I had read and more or less enjoyed a few of Harry Turtledove’s sandals and sorcery novels a few years ago, as well as a few of his short stories, and had read a couple of his alternate-history novels as well. When I saw a book called Justinian, by H.N. Turteltaub, I just assumed it was his, and I read it, and more or less enjoyed it (although I don’t remember anything about it at all). So, when I was on vacation and looking for something to read, and I saw Over the Wine-Dark Sea on the not-quite-remainder table for three bucks, and figured it would be worth it. And I suppose it was.
It’s a well-written and (as far as I can tell) well-researched sort of textbook-in-novel-form about trading merchants in post-Alexander Hellas. I suppose I learned a bit about daily life and merchant economics in that period, although since nothing particularly bad happens to the main characters, I only learned about successful trades and (comparatively) affluent life. There were a few of the awkward bits where the character, acting as narrator, muses about things in a way that only makes sense if he is addressing us, as when he mentions that one of the other characters is eating breakfast naked, as most of the men on the boat usually do. Um, and you are thinking about this why? No, not that reason, sorry. He’s just telling us things that we wouldn’t have known, but that he would have no reason to know we wouldn’t have known, since he’s not writing for us but just thinking. It’s a common problem in historical novels, and Mr. Turteltaub does a better job with it than many writers, but not as good a job as, for instance, Mary Renault. Which is a tough comparison, of course, but there it is.
No, my problem with the book was its plot, or its lack of plot. I’m a fiend for narrative, as Gentle Readers may have figured out, and this book is just one thing after another. I suppose it’s possible to describe the book as complying with the Universal Plot Skeleton: the protagonist (who is the accountant/buyer for a merchant ship) is faced with a difficult problem (making a profit on a trade mission), makes attempts to overcome that problem (by buying and selling various things at various prices), and eventually succeeds. He doesn’t succeed in a dramatically interesting or revelatory way, in my opinion, but those things are de gustibus, and as such non disputandum.
However, to say that the novel hangs on the Universal Plot Skeleton is not to say that it is a plotty book. I don’t mean that it isn’t well-plotted; when I say a book isn’t well-plotted, I usually mean either that the plot makes no sense, or that it moves too fast in some places and too slow in others. Bleak House is well-plotted, Nicholas Nickleby is badly plotted, and The Pickwick Papers is hardly plotted at all. That’s the problem with Over the Wine-Dark Sea; hardly anything happened, and what did just sort of happened, and didn’t have much to do with anything else that happened.
When I started the book, my Best Reader asked me what it was about, and I said it was about two sea-traders in post-Alexandrian Greece (not actually Greece, mostly Italy, as it turns out), and that I assumed they would be shipwrecked, or taken captive, or something. Thereafter, every now and then she would ask me how the book was going, and Your Humble Blogger would say with exasperation “I’m a hundred and fifty pages in, and they haven’t been shipwrecked yet.” Or two hundred and fifty, or three hundred. Eventually, I figured out that they weren’t going to be shipwrecked, and I finished the book anyway, but I won’t be reading the next three in the series, as I’m told they aren’t shipwrecked in any of those, either.
This is a matter of taste. I like plots. I like my protagonists to be shipwrecked, now and then. I figure I can’t be the only one who, bored out of his mind an hour into Sideways, leaned over to a companion and whispered that the movie would be much much better with a car chase. I understand that the movie wouldn’t actually have been better with a car chase, and that presumably the people who liked it so much liked it, among other reasons, because there wasn’t a car chase. But a car chase is symbolic, to me, of the things I like in a movie that Sideways lacked (or perhaps avoided). Similarly, Mr. Turteltaub clearly didn’t want a shipwreck in the middle of his book, but I did.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
What does “sandals and sorcery” mean? Have I read any sandals and sorcery novels? (I don’t think I’ve read any Turtledove.) What distinguishes them from other novels that happen to contain sorcery, and/or sandals? :^)
I use ‘sandals and sorcery’ to indicate fantasy novels (thus the sorcery) that have a level of technology more or less medieval (thus sandals). I suppose the usual phrase is ‘swords and sorcery’, actually, although often enough the main character doesn’t actually have a sword.
Quick googling found this article by John L. Flynn of Towson University. In it, he contrasts the Sword and Sorcery sub-genre from standard heroic fantasy: “Whereas heroic fantasy emphasizes the valiant struggle of the hero to overcome these supernatural forces, Sword-and-Sorcery focuses on the darker, more sinister and often brutal nature of that struggle.” If I’m going to claim sandals and sorcery as a slightly different subgenre, I suppose it’s that the emphasis is neither on the valiant struggle nor the brutal nature of that struggle but the sociological status of peasants and the logistics of life. The struggle will sometimes take a chapter or two off while the characters prepare a traditional meal or sew clothes or beat their armor back into shape.
Thanks,
-V.