2018-03-23
Another good book from Robert Harris. As ever, strong with the storytelling, though I actually had a couple of niggles with this novel:
The first is that the narrator, Tiro, was freed from slavery at the end of the last book – but about a third of the way into Dictator he is … freed from slavery. I may have misunderstood something, but I was still left feeling that it was a major continuity error, which undermined suspension of disbelief.
The second niggle is that Tiro falls ill during the climax of the Roman civil wars, so much of that part of history is skipped. To be fair, Cicero plays little direct role in it, but it still felt like an unnecessary and contrived omission.
Even still, the Cicero trilogy is easily one of the cornerstones of modern Roman Historical Fiction, and serves as a great counterfoil to Colleen McCollough’s epic and brilliant Masters of Rome series.
Rating: 4/5