Trajan: Lion of Rome

Trajan: Lion of Rome
CRH Wildfeuer
Aquifer Publishing
May 2009

It is rare in my life I ever get a book I hate so much I can not possibly finish reading it. I don’t think, short of a Laurell K. Hamilton book, I’ve had a book that has turned me off so completely that I wanted to put it down twenty pages in. Ladies and gentlemen, I have that book for you. Yes, it’s a Roman historical fiction novel. You are all probably thinking, “Strange, Jenn eats Roman history for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sometimes mid-afternoons snack.” And yet, this book made me weep in places…and not in a good way.

First of all, let me preface this by stating that I have met Mr. Wildfeuer, who is a perfectly lovely person. I was impressed with anyone willing to write a historical fictional novel on any emperor as little known as Trajan is to the mass market, and thought it would be exciting to read about him. Trajan, one of the so-called “five good emperors” of Roman history, isn’t particularly sexy to most popular Roman historians, because he wasn’t insane, he didn’t start a civil war, and he didn’t particularly make major changes to Rome, (well except for the whole Trajan forum, the defeat and colonization of Dacia, oh, and invading Parthia….except for those.) The History Channel and popular novelists tend for forget Trajan, who for his part was a very interesting man and a very good emperor. Considering that Wildfeuer had studied Trajan intensely over a period of time, and had a Classical studies background, I was ready for a great read through the era of history my UCLA degree prepared me for!

I admire anyone who has had seven years worth of Latin. My paltry one, (mostly forgotten), quakes in the face of it. But I shall state this, seven years worth of Latin and an intense knowledge of any period of history does not a good storyteller make. And in Wildfeuer’s book, this lack of ability to even string together an endearing and complex English sentence grabs you almost from Chapter One. I could tell because Chapter One is only a couple of pages long. Startled, I looked through the rest of the book and found that this is the case through out, with very little dialogue development, character development, or scene development as far as I could tell. I thought I was reading a high schooler’s work, until I remembered a man who specializes in the field wrote this.

Odd….

The writing doesn’t improve one wit as the story progresses. We are led through a confusing ramble in the Jewish Wars; I am surmising the whole point of this to set up the loyalty shown by the Traianus family to the Flavii as they take the purple in Rome. Trajan isn’t even involved in these opening sequences in Palestine, rather he at home in what is modern-day Spain, dealing with bullies in what I am guessing is supposed to show Trajan’s strength, resilience, and bravery against those who threaten him.

These are all suppositions on my part, I couldn’t really tell what the point of the opening chapters were because they tell you nothing really. They are interesting from a historical perspective, I suppose, but the dialogue is so childishly weak, and the scene writing so bad that I got distracted by how horrible the story was.

But I soldiered on, because I have a degree in Roman History, and I wanted to see where Wildfeuer was going with this, (and if he would improve his writing as the book went on). As we watch Trajan age from youth to man with very little character development, the stilted dialogue and lack of true, in-depth character study or plot is glossed over in favor of jumping from one historical event to the other, mostly relating it through Trajan’s rather static eyes. I say static because Trajan never comes off as having been a living, breathing human being once, with real thoughts, ideas, and passions. So little attention is given to Trajan’s personality that if I didn’t already know the man’s life before reading the book I’d wonder why it is anyone was bothering to write about him at all. Trajan becomes as thin as dishwater, the aspects of his personality gleaned from meticulous reading of first hand sources and are clumsily pieced together without real thought or explanatio. There is none of the imagination and creativity an author needs to give their characters to make Trajan real, no spark of live, of adventure, of excitement. And it lacking in all of the people populating the story, not just the main character. Trajan and his compatriots plod through the history we know they are meant for, and you come off at the end of the day wondering why you didn’t just bother picking up Anthony Birley’s translation of the so called Lives of the Later Caesars and read that instead. After all, he at least makes questionable court-gossip fun, which is more than I could say for Wildfeuer.

And speaking of gossip, if you aren’t comfortable with writing about sexuality, please don't write about it. Our modern views of sexuality are very different from the Romans, but I can guarantee that even the Romans would be horrified by the very amateur way it was handled in this book. Beyond the fact that I question and doubt that one bad love affair in Trajan’s life prompted his sexual preference for men over women, Wildfeuer treats sexuality in general and the Roman views of it in particular so ham-fistedly that in spots I had to wonder if this was a twelve-year-old writing writing their first love scene. One episode in particularly had me laughing so hard I was in tears, and I couldn’t stop giggling for half-an-hour. I was the queen of the trashy-romance as a teenager, I can say it was certainly not out of some titillated fit of scandalized prudishness that made me so shocked and amused. Between the dialogue so choppy you wonder who in the world speaks like that in the bedroom, to the gratuitous use of the word cock, jarring in and of itself given the historical nature of the book, I had to classify it as the worst love scene I’d ever read anywhere, in any book.

And that is saying something. See mentioned Laurell K. Hamilton, who I mentioned earlier, for more details.

I don’t know who his editor was, but if you have a job at a publishing house, you really might want to brush up on what it takes to make a good, interesting, and enlightening story, because this is not it. Mind you, I’m am not claiming to be great with grammar, frankly some of the things I do with the English language as I type would have English majors fainting, but I do know enough to spot obvious errors. There are quite a few of them in this book. One or two are to be expected in any book, but these are gross errors, and there is bad syntax left and right. If Wildfeuer were writing the book as a translation of Latin, I could understand the syntax, Latin often has clumsy syntax at best that in English has to be tweaked a tiny bit. But honestly, it is the editor’s job to catch these things. And they weren't caught. And that is a shame in any book.

Now, Wildfeuer’s book isn’t all bad, there are some very rough diamonds in it that if he were a better writer he could have really made something of this book. As a historian I took away much that made my geeky heart palpitate in joy. His Latin usage was appropriate and always given in a context that either described the object clearly, or helped you understand what the title/word/term was so that you got the sense that this was Rome, and not just some guy doing a bad translation job. Wildfeuer also always tried to inject as much of the Roman traditions, moirés, and culture in as he could, albeit stiffly. While I can’t give him props for really breathing life into it, it is accurate to its time period. I was particularly pleased with minor details, such as the remembrance of the difference in ladies elaborate hairstyles in that period as opposed to early periods, of the clear definition of titles and roles in the empire at the time, little things that are so often glossed over in history classes that Wildfeuer really did give full attention to.

And I appreciated that Wildfeuer does know his history, and he knows it well, and he tries, clumsily, to create a narrative of it. He does try to give explanations for the actions of historical figures, actions that often in history books or lectures get overlooked for the bigger picture of what is going on. You can see very much that Wildfeuer wanted to very much provide for us the thinking behind the events we know happened, the reasoning for those things that became so pivotal to history. But sadly, his storytelling skills are so poor that not even his insights come across, instead you almost wish it were a lecture because it seems unreal that anyone could write this badly.

And I don’t say that lightly. I would never say anyone is a bad writer unless it distracted me that much. And sadly, Mr. Wildfeuer is a horrible writer.

It is a difficult thing to write historical fiction, I will grant any writer that. On the one hand you want to stay true to what you know from your sources, to the things they saw and experienced, and yet you have to tell a tale that is compelling to people who didn’t see it and who don’t know. And frankly, you are only working off the eyes of someone long dead, who describes little because they expect everyone to know what they are talking about. This is not easy at all. I know this, I’ve been up to my eyebrows in original source material, and I have to give Mr. Wildfeuer a hand for even making the attempt. But I’ve read many historical fictions, and it can be done. It just takes a touch of the writer, that spark of imagination, and that grace to handle difficult topics with finesse, and that is something that takes years of practice. It also takes getting into the head of the person you are writing about, be they an original character or the Emperor Trajan, a real life person. You need to understand that person better than you know yourself, you have to get into their personality, speak with their voice, their words, their experience and views, and that is something that takes years of practice, and a keen understanding of people that did not come across at all in Mr. Wildfeuer’s book.

If Wildfeuer ever writes a true history book, a study on Trajan or any of his predecessors, or even a study on the world of the Roman Empire at the time, I will of course buy it happily. I can say with certainty the man knows his stuff. He just needs to learn how to write fiction.

Rate this wormy book: This book gets the worst rating from me, MAGGOT. The dialogue is unreadable, the characters are wooden, and short of the history you have no reason for caring why any of it is happening. I recommend the San Diego Writer’s Guild, or whoever gave it such a great review try speaking to some of the San Diego writers I know about basic fiction before handing out recommendations.