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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Read Ford's other work, January 25, 2009
This review is from: The Fall of Rome: A Novel of a World Lost (Mass Market Paperback)
I picked up The Fall of Rome because I remembered reading Michael Curtis Ford's first novel, The Ten Thousand, some years ago and because I had read good things about it here at Amazon. I also had a vested interest in the book, because ancient and medieval history is my field and I love good historical fiction. Unfortunately, The Fall of Rome was a severe disappointment.
Contrary to what many here have asserted, The Fall of Rome is not well-researched. Even though the period during which the novel takes place is under-documented--hence the "dark ages" slur--there are numerous errors in every area from major to minor details. The barbarian king Odoacer, as the main character, is depicted as half-Hun, half-Germanic, when in reality his father and mother were both Germanic. Ford confuses the geography of Rome and the function of its major buildings--he claims that the senate meets in the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, when it actually met in the Curia. He also seems to be under the impression that Roman armies still dressed, manuevered, and fought the same way in the 5th century AD as they had four hundred years earlier, under men like Julius Caesar and Trajan. They did not, and hadn't for centuries.
Ford has to invent a lot of what takes place in the novel, which is not a bad thing--historical novelists must fall back on invention and a good novelist will seamlessly interweave fact and fiction. Where Ford invents, though, he falls back on cliche and melodrama. Roman triumphal parades, scheming politicians--every Roman cliche except the orgy is here. Tied closely to that, all the characters, with perhaps two exceptions, are flat and uninteresting. Their dialogue is clumsy and cliched, the bad guys variously threatening in hushed tones and bellowing in rage. The sympathetic characters are just as two-dimensional, with the result that the many lengthy battle scenes are sometimes boring and tedious because the reader has invested no emotion in the characters.
The novel wasn't all bad, though. The pace picks up significantly in the last quarter or so of the story and the only two really interesting characters make appearances then--Severinus, a Christian hermit who takes Odoacer under his wing, and Pelleus, a legionary centurion whose speech before the legion perfectly captures the tone of Roman soldiers' pride in their service.
I really wanted to like The Fall of Rome, and actually tried to make myself like it. But the book on the whole was so clumsily written, paced, and plotted that I wound up only making myself finish it.
Not recommended.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid, entertaining, good battle sequences (a history teacher's review), August 20, 2007
While not as strong as Stephen Pressfield in "Gates of Fire", Michael Curtis Ford makes a strong contribution to the burgeoning collection of historical fiction books set in ancient times.
In this case, we follow Odoacer, a real-life German/Hun who variously fights against and fights for the Roman Empire in its last days. The fight sequences are strong and with the exception of a couple of slow spots early on, this book hums right along. If readers are unaware of Odoacer's true place in history they may want to delay researching him until they have finished the book in order to avoid spoilers.
Part of Ford's style is to narrate without necessarily telling you the year or how much time has passed. From time to time he gives dates but oftentimes you have to guess how many weeks/months/years have passed. This is annoying at best and sometimes confusing for several pages.
This book is not an overall sweeping epic that covers all aspects of the fall of Rome. There is minimal discussion of corruption, except at the very highest levels. There's no discussion of cultural aspects, financial troubles and any of the other myriad issues that caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. The book focuses almost exclusively on the military aspects of the time.
One glitch lept out at me - on page 84 Ford has the Huns using "compound bows". The compound bow was not invented until the 20th century. I am sure this was a misstroke of the keyboard, perhaps he meant a similar word such as "compact" or "composite." The only reason I mention it is to warn readers who are familiar with the true destructive power of a compound bow - the Huns would have loved them but they did not have them.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well-researched, solidly grounded novel struggles with pacing, conflict, May 26, 2008
Michael Curtis Ford has surely taken to heart the old chestnut - what's the most important attribute of a historian? An iron butt. This joke is a testament to the solitary, grueling craft of history - grinding through the source material until your eyes water and your rear goes numb.
The same is true for the best historical fiction - a good entry into the genre must be solidly grounded in the period. Otherwise, the book is fantasy.
Ford has clearly done his research - while many writers of historical fiction are content to jump from battle to battle (the battles are the easy part to write), good historical fiction makes a bygone era come alive with accurate-yet-riveting depictions of a bygone era. Colleen McCullough's "Masters of Rome" series achieves this end, as do the action-packed books of Steven Pressfield and Bernard Cornwell.
This novel is ostensibly a sequel to "The Sword of Attila," Ford's excellent take on Attila and his march against Rome. "The Fall of Rome," however, struggles. This is in many ways understandable. Rome did not fall in a single cataclysmic event like Atlantis getting swallowed by the sea or Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star. Rome died a death by a thousand cuts. This makes the event no less interesting, but it does create problems for the writer seeking to create a sense of drama.
As a result, "Fall" takes place over several decades as the heirs to Attila (who died shortly after he failed to conquer Rome) vie for power. If Ford had written a "Shogun"-sized epic of several hundred pages, "Fall" might have worked. But instead he wrote a novel of a bare 300-odd pages. Accordingly, there are huge jumps between chapters of several years and hundreds of miles - and the novel loses all flow and cohesiveness. Also, the ostensible conflict between hero and villain suffers as the two men - Orestes (villain) and Odoacer (hero) don't interact for close to thirty years.
"Fall" reads kind of like a Cliff Notes version of the novel, highlighting key passages but leaving much of the meat off the page.
Ford is an enjoyable writer, and his research is impeccable. This novel simply smacks of biting off too much for the size of the planned novel and not being able to make it into the true epic it deserves.
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