communal bathing<\/a> complexes. Where another author might have reached immediately for Caesar, Cleopatra or Mark Antony, Harris chooses a man who spent much of his life standing slightly behind one who history does remember.<\/p>\nIt is a promising premise. Unfortunately, Harris\u2019 narrative failings prevent his story from reaching its full potential. \u201cAgrippa\u201d makes its narrator a hound at the feet of Octavius, barely having a life outside of a long and weary list of battles. Any blood he smells or prey he spots is brought to the page with little enthusiasm. Harris convincingly commits to the voice of an old, dying man telling his story with the assurance of someone who already knows how it ends. What is left for the reader is a resounding lack of excitement, intrigue and, most frustratingly, passion.<\/p>\n
The novel follows Octavius\u2019 rise to power and Rome\u2019s transformation into an empire, moving through the fall of Julius Caesar, the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra and the ensuing political consolidation. Agrippa is present for nearly all of it, usually with a sword in hand. And, by Zeus, Harris will tell you how he wielded it. Battle follows battle follows another battle, with military campaigns becoming the primary measure of Agrippa\u2019s importance to the story. His reputation as a general is historically well established, but historical fiction has the luxury of exploring what that renown actually felt like from the perspective of the man who earned it. Harris rarely looks beyond the laurels to find the man beneath. <\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nHis characters consequently flatten into the outlines history has already provided for them: Agrippa is good at fighting because Agrippa was a general; he builds aqueducts because Agrippa built aqueducts; Octavius is tyrannical because Octavius became a tyrant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are<\/em> occasional attempts to complicate these familiar portraits; Agrippa experiences moments of love, loss and fear that suggest a more vulnerable man beneath the armor, while Octavius\u2019 nebulous lifelong sickness offers Harris an intriguing avenue into the underlying jealousy and dependence in his relationship with Agrippa. Yet, the novel repeatedly abandons these tensions for another march toward another battlefield, often literally. As tensions rise between Agrippa and Octavius, Agrippa is always conveniently called off into battle, and they forget all about their qualms \u2014 multiple times<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe problem becomes even more apparent in Harris\u2019 prose, which rarely seems to move beyond Agrippa\u2019s immediate observations. He describes what he sees, what he does and what happens next, but seldom pauses to consider what any of it means. There is little introspection and even less reflection. Other people frequently appear as objects within Agrippa\u2019s field of vision rather than individuals possessing their own interior worlds. Even when Agrippa loves someone, loses someone or fears for his own life, those emotions tend to pass through the narrative rather than transform it. This omission leaves the story feeling strangely weightless, and Agrippa seems unchanged by the otherwise world-shifting events transpiring around him.<\/p>\n
This is particularly unfortunate because historical fiction has a uniquely difficult task. Historians can afford to treat the past as a sequence of documented events, weighing maps, letters, military accounts and archaeological evidence against one another until a coherent history emerges. Fiction writers inherit that same weight of research but are asked to do something considerably more difficult with it: make the dead feel alive. The ending is already known; the battles have already been fought; the empire has already risen and been razed. Cleopatra will die, Antony will lose and Octavius will become Augustus regardless of how dramatically the author arranges the sentences around them.<\/p>\n
The work of historical fiction, then, is not simply to tell us what happened \u2014 it is to make us feel the uncertainty of a world, the way in which the people living through those events did not yet know what would happen next. \u201cAgrippa\u201d occasionally gestures toward that possibility, particularly through the uneasy relationship between Agrippa and Octavius. Harris too often writes with the distance of a historian while expecting the reader to experience the intimacy of a novel.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nThat distance ultimately makes Agrippa\u2019s extraordinary life feel strangely ordinary. Here is a man who helped reshape the Roman world, yet his interior life remains frustratingly untouched by the scale of what he accomplished. The choice of Agrippa promised an opportunity to look at the birth of the Roman Empire outside the frame of its most famous figure. Instead, Harris spends much of the novel keeping his protagonist exactly where history had him pinned: beside Octavius, holding a sword, waiting for the next battle.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For a novel built around a man history left in the margins, \u201cAgrippa\u201d has remarkably little interest in asking who he was when nobody was looking.<\/p>\n
Digital Culture Beat Editor Estlin Salah can be reached at<\/em> essalah@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
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