{"id":12522,"date":"2009-11-08T13:58:17","date_gmt":"2009-11-08T18:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/11\/08\/12522.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:52:50","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:52:50","slug":"book-report-count-belisarius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/11\/08\/book-report-count-belisarius\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Count Belisarius"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger read I, CLAVDIVS<\/a> at an earlyish age, not having been allowed to watch it on television (I vaguely remember) and later finding it on my parent’s shelves. I have read it half-a-dozen times, altogether, and I expect it has not only colored my understanding of Roman history but my expectations of the historical novel more generally (together with Mary Renault, of course, and The Ides of March<\/a>). Somehow, though, I never sought out any of Rupert Graves’sses’ other historical novels. Then, later, when I was aware of Rupert Graves as a poet and essayist who happened to write a popular historical novel, the lasting popularity of which was due to that television series I didn’t get to watch, it didn’t occur to me that he had written any other historical novels to seek out. But I work (as I may have mentioned) in an academic library, and if there is one good thing about working in an academic library at this moment in history, it is the profusion of leftover novels from the middle of last century. Which means that Count Belisarius<\/a> was sitting on the shelf when I walked past.\n

Reading it had some of the experience of re-reading; the battle scenes seemed particularly familiar, with the dry references to thousands or tens of thousands of people slaughtered in this engagement or that, which led to such-and-such an advantage or disadvantage in the campaign, which was wasted through the mismanagement of the other, resulting in the further slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands in another engagement. There is no attempt to convey what war is like<\/i>, in an emotional sense. But then there isn’t much attempt to provoke strong emotions at all—Mr. Graves is telling a story, and there is much to interest the reader, and perhaps raise a chuckle or a tsk, but not much to cause uproar. Which, after all, is why I liked Claudius<\/i> so much at such a young age, or rather, what gave me an opportunity to like it rather than being frightened off by the nightmarish stuff that was actually being described.\n

Despite that comforting feeling, I do have to relate that the book isn’t very good. There’s a reason why CLAVDIVS<\/i> is a popular book and Belisarius<\/i> is not. The character of Claudius is a fascinating character, full of contradictions and quirks, and who faces real danger and real problems, and worms his way through them in an entertaining way. The character of Belisarius is not. Part of that is that where Claudius is his own narrator, our narrator here is someone else, also not a very interesting character, which doesn’t help, but splitting the focus here emphasizes the problem, and to no good purpose. Belisarius is noble, bighearted, clever (at military stuff), and pious. The piety is viewed a trifle askance by the scribe\/narrator, but we are on Belisarius’s’s side on that, so it doesn’t matter. Also, the Emperor, Justinian, is a weak character, and largely reacts to things instead of acting on them—he is no Livia, and neither is Theodora.\n

Speaking of Theodora, another odd and somewhat comforting thing in the book is the way Mr. Graves makes it clear that some pretty salacious stuff is going on, without actually revealing what it is. It’s all out of Procopius<\/a>, only without the details. It’s one of those things about the thirties and this kind of writing, that you can’t actually mention a dildo, which would make the book trash and pr0n, even if it’s in the original Latin you are spicing up.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is comforted, and a bit bored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12522"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18917,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12522\/revisions\/18917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}