2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not a good novel..., February 23, 2011
This review is from: Attila: The Gathering of the Storm (Paperback)
I've read the first Attila book and loved every minute of it. There were moments where the writing was on par with the likes of Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden and Simon Scarrow. It was gritty, it was real, you felt the decadence of the times, the tension between Christian piety and pagan customs. There were hints of magic, with the druids and Roman prophecies, but they were subtext in the novel, and you got the feeling that there was more to this world, but, and this is key, that no one knew the whole picture. On the first book, you were in the story, you lived during those times.
This book manages to throw most of it out the window, to the point that this book feels like someone else wrote it.
When writing, one should always show, and not tell, a story. Napier can write, but instead of sticking with the style that made the first book special, he changed it all to a broader, historian's perspective. Remember when in the first book, the historical narrator was an exception, a glimpse into a broader picture. You followed the main storyline, with interludes reminding you that an epic tale will take place, and these characters will take a great part in it. In the first book, when you followed Attila, you knew his thoughts, his contempt for Roman society, his hatred for the princess, all the things that made him human. When the perspective was on Atilla, the paragraphs, the style followed his personality, it defended his actions, it told his side of the story. The same thing happened when the action followed Lucius (I'm hesitating with names here because I read the first book in Portuguese, and as always the translation extended to the names). In this book, the narration follows a more impartial perspective, and it rips you away from the story. You no longer know when characters are in pain or in misery, you know his feelings. Attila is a stranger in this book, you're never inside his mindset. He's full of misteries, seems wiser than most, for reasons you rarely understand.
And when the narrative skips to Aetius, one of my main gripes with the first book, as I wanted at least a slight focus on Aetius, everything goes downhill. Since we skip thirty years from the beggining of the book, to follow the return of Attila from exile, one has to briefly skip over Aetius's rise to the rank of General, which would have been interesting to follow and is only broadly covered with the same impartial tone. Yet his surroundings, well these are described with much detail, too much on things not important (two chapters on the sex life of Valentinian's sister, one chapter on the Vandal invasion of Africa), never once showing you anything but telling a lot. You know on full detail how the Eastern Emperor fell in love with his Empress, and you know that Aetius and the Empress fell in love at first side, and were condemned to spend time away from the person they loved. You never see this, you're told it happened. You never feel what they feel, you can appreciate the writing and the poetic tone to it, but on historical fiction, even more so following such a realistic title as the first Attila, you don't go and start writting about the majestic nature of the Eastern court or the rumors of incest that permeated the court of Honorius and Galla, careful always to put yourself neutrally, claiming to be the position of a historian.
And that's the thing: You're not reading Suetonius's 'The Twelve Caesars'. I really don't care if the author takes the politically correct neutral historian's tone, but in the end of the day, you're writing historical fiction, not a history book. You're narrating a story, don't tell me historians aren't uniform on what happened with Galla. You're writing fiction, show me what happened. You smack too much of magic and mysticism and you're moving even further away from the genre. The book is filled with prophecies, and it is more concerned with showing us that there is a greater design to what happened than to show us the details of what hapened.
To any fan of actual, gritty historical fiction, this book is a major disappointment. To any one that, like me, absolutely loved the first book, it's more than disappointing, it's frustrating.
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