In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

On the way back from the 2010 Fantastic Film Weekend, fresh from having seen The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, I remarked to ms_siobhan and planet_andy that in recent decades people had managed to make vampires, werewolves, ghosts and witches sexy, but I couldn't see how it could very well be done for zombies - what with all the rotting flesh, brainless lumbering and so forth. "Aha!" said ms_siobhan. "Actually I've got this book at home where somebody has done exactly that. It's a high-school zombie romance - would you like to borrow it?" So I did.

It's still a slight exaggeration to say that this book makes zombies sexy as such. But it does manage to make them sympathetic and teen-romantic. The basic set-up is that some recently-deceased teenagers (and only teenagers) have started coming back to life for no reason that anyone is very clear about. It happens pretty much straight after death, so there are no half-rotten corpses clambering out of graves. Rather, the people come back - but they aren't the same. They are pale, and slow of movement and thought, but surprisingly strong and resilient to injury. Some of them are rejected by their horrified families, but others are accepted and put back into high-school. And the book deals with everyone's responses to this - embarrassed friends, concerned adults, bullying jocks, and fascinated strangers.

Mainly, the returned teenagers are treated as a metaphor for any outsider or minority group of the reader's choice. Polite terminology has been developed to describe their condition - 'living impaired' or 'different biotic, rather than 'undead' or 'zombies', although some of them choose to adopt and reclaim that term. A research institute called the Hunter Foundation has been set up to try to find out what is going on, and particularly why it is that some of the returned teenagers have almost the same capabilities as their living peers, while others do not. And those who have been rejected by their families have set up their own hide-out in an abandoned house, where they hold all-night parties and develop their own subculture.

Meanwhile, the main plot focuses on a living goth girl called Phoebe, who knows what it is like to be treated as an outsider herself, and becomes fascinated with a living-impaired football player called Tommy. Tommy keeps a blog (available as a real-life spin-off) in which he chronicles the life of an undead person, and the violence and murders being perpetrated against them - yet never reported in the news. But as their friendship grows, and touches on becoming a romance, this culture of violence draws closer and closer in on them, until it has terrible consequences for one of Phoebe's oldest friends.

It's a sweet story, and I certainly enjoyed it - though more simply as a high-school story with a supernatural slant than as anything hugely challenging or ground-breaking. But there are aspects of it which feel unsatisfying, and particularly the sub-plot with the Hunter Foundation. All sorts of hints are dropped that this may be more sinister than it appears, as living impaired kids disappear off for 'testing' and are never seen again, but this is never resolved, and seems simply to be dropped in the last few chapters of the book. Then again, there are apparently two sequels, so maybe the story of the Hunter Foundation is picked up and continued there?

Anyway, it won't change your life, or indeed probably make you squirm with pleasure over the delightful possibilities of the English language. But if you're up for a high-school zombie romance, then this is exactly the book for you.

(See, told you I had this one ready-written. And that is 2010 done - woo-hoo and yay and hoorah!)

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(This is another instalment in me trying to catch up on unwritten book reviews from 2010. I took a few notes on this one at the time, but they're pretty sketchy, so this review is probably quite unbalanced.)

After reading the first of Harris' Cicero books, Imperium, and being pretty underwhelmed by it, I resolved not to bother reading any more in the series. But I guess the prospect of the young Octavian (later Augustus) appearing in the final volume proved too much of a temptation. Eventually, this series is going to come under the remit of my interest in receptions of Octavian / Augustus, and I want to be ready when it does.

In the meantime, this instalment mainly covers the year of Cicero's consulship and the Catilinarian conspiracy in 63 BC, but Harris also follows up on the consequences of all that for Cicero in the form of his exile in 58. The title of the book, which refers to a purificatory sacrifice performed once every five years, thus refers to the span of time which it covers - though I'd personally have preferred the much prettier alternative term, quinquennium, myself.

Most of my impressions of the first book held true for this one as well. Tiro remains an effective narrator and Terentia a surprisingly-plausible (if minor) secondary character, while the politics is generally deftly handled. But most of the characters are fairly two-dimensional, and the events described lack emotional weight.

Catiline's conspiracy did make for a slightly more exciting narrative than the previous instalment, while I felt that the smells, sounds and topography of the city of Rome were nicely evoked. As for Harris' Pompeii, it was pretty clear that he had written this book, too, with a map of late-Republican Rome in front of him, and had thought carefully about how the spatial relationships between (for example) Cicero's house and the Forum would affect the behaviour of his characters, as well as how the experience of being in the city would change with the seasons and the time of the day or night. I also recognised direct echoes of several of the relevant primary sources, including Plutarch's Caesar and Cicero's own Pro Rabirio, Pro Murena and In Catilinam I, all of which were very effectively used.

But Harris remains fundamentally second-rate as a novelist for me, and for all his (obvious) careful research, a fair few historical errors crept in as well. I noticed that Cicero's daughter, Tullia, was "all veiled and dressed in white" for her wedding (so what of the famous flame-coloured veil?), while the senate seems to have regular daily meetings and a parliamentary-style recess (in fact, it met in this period on an ad hoc basis, whenever summoned by one of the magistrates). I also felt that Cicero seemed far too well aware in advance of the potential consequences of his decision to have Catiline's supporters imprisoned without a proper trial. I can see how his concern would serve as valuable dramatic foregrounding for what does happen later on as a result of this, but I'm pretty sure he just thought he was being decisive and heroic about it at the time, and I would have preferred to see his shock and humiliation at being completely unexpectedly attacked for this by Clodius instead.

In short - not a complete and utter waste of paper, but to be honest I'd still recommend just reading Plutarch's Life of Cicero instead.

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This is normally the time of year when I look back over the books, films and TV which I have consumed over the past twelve months. Previous posts in this series can be found at the following links: 2009, 2008 and 2007.

Unfortunately this year I am at a bit of a disadvantage in looking back over the books I have read in particular, as I have completely failed to keep on top of reviewing them. I knew I'd got behind, but have just looked at my books read 2010 tag, and it turns out that I have only actually managed to review three books this year, with the most recent written up in February. I am also behind by one film review and two Doctor Who reviews - although in both of those cases that represents a much smaller proportion of the total. I've been actively focusing on clearing the backlog of film reviews during December (I managed six - not bad), and was going to get on to the books and Doctor Who after that, but never quite made it.

Nevertheless, I am going to write up an overview post now anyway, in keeping with my normal practice, even though not everything I'll be looking back over has actually been written up here yet. And I do want to get on top of the unreviewed material, so that is a little goal which I am setting myself for January - try to write up my unwritten book, film and Doctor Who reviews for 2010, while doing my utmost to avoid accruing any more. And maybe also learn to write shorter reviews, so that this doesn't happen again in the future. Although I do believe that I resolve something of the sort around this time every single year, and I never manage it - so I may as well just accept the status quo.

( Books )

( Films )

( Doctor Who )

( Other television )

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Though obviously of relevance to my subject, I view this as part of my leisure reading. In August, nwhyte established reading_gibbon, an LJ community based around reading weekly chapters from Gibbon's magnum opus, and discussing them in a reaction post. I decided that this was a golden opportunity to get better acquainted with one of the seminal works of Ancient History as we know it today, so have been reading and commenting along as we've read. We intend to read all six volumes in due course (so there's still plenty of time to join us if you'd like!), but given that each volume was originally published sequentially as an independent instalment, I think it is reasonable enough to treat volume I as a 'book' and write up an overview reaction here.

My previous exposure to Gibbon has included a short selection of extracts (mainly from chapters 1-3) released as part of Penguin's 60s Classics series in 1995, and occasional choice extracts quoted by more modern scholars. A typical example of the latter tends to run thus:

"Famously, Edward Gibbon, inspired by the secularist thinking of the Enlightenment, blamed Rome's fall in part on the fourth-century triumph of Christianity and the spread of monasticism: 'a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity'." (Bryan Ward-Perkins (2005), The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, p. 40).

This had given me a rather warped idea of the nature of Gibbon's work, though. In a context like that, the quoted extract is bound to be one in which Gibbon is articulating an argument, but when I began reading him properly I was surprised to find that (in volume I at least) the ratio of argument to narrative in his prose is much lower than I was expecting.

This shouldn't really have been a surprise, though, if I'd thought about the state of Classical scholarship at the time when Gibbon was writing. A generation before him, people still didn't really see any point in trying to write narrative histories of the ancient world. They thought that, since ancient writers like Thucydides and Tacitus had already done that, then all you needed to do if you wanted to know what had happened was to read them. Instead, most publications about the ancient world tended to be uncritical compilations of what the ancient sources had to say on particular themed subjects, like Basil Kennett's The lives and characters of the ancient Grecian poets (1735), or (illustrated) encyclopedias like Bernard de Montfaucon's L'Antiquité expliquée, et représentée en figures (1719-24). This was antiquarianism, and its adherents were concerned to catalogue and admire the ancient world, but it had not yet occurred to them to criticise or analyse it.

Gibbon represents the emergence of a quite different approach. He is one of the first narrative historians, and as such takes a more critical view of his sources than his predecessors in an attempt to achieve a more or less comprehensive and reliable account of ancient actions and events. So of course his text needs to contain a great deal of narrative before he can get on to making any arguments, because nobody before him had really tried to write a continuous account of the period he was dealing with. He is doing that for the first time, and setting out to analyse the factors which gave rise to the behaviour and events which he is describing. It is a truly monumental achievement, especially when viewed in the context of the time when it was produced.

He is almost deceptively modern in his approach, in fact. Sometimes I found myself criticising him in our weekly discussion posts for taking sources at face value - but of course that is exactly what most of his contemporaries were doing, and I'm always quite happy to make due allowance for them because of the scholarly context in which they were writing. It is just that Gibbon is for the most part so far ahead of his contemporaries that I sometimes forget when he was writing, and expect him to meet standards which plenty of Classical scholars were still not meeting in the earlier half of the twentieth century. Some sources were not as easily available to him as they are to us now - there were no systematic catalogues of coins or inscriptions, for example. But considering the tools at his disposal, he was actually doing an amazing job. He tried to draw on coins and inscriptions when he could, and overall his use of literary texts is actually pretty thoughtful and perceptive.

Of course there are things which reflect the climate of his time, though. Like most white men of his day, Gibbon was both racist and sexist, in ways which also map very closely onto the attitudes he was encountering in his sources. He also clearly believes that it is possible to know exactly what happened in the past, as long as the sources are read carefully enough, since his prose lacks the phrases such as 'probably', 'may have', 'this suggests', etc. which modern historians use to signal the fact that they are merely offering a plausible interpretation, rather than a definitive and irrefutable account of events. But that too was a practice which was only seriously challenged in the 20th century, so it is no great surprise to find him subscribing to it.

Meanwhile, his overall prose style is, to me, the biggest reason for reading his work. He uses more commas than most modern readers will be used to, and some editions of his work (though not all) preserve antiquated spellings. But once you've got the hang of all that, his prose is rich, stylish and extremely readable. In particular, he has a brilliant line in very precise and biting sarcasm, as well as a rather amusing tendency to use his footnotes as a vehicle for snarks at contemporary fellow-scholars. Plenty of examples of both have been nicely picked out by nwhyte in the reading_gibbon community, so I will leave interested readers to browse through them there.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made it through the entirety of this first volume without the weekly posts to keep me supplied with targets to aim for as I went along, so I'm very grateful to nwhyte for putting that system in place. Whether I'll make it through the entire six volumes, I don't know - I fear I may lose interest after the fall of the western empire. But I'm definitely staying on board for the time being.

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