Customer Reviews

The Water Thief

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"The Water Thief" is both a good mystery yarn and a highly literate piece of historic fiction. The author has done a commendable job of research on the later period of the Roman Empire and much of the book examines the forces at work that eventually pulled that sprawling collection of territories and subject kingdoms apart. The story's protagonist, Aelius Spartianus, is a senior army officer, historian and agent of the emperor, Diocletian. Dispatched to solve a century-old murder involving one of Diocletian's most successful precedessors, Hadrian, Aelius Spartianus' investigation stirs up a new series of killings and ultimately brings to light a massive conspriacy that threatens to destroy the authority of the Empire. Author Ben Pastor creates some beautiful prose in this story, which though at times a little dense or meandering, is effective at carrying the story line along and ultimately, entirely satisfying. The book's cover notes suggest that "The Water Thief" is the beginning of a new series. Let's hope so.

I was very excited to read this book considering I'm usually a big fan of ancient Rome, and Hadrian in particular. Imagine my disappointment when about half way into it I realized that I couldn't care less about either the main character ("my one issue is that I'm too smart for the army" - yawn) or the "conspiracy" (a shady organization is behind EVERYTHING - oh my!) that he's trying to unearth (uh... literally). Somehow along the way, poor Antinous and his grave got involved. Perhaps because I know that his real grave was never found and that everything here is pure conjecture, I felt hardly any motivation to keep on digging (buh-dum-bum). Throw in a rather lackluster "romance" (a prostitute with a heart of gold - very original!) and receive the overall meh-factor. I'm giving it three stars because Ben Pastor obviously did her research and it's still fun to imagine how things maybe... possibly... kind of.... could have been.

The Water Thief is a tale very loosely related to the mystery surrounding the death of the Emperor Hadrian's young favorite, Antinou, who drowned in the Nile during Hadrian's visit to Egypt.

The author, an Italian woman named Ben Pastor, bases her story on the highly unlikely premise that several centuries after Hadrian the Emperor Diocletian, suspecting a conspiracy still in existence, orders a Roman army officer to investigate Antinou's death. The novel revolves around and in part is told by the Roman officer, who makes occasional and slightly disconcerting use of modern American slang.

The novel never gets around to providing a satisfactory explanation of Antinou's death, but the Roman eventually discovers a preposterous conspiracy. By that time the author has refashioned her story into what amounts to an old-fashioned romance in which the right people are eliminated and love triumphs.

The Roman Empire under his last truly Roman Emperor,Diocletian,and a quest for a century old mystery, the fate of young Antinoos, Emperor Hadrian's lover, drowned in the Nile, some say accidentally, some say in sacrifice to the Nile God. Diocletian appoints Aelius Spartianus his historical researcher to discover the truth. But at Antinopolisthe mystery only deepens, as he has to contend with mysterious enemies and ambiguous friends, whilst someone seems determined to kill to prevent him to know the truth...what little is there to know. Spartianus experiments the dissolving and corrupting of Roman Power, and the tide of Christianity inarrestable as that of the Nile. After a last, melancholy encounter with an ex-lover, Spartianus embarks to Rome, where he will find something unexpected, as well as the killer that meanwhie made the body count rise.
I loved this learned, intriguing book, the strange ayhmosphere of Antinoopolis and the memory of a tragic love. Only flaw, some historical incongruency (in 304 AD the concepts of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were unknown, the very terms having being coined at the beginning of the Twentieth Century). But apart from that, a very original, well written and evocative novel. An Author to follow!

What a wonderful mystery...with the color of ancient Egypt and Roman Italy. If you want to take a trip down the Nile, across the Great Green and across the hills of Roman Italy while trying to solve murder then this is the book for you. I really enjoyed this author's style and views of these ancient places and highly recommend this book!

There is no way this woman compares to Saylor or Haney who are masters of the historical mystery.
This book is basically flat and for the most part boring.
She had a good idea and perhaps her hero will develop in further books.
She needs to show more and tell less.
I gave it three stars because her writing itself is okay and her research is fine.
I admit to not finishing the book--something very rare for me, but I did read far into it.
I usually am in agreement with Harriet's reviews which are very well done, but I can't agree this time.

This book is unbelievably slow with a convoluted plot that meanders without purpose for huge stretches. The author spends so much time on unimportant details, whipping around names and places that she misses the entire essence and feel of the old Roman Empire. For a murder mystery there is no sense of urgency or tension, just slow, boring, plodding to the end.

In 304 AD Aelius Spartianus, military officer, historian and envoy of the Emperor Diocletian, is working on a biography of the deified Emperor Hadrian, dead almost 200 years.

Though it seems a small thing in the Emperor's long and tumultuous life, the death of Hadrian's favorite, the boy Antinous, intrigues Aelius. Hadrian, a restless traveler, known as cruel and capricious, was obsessed by the drowning death of this boy and built shrines and created a cult in his name.

With Diocletian's added directive to report back on the state of the Roman army in Egypt, Aelius travels to Antinoe (named after the boy), where an antiquarian bookseller with an old and secret letter of Hadrian's has just been killed, drowned in the Nile like the emperor's boy.

With the persecution of Christians and the demoralization of the Roman army as a backdrop, Aelius follows clues as murders litter the path before him, which leads, eventually, to Rome and Hadrian's crumbling country estate.

While the mystery is well done, the protagonist's character and the waning Empire setting are truly captivating. Pastor's prose is rich, almost dense, giving a real sense of place and time. Aelius is a wanderer with a yen for a home, a thoughtful man who regrets the missteps in his life, a man of action and sharp perception and a romantic.

Mystery lovers and historical fiction buffs will be equally rewarded.

Pastor's The Water Thief claims to be a historical novel, set in the period of the Roman Emperor Diocletian around 300 CE, investigating the death of long-dead emperor Hadrian's young male lover Antinous. Hadrian, besotted in love, was heartbroken when Antinous went overboard and drowned in the Nile. The death has been variously imagined as a drunken accident, a suicide, and a murder. Pastor's hero, Aelius Spartianus, assigned to the task of learning the truth by Diocletian, gropes his way clumsily (like the writing in the book) towards discovering what actually happened in Egypt two centuries before.

Pastor's claim of historicity is unspeakably fraudulent. History is crassly ignored here. Pastor writes that "homosexuality" existed in imperial Rome, and goes to the ridiculous extent of saying that "homosexuals" had their own meetings, where they pranced around effeminately and ogled and touched each other. For Pastor, people in Roman times were either gay or straight. And she is definitely on the side of the straights.

Historical novels, or the good ones at least, do not abuse known facts. It is clear that the phenomenon of homosexuality is less than 400 years old; and that humans for hundreds of thousands of years have had sex more or less indiscriminately with members of the opposite gender, members of the same gender, children, animals, trees, and whatever else could not get away from a lusty person fast enough. People in most cultures prior to our own have not exhibited any of the modern-day cultural traits adopted by "homosexuals" -- they were not exclusively oriented towards one particular set of sexual objects, they were not defensively clubby because of their sexual "orientation," and males who liked sex with other males were not effeminate or somehow socially set off from their comrades who liked sex with females. To be public about liking people of the same gender, for males at least, was proscribed in certain times and by certain cultures. And sometimes criminal penalties, even death, might have resulted from being public. But the guilty were not "gay" or "lesbian," they were defilers. They were in their desires and actions essentially, however, no different from everyone else.

Pastor's shoddy, cliche-filled work must have John Boswell gyrating wildly in his grave.

This is good historical novel writing up there with Steven Saylor and Lauren Haney for accuracy, wit and thrilling murder mystery action. It has the added benefit of being the first novel in half a century to focus on Antinous the Gay God. Read it and, like me, you will have vivid dreams of Antinous. He stood in front of me with a golden wreath in his hair, and with a face grey-eyed and lovely and tranquil, which no astonishment or pain seemed ever to have marred.

Well, that's hardly surprising since I stayed up until 3 a.m. finishing reading the final chapters of Ben Pastor's new novel The Water Thief.

The book gets off to a lucklustre start and it reads in places as if it is translated from Italian. But in its defense, this is one of those books which starts slow but gathers pace to end up at a fever pace at the end.

Set in the year 305 AD, it tells of a very literate Roman army officer who is commissioned by Emperor Diocletian to do research on his predecessor the Divine Hadrian, who had died nearly two centuries earlier. It is while delving into the mystery of the death of Antinous and while trying to learn the whereabouts of the Boy's tomb that the officer stumbles onto evidence of a letter penned by Hadrian uncovering a covert conspiracy to bring down the Empire -- a conspiracy that is still very much at work in 4th Century Rome. As the officer comes ever closer to finding the answer to the death of Antinous, the conspirators' efforts to thwart him become ever more violent, resulting in numerous brutal murders and attempts on the officer's life.

The book opens in Antinoopolis, where the officer begins his investigation. That part of the book is frankly a bit disappointing since the descriptions of the Sacred City of Antinous are sadly a bit vague. But once the plot shifts to Rome itself, the book really takes off. Ben Pastor was born and raised in Italy, and her intimate knowledge of Rome -- above all, her obvious love for the Eternal City -- make her book a joy to read.

Her descriptions of Rome in the year 305 are superb. You get a real feel for the teeming city in mid-summer, with all the odors and noise, colors and steamy heat that that implies. Best of all, for those of us who love and worship Antinous, are the chapters in which the investigaive officer, named Aelius Spartianus, ensconces himself in Hadrian's derelict villa outside Rome. It is there, as he stares up into the stars at night, that he makes a startling connection between the layout of the villa and the eight visible constellations in the nighttime sky in late October when Antinous died -- indicating that Hadrian's obsession with horoscopes and astrology led him to create an earthly universe where time stood still at the death of Antinous.

Did Hadrian's belief in astrological fate compel him to have Antinous killed? Or did Antinous take his own life in a bid to fulfill his astrological fate? Or was it more mundane? Did he and Hadrian have a lovers' tiff that ended tragically? Was he done in by young male rivals intent on gaining Hadrian's affections for themselves? Or was something even more sinister at work? And why is someone desperate to preventing the officer from finding out what happened to Antinous all those years ago?

For those of us who love Antinous, this book is a joy to read. Pastor works in many small and obscure details which are well known to his modern-day followers. To give just one example, the Roman officer expends a great deal of effort trying to locate and decipher the Obelisk of Antinous which today stands in a park in northwest Rome is the focus of much current research.

The obelisk's key inscription, which is the focus of modern experts seeking his tomb, says that Antinous "rests within the garden bounds of the great lord of Rome". Just as today's researchers have puzzled over the meaning of that phrase, Ben Pastor's protagonist must also make sense of it -- and he arrives at a startling answer that almost costs him his life and jeopardizes future of the Empire.

The novel's characters are well drawn and the reader identifies with Aelius as he attempts to unravel this Gordian Knot while at the same time pulling together the strands of his own personal life. There are numerous gay characters and they emerge as well-rounded and believable characters, especially the flamboyant Egyptian gays who find themselves unwittingly the target of unscrupulous killers in their very midst.

The tales of Antinous and Hadrian which unfold as the investigation progresses are a true pleasure to read, if only because they are all so contradictory and often far-fetched -- precisely as they are to today's researchers. Aelius must work his way through this thicket of tall tales and outright lies and defamations in order to determine precisely what sort of persons Hadrian and Antinous were -- in order to save the Empire two centuries after their deaths.

One of the more outlandish tall tales is told to Aelius by a Roman hustler named Cleopatra Minor who claims to have frequented a notorious whorehouse which specializes in boys for aristocratic customers whose villas line the Bay of Naples. Cleo claims it is "well-known there" that Antinous was a boy prostitute who had just arrived from Bythinia and "had barely become accustomed to his little bed" when Hadrian stopped by the whorehouse and took a fancy to him.

Cleopatra Minor, by the way, is a biological female who identifies herself as an effeminate gay man. There are lots of other, equally intriguing characters in this book. But the most intriguing character of all, of course, is the one character who cannot take active part in the plot but whose presence is felt at every turn of the plot:

Antinous himself.

Though the 4th Century murders take center stage in the story, this book actually is more concerned with telling the story of Antinous and Hadrian and their abiding love affair which spans the gulf of the centuries.

As you read the novel, you get a growing awareness of Antinous as the living, breathing, three-dimensional human being that he must have been in life. The more Aelius looks into the life of Antinous, the more he becomes obsessed with the Blessed Boy. He simply has to find that tomb, even if it means his death and the downfall of Rome.

I won't give away the thrilling ending, except to say that, when Aelius finally "exchanges glances" with Antinous (in a manner of speaking), Aelius is overcome with emotion -- and the reader finds it hard to hold back the tears.

The book has its weaknesses. There are a few historical inaccuracies and exaggerations. But all in all, it is very enjoyable and thought-provoking. Particularly if you are an adherent of his modern-day cult, you'll come away with new insights and new theories of your own about the mystery of the life and death of Antinous -- and his place amongst the stars.

If nothing else, after putting down the book before falling asleep, you'll dream of the Blessed Boy.

And when you learn the identity of the Water Thief, you'll realize that this insidious foe is stealthily at work in your own life today, just as in the life of Antinous and of the Roman Empire.