# 37
The First Man in Rome (Masters of Rome I) by Colleen McCullough
1990 - Head of Zeus ebook - 1,056 pages
From Waterstone's:
110 BC:
The world cowers before its legions, but Rome is about to be engulfed by a vicious power struggle that will threaten its very existence.
At its heart are two exceptional men: Gaius Marius, prosperous but lowborn, a proud and disciplined soldier emboldened by his shrewdness and self-made wealth; and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a handsome young aristocrat corrupted by poverty and vice.
Both are men of extraordinary vision, extreme cunning and ruthless ambition, but both are outsiders, cursed by the insurmountable opposition of powerful and vindictive foes.
If they forge an alliance, Marius and Sulla may just defeat their enemies, but only one of them can become First Man in Rome.
The battle for Rome has just begun.
Thoughts:
This is the first book in Colleen McCullough's hefty 'Masters of Rome' series, which currently runs to seven novels. I say 'currently' because there's a campaign to get her to write more but, due to her failing eyesight, it seems unlikely to happen. The series stands at nearly 7,000 pages long, and there's a bit of negativity surrounding the Kindle collection of volumes I - V that was released recently, due to the individual Kindle editions of the books mysteriously disappearing from sale - meaning that anyone who had bought the first couple of books would then have to re-buy them as part of the collection in order to get the others. Not good! The publisher has claimed it was not their decision, and the individual versions are slowly reappearing (although not the first two books as yet!), but it seems a very underhand approach to me. Fortunately I'd only bought the first one, and that for 99p in the Christmas sale, so paying £15 for the collection wasn't something I found particularly irritating, but I can completely understand the 1-star reviews it has received - which have had nothing to do with the quality of the books themselves.
I felt quite daunted taking on this first book. At over 1,000 pages, with the text dense on the page, and with the prospect of dealing with lots of Roman names and Latin words, not to mention the politics of Ancient Rome and the fact that a lot of characters have almost exactly the same names, I figured it was going to be a long and challenging read.
Beginning in 110 B.C., this is the story of the rise of Gaius Marius and his then friendship with Lucius Cornelius Sulla, their involvement in the Jugurthine War in Numidia and, later, against Germania, both of which aid and hinder them in their respective quests for power in Rome. On top of that there is all the political manoeuvring in the Senate, the various marriages and affairs and all sorts of other shenanigans. Just like England under the Tudors, Ancient Rome overflows with opportunities for great stories, and McCullough - in contrast to, say, Conn Iggulden's 'Boy's Own' approach to storytelling - does it all by using the known historical detail. She doesn't play fast and free with the facts, and is quite open about her theories as to what happened between those facts in the excellent, in depth glossary.
For me, McCullough has a couple of masterstrokes up her sleeve. The first, and probably most important, is that she somehow manages to make all the political games easy to follow. She packs a HUGE amount of historical detail into the book but writes it with such an easy, flowing style that it makes it almost impossible to put down (fortunately I was reading the Kindle edition - I suspect I might have wanted to put the brick of a paperback down a bit more often, just to give my hands a rest ). The wars are dealt with in a different way from that I usually read - it's not a book about the fighting, so there is little in the way of outright action. She's telling the tale from Marius' and Sulla's point of view, so it more of a general's overview of the battlefield, but it works a treat.
Her second masterstroke is that - I found - her characters, these real-life people, are amazing - every single one of them. I won't list them all, but Sulla leaps off the page (not always in a nice way!), and the women in the story are every bit as good, particularly Aurelia, mother of Gaius Julius Caesar. There are many powerful scenes, so beautifully written, that stick in my mind.
The other masterstroke involves something that I generally don't like in books: there is a lot of telling rather than showing, conveying a lot of exposition. But the way she deals with this for the most part - through letters sent backwards and forwards, keeping characters who may be in different parts of the world up to date with what has been happening elsewhere - is brilliant because it allows the characters to shine through in the way they write their messages. The letters from Marius's long-time cohort, Publius Rutilius Rufus, in particular, are brilliant, full of the politics of the Senate but told with such caustic wit that they often hilarious. I found this a book full of humour that comes naturally from the characters.
So - to cut a long review slightly less, erm, long - it is most definitely a long read, and I suppose it is a challenge with all those names and pronunciation issues (fortunately, there's also a pronunciation guide - I made more bookmarks in this than any other Kindle book ), but I found it an absolute joy. Once I got through the initial feeling of being daunted I found it a wonderful, flowing, compelling and completely absorbing read. I can safely say it has rocketed up alongside Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies and a couple of O'Brians as one of the best historical novels I've read to date.
If you're even remotely interested in Ancient Rome you owe it to yourself to read this book. It's my favourite read of the year so far, by a country mile. And then some. And the series is only just getting started, so the best could well be yet to come.
10/10
