“Where did you acquire a conscience?” asked Octavian. “It was bred out of your mother’s line long ago.” [p. 415]
I decided to read this whilst I was in Egyptian mode, following Cleopatra's Daughter: I was surprised to find that it also resonated strongly with A Confusion of Princes. Indeed, it has pretty much the same plot as the latter -- though a very different setting, and a different emotional landscape. (Both, it seems, owe a plot-debt to Kipling's Captains Courageous, which I haven't read.)
Caesarion, son of Cleopatra VII and Julius Caesar, wakes up on his own funeral pyre: he had a seizure when the camp was attacked by traitors, and has been left for dead. He eludes the half-hearted guards and makes his way to the caravan trail, where he's found and tended by an Egyptian trader named Ani. Caesarion, unaccustomed to dealing with the lower classes (he was a king!) tells Ani that his name is Arion, and proceeds to display all the arrogance, entitlement and prejudice with which he's been inculcated from birth. Ani is remarkably tolerant, and (very gradually) Arion becomes less arrogant. Once he's recovered from his wounds he's actually useful to Ani and Ani's family: literate, Latin-speaking, and well-informed, he can discuss poetry with a Roman general, write letters introducing Ani to trading partners, and entertain Ari's children with tales of Alexandria before the Roman conquest.
I didn't love this as much as Island of Ghosts (one of the most enjoyable historical novels I've read in years) but it was an engaging read. Though I disliked Caesarion in the initial chapters, I was drawn into his story as he began to adjust to his new, lowlier status, and the loss of all he'd known or anticipated. Though there is constant peril here, there's also humour and warmth. In Ani's family, Arion finds something he's been missing all his life. Perhaps that's what gives him the strength to face up to enemies, traitors and even his second cousin...
Bradshaw's Afterword explains her approach to the story: she 'came reluctantly to the conclusion that Cleopatra was a nasty piece of work, and that her son wouldn’t have been much better' (p. 444). Arion's epilepsy (the 'sacred disease' which Caesar also apparently suffered -- here an additional indication that Caesarion truly was Caesar's son) is depicted with sensitivity: be warned, though, that Arion's haunted by nightmarish visions of medical horrors, which he relives during his seizures.
No comments:
Post a Comment