Customer Reviews

Hannibal: A Novel

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Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, had one of the most spectacular careers in military history. At the time of his birth there were two major powers in the world: his, and the burgeoning Roman empire. Hannibal correctly foresaw that his people would eventually be swallowed by the Romans, and therefore decided to go on the offensive. As every schoolchild knows, he assembled an army in Spain, fought his way across southern Europe, and with his huge army crossed the Alps in the middle of winter. His appearance in northern Italy in 218 B. C. caused widespread panic in Rome.

During his first two years in Italy, he inflicted crushing defeats against the Romans at Trasimene and at Canae. These successes were to be shortlived. He was heavily outmanned by the Romans, his supply was indifferent if not non-existent, and the leaders in Carthage refused to send him the support he needed until it was too late. Nevertheless, Hannibal spent 15 years in Italy, gaining and losing alliances, fighting, struggling, and never giving up in his effort to conquer Rome. He was never defeated in a face to face battle with the Romans in Italy. Finally, in 204 B. C., he was forced to return home when the Romans invaded Africa.

Interestingly, the name Hannibal means "Favorite of Baal:" Baal being the chief Phoenician deity at the time.

You won't learn this from Leckie's book. In fact, all you really need to know about Leckie's book is that Hannibal gets to Italy on page 165, and leaves again for Carthage on page 219. Thus, 15 years of Hannibal's Italian campaign is reduced to 54 pages.

I hope you enjoyed my review. You now know as much about Hannibal as you would have if you had wasted your time with ridiculous book.

When I got to the chapter where a young Hannibal tames his horse, I put down the book, picked up Mary Renault's "Fire From Heaven", and encountered the same scene, practically word for word, of Alexander's taming of Boukephalos. The difference? Ms. Renault wrote her book first. And it's genius. Ross Leckie is an unbelievably bad writer, unintentionally funny in a "dark and stormy night" sort of way. The book is slow, flat, and derivative. But that scene made me close it up and return it to the library. If I'm going to read second-hand fiction, I'm going back to the original source.

I was astounded by inaccuracies of this novel - though one would hardly notice as Leckie doesn't spend much time on history in any case. About Hannibal's life we know next to nothing which gives the writer a lot of leeway; the story immediately uses this leeway to introduce plot elements that are unhistorical - Hannibal's wife certainly did not follow him to Italy as suggested. The atrocities that Leckie so lovingly details only really began during the later parts of the war.

The story generally left me astounded. This is a period of history for which there are few sources, meaning that - unlike e.g. Caesarian times - it is pretty easy to introduce elements without contradicting known "facts". However, doing this seems to be the only interest of the story, when it does bother to delve into history. The story is so consistently wrong on so many things that it's almost as if the errors have been introduced on purpose.

All in all, this is THE worst military history story I've read in a long time (and I've studied the Punic wars extensively and am generally a huge military/fantasy fan). The potential reader would be better served by reading any of the historical works on Hannibal (which are far more interesting and much better reading). I'm certainly happy I borrowed this book rather than buying it.

Hannibal was among the greats of ancient military history, the equal of Caesar and surpassed only by Scipio and Alexander. It is a tragedy that a novel as poor as this bears his name.

Ross Leckie's first mistake is to try and compress Hannibal's expansive career into a work of less than 300 pages. This novel is one part of a trilogy of historical fiction about the Punic Wars, but Hannibal alone is worthy of a trilogy. The attempt to deal with so much material in a single novel was pure folly.

By compressing the history so ruthlessly, Leckie makes austere prose a detriment to his storytelling. Ordinarily I enjoy an austere writing style. There is almost no character development in the novel, with the singular exception of explaining Hannibal's hatred of Rome. However, this lone effort at character development is stillborn: we never actually feel any of Hannibal's hated, because it is never adequately described or conveyed. Hannibal himself is reduced to a one-dimensional character, which does the reader a great disservice. None of the supporting characters receive any development whatsoever: they are ciphers, used to advance what is essentially. This is what makes the novel so terribly dull - I could not find myself remotely interested in or caring for any of the characters.

It is also painfully obvious that Leckie's research is lacking, and he probably plagiarized Mary Renault's "Fire From Heaven" for one of his chapters.

I am thrilled with only one aspect of this novel: I bought it for only $1 at a used bookshop on a whim. It is atrocious historical fiction, and I only finished it so I could write this review in good conscience.

I'm sorry, but this is an awful book. I've never written such a thing in a review before, but I'm absolutely aghast that this thing ever got in to print. The story of Hannibal's war with Rome is one of the most engaging, dramatic stories in world history and it should make for wonderful fiction. Mr. Leckie, unforetunately, reduces Hannibal to a paper thin ogre of a man, and fills the novel with unpleasant extremes far outside what's required to tell the story. That's not to say that I shy away from violence. Just the opposite. I know how violent the times were. But Ross Leckie's writing is artless and that renders all else in doubt. Reading this novel is like chewing cardboard. It's like driving splinters up into your fingernails. Don't do it. Read the other negative reviews on this website and believe them! Await the day when Hannibal finds the storyteller to do his tale justice. When that happens, we might all be in for a great read.

I was looking forward to this book, but amazed to discover how many scenes were heavily derived (phrase by phrase in some scenes) from Mary Renault's great book, "Fire from Heaven" about the Life of Alexander. I found it very dissappointing that an author could reproduce an original so closely, with so little value added. I cite only one example: Mary Renault, on Alexander's horse Bucephalos "He was indeed, at all points, the ideal horse of Xenophon. Starting, as he advises, with the feet, one saw that the horns of the hooves were deep before and behind; when he stamped, as he was doing now (just missing the groom's foot), they made a ringing sound like a cymbal ... his neck arched, as the writer puts it, like a gamecock's .." Ross Leckie, on Hannibal's horse "I ran through the Peri Hippikes, as Xenophon advises, starting at the feet. The horns of Peritan's hooves were deep before and behind. He stamped, just missing the groom's foot, and his hooves made a ringing sound like a cymbal ... his neck arched, as Xenophon has it, like a gamecocks ...

A creative schoolchild writing an essay from the encyclopedia can paraphrase as well. Need I say more?

I don't wish to belittle other readers but some of the criticisms of this novel are just bizzare. The book may suffer from a small level of historical innacuracies, but then how accurate are accounts of Hannibal anyway since most recorded sources are written by Romans. What amazes me though is that almost all the people who read this book seem to have a perfect recolection of other novels, either that or they are simply copying other peoples comments. Leckie captures the hatred, and emotion in a trully moving way, and the reader is able to associate with a man who is in practice, far removed from todays culture. This in itself is an acheivment. A gripping read

Whilst I concede the Mr Leckie's prose style is easily-paced and therefore Hannibal is the kind of book you could probably read in a single afternoon, all this book really achieves is to prove you cannot write a fictional biography of one of history's most captivating figures in a mere 241 pages. I had high hopes because a full third of those pages dealt with Hannibal's boyhood where the author is at full license to use his imagination given the lack of historical detail for Hannibal. But it almost as though Mr Leckie gets bored and rushes through the end in order to begin writing Scipio. Historical inaccuracies aside, the life of Hannibal deserves a better account than the author has attempted and I think it is safe to say that the definitive fictional biography of Hannibal has yet to be written. If you like historical fiction set in the Roman period buy it, if not, don't.

Mr Leckie makes it obvious he has not read the works of Livy nor Polybius. He calls the allies auxiliary the Extraordinarii (crack roman troops), thinks Trasimene happened in a valley with a lake at one far end, has the cavalry chase the velites off the field at Cannae and has no clue what Hannibal really accomplished in southern Italy. Definitely not for literate history buffs or ancient military buffs for that matter.

The great Carthaginian general Hannibal committed suicide by taking poison; he hoped to give the Romans "what they have long desired, the death of an old man." Not to mention the worst enemy they'd encountered since the founding of their city, a man who so terrified the people of Rome that mothers scolded their little children into obedience with the words, "Hannibal is at the gates!"

Pick this book up and you will find nothing in it to evoke any of that terror.

Ross Leckie is a bad writer. I don't mean that he writes without regard for style or characterization, although that's true too. Leckie is an inaccurate writer, and while historical fiction is by its definition supposed to take liberties with the truth, it should at least stick to some basics. Or as the writer Harry Turtledove has said: Choose the lie you're going to tell, and then make your readers believe it.

It's impossible to believe when the style is reminiscent of some Cecil B. DeMille Biblical blockbuster, and the pages are riddled with outright thefts from other authors (yes, in Chapter 7, Leckie lifts whole an entire passage from Mary Renault's "Fire From Heaven," which made me laugh so hard at what publishers seem determined to miss in order to sell ANYTHING). And frankly, Leckie's Hannibal commits the cardinal sin: he is boring. I wouldn't follow this man across the street; Leckie expects us to believe that soldiers gave years of their lives to follow him over the Alps and into a foreign land with no support from the home base?

Find any other novel about Hannibal, and you will find something much more worthwhile than this. The National Enquirer on its worst day is more entertaining, and probably more accurate.