Roma Eterna | ||||||||
Robert Silverberg | ||||||||
Gollancz, 385 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Alma A. Hromic
That's the premise that binds together the stories in Roma Eterna, Robert Silverberg's collection of stories about a never-ending Roman Empire
spanning not just centuries but pretty much millennia, world without end, forever and ever, amen.
Ancient Rome and its doings has always been a fertile field for fiction writers to harvest. Given the abundant historical reference
material and all the fun you can have figuring out how many names ending in "ius" you can put in without confusing your reader into
Byzantium, I can understand the siren call of the idea.
But here that just isn't enough, somehow. These are not Roman Empire stories, as such -- these are generic tales with people named
Marius and Gaius running through them. When in Rome do as the Romans do -- that's an old axiom that is so apt that even Silverberg
quotes it in the book -- but the problem with these stories is that they span hundreds of years and the reader gets no real sense
of change. It's just the Roman Empire toga cast over something else. We have the Roman Empire equivalent of the French Revolution,
and then we have the Roman Empire equivalent of the Russian Revolution, the one that swept away the Czars, right down to an
Anastasia-like survivor of the annihilation of the Roman royalty (who goes on to star in his own story in an oddly Grimm-like
fairy tale). It's almost gratifying, given this relentless "yes, it's all kind of other things, but it's still Rome, look at all
the people named Marius in here" refrain, that at some point Silverberg mentions the Roman traffic in terms of "...there seemed to
be no rules, each vehicle going exactly where it pleases..." and the reader realizes that even in this version of reality those
wonderful Roman roads still managed to give rise to Italian drivers.
It's cute to date the stories according to a whole new calendar, but it's annoying, as well, especially given that the book
contains a sort of foreword explaining the way the calendar works -- just subtract 754 years from every date as given. All that
it would have taken is a slightly firmer editorial hand, and an actual timeline giving the new-fangled dates in context of "our"
reality -- it would have taken perhaps one extra page in the book and would have had the felicitous effect of sparing the
numerically-challenged the constant mental arithmetic to work out which time period we're supposed to be in (especially given
the fact that nothing much seems to change from story to story except the names of the emperors). The editorial hand could also
have been used within the stories -- to ensure that every mention of the distant lands of Khitai and Cipangu isn't followed by
"where the yellow skinned people live". Perhaps, in stand-alone stories published separately, that was necessary -- but in a book
form it merely engenders a reaction of, "Yeah, yeah, we know already…"
Quite aside from everything else, one matter of supreme importance just hasn't been adequately addressed for me. I get the
distinct feeling that none of these characters are "real." They are there for the window dressing, because the Roman backdrop
must have people moving in front of it for there to be a play -- but they have no real personality, no real life. The Princess
Severina Floriana, for instance, seems to be present merely as an object of beauty (which is far from original -- princesses
are SUPPOSED to be beautiful, that's the trope) and (unconsummated) sexual desire -- but she floats on stage, looks pretty for a
moment, and then floats off and is killed offstage in the Purge. The protagonist of that particular story, a visiting Briton,
seems to have had no real reason to be in Rome at that time except to serve as narrator for this horrifying episode in the
history of Roma Eterna -- he, too, floats on stage, has an enjoyable fling with a pretty Roman patrician girl, and then suddenly
develops a burning desire to go back into the maelstrom of the burning palaces to find out what happened to the pretty
princess. The justification for this frantic need-to-know appears to be no more than that he never actually got further with
her than a chaste peck, and he would very much have liked to have taken it further -- which gives the tragedy of that story a
sort of farcical overlay of a sexual innuendo. We never get to know any of the doomed royals, not really -- the fact that they
are all slain horrifically doesn't really come home to the reader at all. In what has become known as the Eight Fatal Words
on an Internet forum I frequent, the reaction this whole bloody episode engenders is simply this: "I Don't Care What Happens
To These People." Large-scale murder becomes a statistic. Talking about it from the point of view of a character who is a
complete outsider and has not borne witness to any of it is remarkably uninvolving.
The only story in Roma Eterna which I felt was truly unique is the last one, "To the Promised Land." Paradoxically, although
it takes place in the same world as the rest, the tale is NOT directly a story of Rome -- and perhaps this is what makes it
different. This story has the people I craved in the rest of them. These people, somehow, I DO care about.
Perhaps the basic cavil I have is that I simply do not believe that a society would remain this static for this long. I can't
believe that a society with trams would still have temples to Juno -- or remember, in the kind of detail that these people seem
to, the names of Sulla, Nero, Caligula. To be sure, our own society does -- but only as figures of a distant past, not something
that feels like yesterday, not something that today's society has been based on or built upon. An ocean of willing suspension
of disbelief crashes in a sea of shattered foam on these rocks, and the end result is that I can't bring myself to
either "live" in, or care deeply enough about, Silverberg's eternal Urbs Roma. He is a storytelling master and an elder in
the field -- but somehow the overwhelming urge about this book is not to sit up all night to finish it with breathless
anticipation, but more to put it down and pick it up later... sometime... maybe.
Alma A. Hromic, addicted (in random order) to coffee, chocolate and books, has a constant and chronic problem of "too many books, not enough bookshelves". When not collecting more books and avidly reading them (with a cup of coffee at hand), she keeps busy writing her own. Following her successful two-volume fantasy series, Changer of Days, her latest novel, Jin-shei, is due out from Harper San Francisco in the spring of 2004. |
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