Month: October 2026

My review of Robert Harris’ ‘Agrippa’

Agrippa by Robert Harris

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Historical fiction is the paint-by-numbers of fiction writing. It lets you do the fun part – adding the colours of description and the shades of narration to the dry outline of recorded history – but without having to do the hard work of skillfully sketching the contour lines that define plot and character. And because the story already has brand recognition, you are guaranteed some degree of buy-in from your readers, simply by choosing a piece of history everyone knows.
The downside is the limits to how much artistry you can achieve within the confines of a story once told by God, and then badly retold by a slew of stuffy academics. Your art is constrained by the fine lines you are forced to walk as you paint: Slip too much into history, and you bore your audience. Slip too much into fiction, and you risk the trust of readers who expect you to stay true to what actually happened.
In Agrippa, Robert Harris manages to walk this fine line, but only barely. On the one hand, the very choice of canvas is to the author’s credit. He has selected a truly interesting central character, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the right-hand-man of Augustus Caesar; combined with an equally interesting period in history, the turbulent years after Julius Caesar’s assassination leading into a civil war that brought down the Republic and gave birth to the Empire. For lovers of ‘Rome Porn’ like me, there isn’t much for an artist to do in terms of colour choice to guarantee an enjoyable read: a stab of red as bloodlusted legions clash on the battlefield, a few hard strokes of flesh-colour as adulterous togas fall to the tiled floor of a sumptuous villa overlooking the Tiber. The palette is tried and true.
The problem is Harris doesn’t try very hard to make Agrippa feel true. The narrative device, a first-person retrospective from the protagonist’s deathbed, means our eponymous hero comes into the story weary and disillusioned, and this tone is carried across the entire novel, leaving no place for a character arc. We should feel the bright colours of youth slowly turn muddy and dun, as Agrippa’s noble friend and patron Octavius rises to power as Augustus, and becomes mired in the hypocrisy and filth of Roman politics. Instead we are treated to moments where the narrator tells us that he is too tired and fed up to recount the details of this or that battle or journey across the Adriatic Sea. What the reader hears instead is that Robert Harris himself is too tired to finish painting in all the numbers on his canvas. Time is running out, but not the time Agrippa has left before succumbing to his old war wounds, rather the time Harris has left before succumbing to his publisher’s deadline.
For all this, Harris remains a competent, if pedestrian, writer – good enough to put into words some surprising and entertaining details. I was struck by the descriptions of the hydraulic engineering works credited to Agrippa: canals, aqueducts and sewers. But most of all, I liked the parallels to the modern era. For instance Augustus Caesar’s frequent references to ‘upholding the Republic’ decades after his uncle had crossed the Rubicon resonate in today’s world, where the United States still calls itself a ‘Republic’, decades after JFK was assassinated for attempting to stand against what was already an American Empire by 1963.
Enjoy Agrippa for the competent, interesting story that it is. But don’t expect great art out of a tired novelist who can barely write colours between the lines.




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My review of Colm Tóibín’s ‘The Magician’

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As a longtime fan of Thomas Mann’s work, I was reluctant to pick up this quasi-biography, especially knowing it was written in the contemporary era; a time when the woke agenda’s revisionist impulses are injected into every historical account with the feckless zeal of an mRNA vaccine campaign – turning 18th England into a racial melting pot, and imbuing female protagonists with the physical strength and courage of ten doses of toxic masculinity. The risk of this one getting the tone badly wrong was magnified by Mann’s complex relationship with sexuality. I feared the biography of one of my favourite writers would be reduced to a prop for virtue signalling some banal cliche of the 2020s LGBTQ3.1415PI+ agenda.
I should have trusted in the craftsmanship of Colm Tóibín. From the early pages on, the author shows us that he has a deep love and respect for Mann’s oeuvre. Not only are we plunged straight into the small, mercantilist world of late Hanseatic Lübeck, but the very pacing and tone of the narration mirror the style of Buddenbrooks, Mann’s own autobiographical account of his early life in Lübeck. Tóibín outdoes himself in matching Mann’s own delicate descriptions that bring to life the austere subtlety of the Lutheran city-state, as it gets swallowed by Prussia just as the Buddenbrooks / Mann family’s fortunes become swallowed by those of outside Germany.
And so the biography continues apace, weaving Mann’s great works into the very source of those novels: the tale of Mann’s own life as it unfolds. We are taken to Italy to discover the true story behind one of the most beautifully written novellas in the German language, A Death in Venice. We join Mann and his wife Katia in the sanatorium in Davos to understand whence The Mountain got its Magic. We live with Mann the patriotic zeal that preceded World War 1, then the implosion of Germany and the rise of fascism, culminating in a break in biographical inspiration caused by Mann’s exile to the United States.
That Mann’s works were so uninspired by his newly built house in the sunny suburbs of Los Angeles highlights how destructive was 20th Century fascism for European intellectualism: By the time the war ended, Thomas Mann was already a figment of a destroyed past – he had nothing really to give to Post-War Germany. For me, this reflects a deeper truth: Those of Europe’s intelligentsia whose creativity was not starved to death in Nazi concentration camps, found their creativity saturated and bloated out of them by American hamburgers, hot dogs and ice cream.
But perhaps the best thing about The Magician is how deftly and delicately it tackles the question of Mann’s sexuality. It would be every bit as easy for a modern writer to overegg this pudding by making the entire book be about Mann’s repressed gayness, as it would have been for biographers of more prudish times to underegg it by evading the topic altogether. Tóibín avoids either trap, and instead allows Mann’s own work to dictate the place sex occupied in his life. The result is an account that is by times graphical, but more often nuanced and metaphorical.
The ending of The Magician was touching, but for personal reasons it also caused me to smile wryly. The final passages include a memory Thomas Mann indulges at the end of his life, while on his final trip to Lübeck: it is a story his mother told him as a child about the trip Bach took to Lübeck to meet the then more famous composer Dietrich Buxtehude. I was struck by the contrast with another book I recently read on that very subject, called Something of his Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S.Bach, by British author Horatio Clare. Tóibín’s beautifully written account of Bach’s journey – though only a few paragraphs; though only a story inside a memory inside a biography – is a thousand times more impactful that Clare’s entire book.
And that underscores the main point here. To attempt the biography of a writer as good as Thomas Mann, it takes a writer as good as Colm Tóibín.



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The case for switching to Heartbeat Time

Spring forward, fall back
As we move rapidly towards the end of October, an important seasonal calendar event approaches us with comforting certainty. No, I don’t mean Halloween, that perfect blend of processed sugar and devil worship that has emerged as one of the American Empire’s most beloved holidays. I’m referring to the other autumnal rite: the turning back of the clocks. The constant low-level grumbling about how unnecessary it is, has become almost as much a ritual as the time change itself.

Yet I confess I have never much cared about it either way. Do farmers need more light in the mornings for late planting? Does bumping peak traffic out of twilight more quickly reduce the amount of traffic accidents at dusk? My guess is that when all the variables are plugged into the cost-benefit equation, any effect either way will be more than drowned out by the hefty error term – meaning no one knows and it doesn’t much matter.

What’s in a base? A day by any other base would last as long
But allow me to hijack the discussion to propose something that, I believe, does matter: a simple and elegant means by which we can improve the quality of life of every human on earth. Society pays a small initial cost, and life gets better for everyone, until the end of time. Allow me to explain.

We all know that there is a reason why we have 365 days in a year (with an extra day added once every 4 years). The maths comes to us straight from God, who in His infinite wisdom decided the Earth should complete 365 axial rotations in the time it takes that celestial body to complete one orbit of the Sun.

But the Almighty set no such rules when it came to the division of a day into lesser units of time, and so man decided to create sub-units of the day as he saw fit. Different systems were tried, but the Egyptian solution survived, owing to its practicality: 24 is a good number to use because it has many factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24). Especially useful are the factors 2, 3 and 4 because they allow us to divide into halves, thirds and quarters respectively. This is something we often like to do. Ditto for 60. So on the face of it, 24 hours/day; 60 minutes/hour; 60 seconds/minute looks like a good, if entirely arbitrary, system. You might ask: If nature doesn’t demand otherwise, why on Earth would anyone want to change it?

Tick tick, boom boom boom
The problem is that this system does, in fact, clash with nature. Unfortunately, our current (mathematically convenient) temporal divisions are slightly out of sync with the most important clock nature has given us: our hearts. The average human heart rate at rest is about 80 beats per minute, just a little faster than the 60 seconds per minute set out by Greeks and medieval clockmakers.

The effect of this is subtle, yet I believe it can have far-reaching consequences. Our internal clocks are always struggling to calibrate to the artificial rhythm of the clock. It’s like we are trying to sing along to a song that is being played in slightly the wrong time. Counting seconds out loud is difficult as a result – and the point is it shouldn’t be. If clocks were synced to our bodies, counting seconds would come naturally to all of us. Indeed, the very act of doing so would have something meditative and relaxing to it. Time itself would become a form of mindfulness.

For most of human history, this asynchronicity was nothing to worry about. After all, most of us had no access to timepieces of any description: the only chronology that mattered was sunrise and sunset. But as more and more of us are now ‘on the clock’, I believe this problem of ‘horological asynchronicity’ has become a hidden and persistent form of stress. The only reason we are not more aware of it, is because it has been with us thousands of years.

It’s time to take time to heart
The solution has always been simple: simply change the division of time. A quick fix would be to rejig the divisions of time within a standard minute, so that there were 80 seconds a minute, rather than the current 60. I don’t think this is a good durable solution, because it simply kicks the can down the road: The asynchronicity still exists, but now it occurs through the misalignment of heart beats with minutes.

The solution is to rejig the entire arbitrary system, by creating a 32-hour clock.

A 16-hour analogue clock, marking half of a 32-hour ‘heartbeat day’

This is done easily by speeding up each second by 33.3%. If we keep base 60, faster seconds yield faster minutes. Whereas Ptolemy’s system gives us a 1,440 minute day, Heartbeat Time has a 1,920 minute day – with each of those minutes feeling like a natural duration of time in terms of heartbeats. The next step is to divide the minutes by 60, (so keeping our base). This yields 32 hours in the Heartbeat day.

If this be the hour when we draw swords together, let’s at least shorten the hour by 33%!
I feel like heartbeat time would have subtle advantages over current timekeeping – beyond the natural rhythm it respects. For example, for me, a standard time hour feels too long. And that’s because for most practical purposes, it is too long. Hour-long meetings drag and drag. Hour long lectures in college always contained about 40 useful minutes of information and sitting through the rest usually meant fighting the urge to take a nap.

And what about waiting for a bus that comes ‘every hour on the hour’? How is that at all useful to commuters? Never mind the joy of being able to tell children they will now get to stay up until to 12 O’Clock at night!

I’ll admit, the 32-hour heartbeat clock does lose us the ‘3’ as a factor – which is useful, for example, for factory shifts. But I think it would work out even better: my guess is having 3 11-hour shifts eliminates a lot of problems, because it allows for two 30 (heartbeat) minute overlap at the two crunch changeovers (morning and afternoon). And for anyone who’s done shift work, we all know that these handovers can cause a lot of friction.

The only problem is getting the entire world to reprogramme their software systems, replace their clocks, change their watches and so forth. No big deal.