{"id":367,"date":"2014-07-17T20:23:52","date_gmt":"2014-07-17T20:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/richardabbott.authorsxpress.com\/?p=367"},"modified":"2014-07-17T20:23:52","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T20:23:52","slug":"review-augustus-by-john-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/07\/17\/review-augustus-by-john-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"Review – Augustus, by John Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Augustus<\/em>, by John Williams, was another book club choice: I’m not sure that I would have picked it out myself. I have come away with mixed feelings. It is very obviously a carefully written book, intricately written entirely in epistolary form. Strictly, not all sections are letters, as we have diary entries, military orders, official records and such like as well. However, every part has a sense of formally constructed distance – we are not experiencing things as they happen, but rather we are shown a highly selected series of personal reflections on events.<\/p>\n

Buy Augustus from Amazon.co.uk<\/a>\"\"<\/em>
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\nAlthough the progress of recounted events proceeds almost entirely in linear order, the time sequence of the reflections themselves is extremely nonlinear. A letter written just hours after a key moment is followed by a memoir extract from decades later. Likewise, the perspectives offered by the writers range from enthusiastic through manipulative to hostile. Most of the entries are acutely conscious of the political games being played, and are seeking to influence others one way or another. There is a constant sense that nobody’s words can really be trusted.<\/p>\n

This was certainly an interesting ploy, but one which for me did not quite work. The cast of involved people was very large, and their writing styles not sufficiently diverse for me to pick them out easily. John identifies each sender and recipient in a short header, as well as the date of the item, but I found it all too easy to forget after a couple of page turns, and on a Kindle it was not easy to flick back to the header to remind myself. It is, I think, a book which actually needs to be read in a physical copy, with the consequent ease of keeping your thumb in a page and flipping to and fro. Indeed, I realised half-way through that you really need a large diagram beside you tracing who knows whom and the nature of each relationship (which changes through time).<\/p>\n

I think the book might work for those who like political machinations. So far as I was concerned, I started to think quite early on that I wasn’t really interested in who was trying to deceive whom and why. By the time I thought of tracking relationships on paper, I had already ceased to really care who won and who lost, since their personal plots and preoccupations did not interest me (despite apparently deciding the fate of the Roman world).<\/p>\n

There are three main divisions of the book. The first is male dominated and follows the saga to the defeat of Mark Anthony, at which point Rome is free of civil war. A second, with a higher proportion of female voices, takes us through to Augustus’s successful defeat of a last conspiracy against him. The final, much briefer, section is almost entirely a soliloquy of Augustus himself, close to death and reflecting on his life. Each stage sees him gain something and lose something, and the reader is left to decide if the gain was worth the loss.<\/p>\n

Overall a modest four star book for me. I am glad to have read it, but cannot imagine reading it again. It is carefully constructed, but left me cold, partly because the overwhelming majority of the book concerns itself with an elite group of men that I cannot identify with. I think it was reasonably well researched, but am not enough of an expert on Roman history to know for sure, and there were a couple of places in the Egyptian section that I was very dubious about. If you like immersing yourself in Roman politics, you may well love this book – but make sure you read it with pen and paper beside you to keep track of the intricate web of personal interactions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Augustus, by John Williams, was another book club choice: I’m not sure that I would have picked it out myself. I have come away with mixed feelings. It is very obviously a carefully written book, intricately written entirely in epistolary form. Strictly, not all sections are letters, as we have diary entries, military orders, official … Continue reading Review – Augustus, by John Williams<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-fiction-2","category-reading-challenge","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/richardabbott.datascenesdev.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}