography by Appian. Stone released a director's cut but what I would really like is a DVD of digital video of the movie that could be edited into a personal cut of the movie then shared on Hulu or another site that does not have a video length limit. Maybe the studio could sponsor a contest for "Best Cut of Alexander" or have categories like "Best Cut of Alexander from a Persian Viewpoint", etc.
