purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (books)
[personal profile] purplecat
The problem with writing a book that follows one family through the ups and downs of Roman Britain is that it inevitably causes the reader, or at least this reader, to draw comparisons with Rosemary Sutcliff. Although Sutcliff set her books in many historical eras Roman Britain is the backdrop for many of them and, indeed, many of the best of them. Following the progress of one family is also a trick of Sutcliff's - The Capricon Bracelet does this in one volume as a series of short stories, but her most famous family must be the Aquila family who, as far as I'm aware, first appear in The Eagle of the Ninth and I last encountered them in The Shield Ring, set against the backdrop of resistance to the Norman Invasion in the Lake District. The problem with causing a reader to compare your work to that of a well-loved children's author is that you are almost bound to lose out.


In brief Emperor consists of three Novellas topped and tailed by a short Prologue and Epilogue. In the Prologue a prophesy is delivered, in Latin, to a Brigantian family and written down. The prophesy consists of three triplets each referring to a roman Emperor (Claudius, Hadrian and Constantine) followed by bits from the American Declaration of Independence (I think, possibly the constitution, my knowledge of American history is, I now realise, rather woeful). Each of the novellas then details the meeting of a family member interested in the prophesy with the respective Emperor and the Epilogue closes with the delivery of a new prophesy, in Anglo-Saxon, to the latest family member (all ready for book two in the series).

One of the reasons I bought Emperor is that I hugely enjoyed Neal Stephenson's System of the World series and was excited to read another novel by a respected SF author which was going to write a historical novel but, essentially, treat it as SF. I've never actually read one of Stephen Baxter's novels, although I very much liked his short story in the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and his name is frequently linked to rumours that he will be writing for Dr Who; the poor man must have foolishly mentioned a fondness for the programme at some point. Unfortunately Emperor is not in the same league as the System of the World. Stephenson managed to present Enlightenment Europe as a strange and exotic fantasy world while never appearing to educate, Baxter, on the other hand, seems to be over-anxious to educate (character's ruminate internally on the economic forces at work in their world, and helpfully discuss the history necessary to link the three novellas while touring various examples of Roman architecture) without ever appearing actually inspired by the world as a setting. The stories in the three novellas are mostly kind of dull and the prophesy itself is not really either interesting enough nor mysterious enough to drive the plot. This all sounds fairly damning but actually the book itself benefits from being pretty short, Baxter manfully resists the tendency to pad present in buckets in fantasy writing but also evident in some SF writing. His characters are also both interesting and sympathetic which will take a book a long way - certainly this was a book I kept stealing odd moments to read during the day rather than waiting for my customary personal reading time just before bed.

The comparison with Sutcliff though was very interesting. As I said above, I don't think its a comparison Baxter could ever hope to win since it is difficult to compete with fond childhood memories, but it is interesting none-the-less. At the risk of using an over literary word I would describe Baxter's approach as post-colonial. He sees the Romans in terms of their occupation, exploitation and ultimately cultural assimilation of British, and specifically Brigantian, culture. It's quite a clever device. Sutcliff, of course, encourages the reader (mostly) to identify with the Romans but her identification is associated with viewing the Romans as a "civilising influence" and stresses their "British" values of honour and integrity. Baxter does not ask you to identify with the Romans, quite the opposite, but by encouraging the UK/US reader's natural tendency to identify with the native Britons (because of the name) accomplishes the trick of viewing Imperialism from the other side, especially if you are aware of a previous tendency to identify with the Romans. In this light the book is distinctly thought-provoking - he even briefly introduces a post-9/11 "suicide arsonist" but wisely does not pursue the idea. In fact, ultimately I was more interested in this work as a commentary on Imperialism than I was in the prophesy and this particular presentation of history with a SF slant.

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