I finally got around to getting The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby this week. is it any good? If the suspense is too much for you, Gary’s a nice bloke, so if it were rubbish I wouldn’t mention I’ve read it. The reason I left off buying it for so long was that I was waiting for the paperback. In the end the Kindle price dropped to the paperback, so I got that version. I’ll also be buying the sequel The Ionia Sanction, possibly not till the price drops with the paperback for that too, but then again it might be a Christmas treat instead.
The book is based on a real event. Ephialtes established the Athenian democracy (if you ignore Cleisthenes), and then was killed a few days after by xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (I just realised, this would be a big spoiler). This, as Gary Corby points out in his author’s note, is in a few lines of the Constitution of the Athenians – which we’ll say was written by Aristotle because a discussion of the authorship would be tedious, inconclusive and utterly irrelevant to the point.
The book opens quickly.
A dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud. I stopped and stood there like a fool, astonished to see him lying where I was about to step. He lay facedown in the dirt, arms spread wide, with an arrow protruding out his back. He’d been shot through the heart.
It was obvious he was dead, but I knelt down and touched him anyway, perhaps because I needed to assure myself that he was real. The body was warm to my touch. The blood that stained my fingertips, from where I had touched his wound, was slippery and wet but already beginning to dry in the heat, and the small cloud of dust his fall had raised made my nose itch as it settled.
It doesn’t normally rain corpses, so where had this one come from? I looked up. There was a ledge above me, and another to the left. The one directly above was the Rock of the Areopagus, home to the council chambers of our elder statesmen. The other to the left, but much farther away, was the Acropolis. There was no doubt about it; this man had fallen from the political heights.
The opening chapter is available as a Kindle sample, which you can use with Kindle for PC or Mac if you don’t have a Kindle, and it’s a fair sample of both the best and worst of the book. At its best, which is most of it, the action runs smoothly. Sometimes though there is a thud as novel pauses to dump some information. Even then it can work well. When Nicolaos, the protagonist, is trying to work out who inherits the victim’s estate there’s a good route into pulling apart what can be head-spinningly complex Athenian law. Sometimes the story has to stop to explain a historical point, which then launches the characters again. Once or twice there is a bump when the novel turns into a history lesson for a short while for no apparent reason, but these points are very rare and brief so the tale can pick up the pace again.
The main characters are well-rounded. There’s shades of grey in the Athenians and not just the guilty and the innocent. The appearance of Socrates is popular among many readers though I would have been happy to see him knocked off by the murderer.* NS Gill said that “although Corby’s vision of ancient Athens is nowhere near mine, little of it could be positively refuted.” I agree. Corby’s view is more rose-tinted than mine, but his version still has warts that are rarely seen in popular portrayals of the city. This is not something I thought was bad, just different.
It also raises a question of how much historical accuracy is important to a historical novel. I think limitations in a story are important, because a story without obstacles isn’t much of a story. Reality is a good source for obstacles, so historical accuracy helps. At the same time this is a story, and a slavish adherence to historical sources at the expense of the narrative is not a good thing in my opinion. For that reason while there might be one or two things in the book I’d query it’s not enough to matter. They’re forgotten after a page. A day after finishing the book only one possible problem remains. Getting the detail right could make it a lot harder to keep the plot moving. It’d also put him well ahead of hundreds of classicists, so he’d have even more people thinking something was amiss.
The only thing that really jarred might be down to me getting the Kindle version. There were too many donkeys. A few times a character would scratch his donkey. The only other possible reading would be that he was speaking with an American accent and scratching his posterior. He has talked about voice recently and posted a good argument for colloquialisms in historical novels. However, as all the recent films in the cinema and popular television programmes have conclusively shown, ancient Greeks and Romans spoke English with an RP accent. Slightly more seriously, the occasional word in American was a far bigger problem for me in pulling me out of the story than anything Gary Corby wrote. This really wasn’t that much of a problem. I don’t know if the paperback has an English variant.
A missed opportunity for the Kindle version was a lack of links to the Glossary. It could have been handy to have links through to the Glossary in the text to find out what a krater was if you didn’t know. A link through to the publisher’s site and Gary Corby’s weblog at the end of the book would also be a good idea.
In the author’s note Corby explains where ideas came from and what was real and what was not. He takes a more generous view than me about how much history can be trusted. As he also notes the period he’s writing about isn’t really historical, it’s proto-historical. However, there are plenty of classicists who take Thucydides as a reliable source for the foundation of the Sicilian colonies three hundred years before his time, so Corby’s acceptance of history isn’t simply credulous. It’s just different, and again for a novelist this is probably better because it adds restrictions on what can and cannot be done, pushing for creative and not obvious solutions to problems.
This is probably the big attraction of the book for me. Because it’s not Athens the way I see it, the story isn’t always obvious. At the same time it’s not wilfully obscure. The solution doesn’t appear thanks to a secret tip-off that he pulls out as a Deus ex machina at the end. It’s not in plain sight, but it’s plausible.
It’s also fun, and that’s what I want from a novel.
*Likewise, my big complaint about HBO’s Rome was they didn’t kill Cicero soon enough for my liking. Damn this historical accuracy.