IMPERIUM
by Robert Harris
Hutchinson £17.99 pp416
Halfway through Robert Harris’s new novel its hero, Marcus Tullius Cicero, indignantly exclaims, “Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses?” Not the least achievement of this fascinating book is that it has you nodding in vigorous agreement.
A passion for politics has always pulsed through Harris’s pages. Initially acclaimed as a shrewd and stylish journalistic commentator on life in and around Westminster, he has since specialised in thrillers — Fatherland (1993), Enigma (1995), Archangel (1998) — that make scary excursions into the world of totalitarian menace. Like his literary role model George Orwell, he has an imagination put on creative red alert by tyranny and its terrors. Nazi Germany cast shadows over his first two novels; Stalinist Russia over the third. Dictators and ogres (The Making of Neil Kinnock, 1984, is the admitted exception) loom large in his books. His biography of Bernard Ingham gave a caustically comic tweak to this preoccupation. Even his least political novel, Pompeii (2003), centrally featured a megalomanic holding life-or-death sway over his slaves.
Moving 100 or so years back from Pompeii into the first century BC, Imperium commandingly combines the insights Harris has acquired through his immersion in politics with the high-tension techniques he has honed through his fictional career. Chronicling Cicero’s progress from unprepossessing young advocate from the provinces, beset by nerves, insomnia, stomach troubles and a stutter, to Rome’s most acclaimed and feared orator, it spotlights an extraordinary individual pursuing an often perilous course through momentous times: the period when the Roman republic was beginning to collapse under autocratic pressures.
The narrator is Tiro, a former slave. Looking back in extreme old age over his 36 years as Cicero’s confidential secretary, he here records his master’s remarkable rise, between 79 and 64BC, to fame and the ultimate power pinnacle of the consulship. As a close-quarters observer of political struggles and the inventor of a brilliantly efficient system of shorthand (much needed to keep up with Cicero’s courtroom torrents of eloquence and invective), Tiro is well placed to be the inscriber of these memoirs. His ability to jot down speech at top speed also proves of crucial importance in two of the novel’s most dramatically decisive episodes.
The book’s title, Imperium, refers to official and political power. Lacking the traditional means of access to this in Rome (membership of the patrician caste, leadership of an army, enormous wealth), Cicero attains it by strength of will and suppleness of intellect. Visits to celebrated orators in Athens and Rhodes school him in rhetorical techniques: the telling effect of a sudden drop into quietness or a prolonged pause, the importance of clearly defined body language, the deadly impact of a perfectly targeted thrust of mockery that will linger in listeners’ minds long after everything else in a speech fades away. Mentors teach him breath-control and how and when to modulate tone. He’s trained — by practising public speaking against the crash of waves as he walks up and down a shingled beach — to ignore and overcome background noise.
These skills are dauntingly tested in the first great case of Cicero’s career: his prosecution of Gaius Verres, who, protected by formidable allies, had used his governorship of Sicily as an opportunity for wholesale looting (everything from archaic Greek bronzes to wrenched-off ancient sanctuary doors), extortion, enslavement, torture, floggings to death and the hanging or crucifixion of anyone who defied him.
Race-against-time scenarios contributed grippingly to the page-turner thrills of Harris’s earlier novels: a desperate bid to unearth the truth about the Nazi death-camps in Fatherland, the urgent drive to break the Nazi code in Enigma, the dash to reach an arctic hideout in Archangel before winter locks it away behind snow and ice, the frenzied stampede from erupting Vesuvius in Pompeii. In Imperium, it’s the need to gather evidence against Verres in a taskingly short space of time (and then to compress the indictment so that it can be trenchantly delivered within the brief period of a trial cynically curtailed by Verres’s supporters) that sets hearts pounding.
Cicero’s against-the-odds defeat of Verres in court entitles him to assume the rank of the routed man. This is the first step in an ascent that carries him by the end of this book (two subsequent volumes will continue Cicero’s story) to the coveted victory of being elected consul. Even as he reaches this dominant position, though, more ominous power-figures, each brought alive in all their idiosyncratic energy, are manoeuvring for supremacy in Rome: Pompey, using his military resources and renown to push for dictatorship; Crassus, deploying his fabulous riches to undermine the republic; Catilina, spurred on to abet a coup d’état by his aristocratic background and swaggering taste for thuggery; and Julius Caesar, stealthily positioning himself for the seizure of power.
In Fatherland, sycophantic Nazis referred to sunshine as “Führer weather”. But, in Harris’s fiction, the climate of totalitarianism is overwhelmingly dank and shivery. As machinations threaten justice and liberty in Imperium, Italy repeatedly looks bleak. Bitter winds whistle through Rome’s colonnades and temples. Mist rises from a chilly Tiber into damp air that blurs the lamps. Out along the Appian Way, flurries of snow descend on the hideous remnants of Crassus’s mass crucifixion of slaves who took part in Spartacus’s rebellion: 6,000 victims nailed to crosses, each set up, with a ghastly mixture of cruelty and calculation, 117 paces apart down 350 miles of road.
Even more potently rendered than the meteorological atmosphere is the political and social one. Republican Rome in its last days is resurrected with a cornucopia of informative detail (for anyone who wouldn’t previously have known a praetor from a pontifex maximus, a quaestor from an aedile or a lictor, this book is an instructive godsend). Re-creating a society two millennia away from ours, Harris contrives to make it appear at once distant and familiar. Electoral predictions in Rome may be based on auguries and entrails rather than focus groups and opinion polls but, behind colourful surface differences, the prototypes of our own politics are visible. Tiro seems a precursor of the legal reporter and the lobby correspondent. And, as he watches realpolitik and idealism clash and even Cicero become tainted by compromise and concession, Imperium masterfully dramatises issues pertinent not only to a vanished world but our own.
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