Customer Reviews

The boat of fate: An historical novel

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I am a dedicated reader of Roman historical fiction, and I have read the excellent, good, mediocre, poor, and junk. This definitely falls in with the excellent, comparable with Gore Vidal's "Julian", Rosemary Sutcliffe's "Three Legions" series, and Wallace Breem's "Eagle in the Snow". It is an intensely vivid and believable recreation of the Roman world in the early fifth century. We see peaceful Iberian towns remote from the impending chaos. We see a Rome that that is still carousing, still pounding with life, still dirty, and still glorious, although the veneer has now worn thin. We see a Gaul that has been comandeered by the Germans in Roman service, but whose nobles still pretend they call the shots. Finally, we see a Britain, helpless in her peril, watching as her legions depart, but still proud to be "Roman". The people in this book seem real, not like the "cartoon characters" described in other current Roman army fiction novels, however enjoyable they are.
If you want to feel what it was like to live in the Roman twilight, read this book.

I was pointed in the direction of this excellent book by a member of staff in a bookshop. It was recommended to me as the best Roman historical fiction novel the man had ever read. While I won't give The Boat of Fate that title, because The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff has that honour, I will afford it a place in the top five.

This book is astonishingly well written, and details the life of Sergius Paullus, an Iberian Roman whose life spans the last years in the western Roman Empire, when men such as Theodosius ruled, and generals like Stilicho fought to save the last parts of the formerly great empire from destruction. Sergius, an angry and troubled young man, wanders from Iberia to Rome, takes service with the army in Gaul and is then sent to Britain, where he is intimately involved in the last struggle after the legions left in 410 AD. The prose wears its historical detail very lightly, yet conjures a wonderfully intense image of Rome and its empire. I couldn't put it down.

It's a book which has only recently come back in to print, and I sincerely hope that a large publisher takes it on board and rejackets it, because it would sell in large numbers. In its current incarnation, that is unlikely, unfortunately.
Take a chance, buy this book. I guarantee that after the first chapter you'll be hooked. It's a fantastic read.

Ben Kane, author of The Forgotten Legion.