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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