Just Finished Reading: The Road to Rome by Ben Kane (FP: 2011)

Alexandria, Egypt 48 BC. As the city burns and his long lost sister sails for Rome, Romulus and his friend Tarquinius can only look on and get ready to fight for their lives. Heavily outnumbered by local Egyptian forces they can only retreat to their waiting ships and hope that their commander – Gaius Julius Caesar – can save them. Meanwhile in Rome Romulus’s sister Fabiola has her own plans and her own path. Now free from slavery and lover of Brutus, a man on the rise in Rome, she is free at last to put her plan into effect. Using her position as brothel owner to gather information from the leading men of the Roman Republic she begins to determine who she can trust and who shares her desire to rid Rome of its greatest enemy – not a foreign King or paid infiltrator but someone at the very heart of the Republic itself. But her revenge is far from purely a way to protect Rome from a would-be tyrant. For Fabiola it’s personal – as personal as it can possibly get. For Fabiola is convinced that her enemy is the same man who raped her mother many years ago, the man who almost raped her, the man who was her father and the hero of the battlefield, conqueror of Gaul – Julius Caesar himself.

This was the 3^rd book in the Lost Legion trilogy which followed the lives of brother-sister pair Romulus and Fabiola and Etruscan mystic Tarquinius and they make their way through the turbulent history of the late Roman Republic. Rome is seen here warts and all with crime, corruption, filthy streets, poverty and prostitution (to say nothing of slavery, the pitiless ‘Games’ and the casual brutality of the times) rather than the glory of Rome we’re mostly used to. The times and the place are fascinating it themselves but, unfortunately, despite having quite a tale to tell I really felt that this final instalment fell rather flat. Several problems (or irritations) really jumped out at me and recurred throughout the book. Firstly there was the main character’s motivations. We were introduced to them in the first book and reminded of them in the second. I can kind of understand why we were reminded of them again in the third book (after all I myself have, on occasion read books out of sequence) but I felt that being reminded – either during dialogue or internal monologue – more than 10 times (I kid you not) throughout the book was a bit much to say the least. I know I’m ‘getting on’ in years but even my memory isn’t that bad yet. Then there was the internal monologues of the main protagonist in particular. Repetitive just didn’t cover it. There was guilt over a friend’s death, anger over a friend’s lies, missing his sister etc.. Over and over and over again. It was the classic mistake (in so many books and films) of telling rather than showing. Readers are normally intelligent enough to work out a characters motivations if given enough evidence to work from. We don’t need constant rumination coming from someone’s head. Then my biggest bug-burr: Cliff Hangers. To ‘drive the narrative forward’ and keep you turning those pages the author dropped in a cliff hanger (usually a matter of life and death) every three or four (short) chapters. OK, it might have driven the narrative along like an out of control freight train but it was SO annoying I actually howled in protest more than once – fortunately this was at home alone rather than back in my office. I quickly learnt that any moment of drama would be addressed a few chapters later and the ‘dramatic pause’ would be essentially meaningless. It didn’t exactly add very much to me overall enjoyment.

It was a real shame that there were so many things that irritated me with this book. The location and time frame – on the road to the Ides of March – were dramatic enough. The author handled the locations well and his battle sequences were very well handled. There would have been much more interest, for me at least, to spend more time on the political side of things, which where generally glossed over, rather than the private revenge of one person. I haven’t been put off this author (yet) but I’m certainly in danger of being if especially the repeated cliff hangers carry on in other books/series (which if I’m honest I suspect will do).  We’ll see. Despite having its moments I can’t say I enjoyed this book overly much. Borderline reasonable.