I came away from Ken Parejko’s Across the Waters of Time: Pliny Remembered with very mixed feelings. On the plus side – and these are very large plus features – this is a beautifully conceived book, with a powerful and compelling imaginative sweep and some marvellously lyrical passages of writing. The presentation of Pliny’s interior thought-world, and its evolution through his lifetime, is splendid, and the historical events Ken chooses to illuminate this come over as pivotal to Pliny, and in some cases centrally important to the entire first century AD. It is a book which can be highly recommended in these grounds alone.

I had not realised before – having given up Latin studies too early to get beyond Julius Caesar’s wars in France and Britain – just how close Pliny had been to the key figures of his age. He counted among his friends the emperor Vespasian, the Jewish author Josephus, and a wide circle of other political and intellectual people.

But the book ultimately is more concerned with the interior world than the exterior. Pliny’s approach to history, and most especially to the natural world, have become foundation stones in our own systems of evaluation and classification. We follow how these ideas slowly crystallised in his mind, triggered by external events, and coloured always by his advancing age and frailty. By coincidence, if there is such a thing, I started reading this just after visiting the British Museum’s superb exhibition on the Vesuvius eruption which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum – and killed Pliny along with many others. So I had a very clear idea of the material world in which Pliny lived, which gave an extra dimension to my reading.

Sadly, though, the book has been finished very carelessly. There are a great many spelling and grammar errors, accidental use of similar words (swapping her for here, and such like), and problems of formatting. There is even an email address at one point in my version, presumably dumped in by an auto-correction feature of the software Ken used. I can easily live with a few of these kinds of slips, but there were so many that they became a serious impediment.

I also did not like the way Ken substituted modern place names and modern turns of phrase. In the early parts of the book these are largely absent. So the chapter set in Germany by and large uses the contemporary Roman names for towns and other places. The reader is immersed in Pliny’s world, and must make the personal effort to cross the waters of time and find out what they mean in modern terms. But increasingly we find modern place names used, and so are pulled away from the ancient world. Likewise the word “ok” (or variant spellings) appears with increasing frequency as the book proceeds. I’m sure the Romans had an equivalent for this slang phase, but this word grated on me. Again, on a purely technical level this time, the Kindle text is missing the standard navigation aids such as table of contents, and the ability to jump to and fro between chapter headings.

All these things, especially given they occurred more and more frequently as the book proceeded, suggested to me an air of neglect. Ken has conceived what I believe to be an important and beautiful book, but he has neglected to care for it enough to finish off the details. Even a small amount of extra time spent on the presentation and preparation, or another round of proof-reading, would have eliminated a large number of these mistakes. It is very unfortunate that this kind of nurturing care did not take place. There is a character in the book called Aulus, who because of birth deformities is exposed in the countryside and left to die. A very moving passage relates the different reactions of people caught up in this event. It is an experience which continues to haunt Pliny throughout his life. Sadly, Aulus’ story is rather mirrored by that of the text itself.

For depth and sweep of ideas, and for the way in which Ken has captured the inner world of a great and influential thinker, Across the Waters of Time deserves five stars. But the faults of execution, and the sad neglect of what could have been a beautiful text, mean that I can only give it four. Readers who are willing to live with the flaws will, I believe, discover a fascinating tale here.

The review will be posted to Amazon and Goodreads shortly.