Editor’s Choice

WHAT’S IT ABOUT the Romans? Their imperium continues to be the historian’s most favoured destina­tion. Their Caesars never cease to provide the kind of frisson to royal theatre that others from any era can seldom match, unless a Shakespeare comes along. Two British historians gave me my Roman fix this year: Mary Beard and Tom Holland. Beard is an amazing storyteller, unlike academia’s cheerless travellers lost in the dead ends of the past. In Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World (Profile Books), she is at her wicked best, and turns what has grown into the mythical over centuries in popular imagination into bizarrely human, something, for instance, a novelist like Gabriel García Márquez had done with Simón Bolívar in The General in His Labyrinth. In Emperor of Rome, Beard, while passing through the lives of emperors familiar and obscure, among them the much-anatomised Julius Caesar, Caligula, Nero and Hadrian, shifts from the trivial to the tantalising, beastly to the noble, to tell us that, beyond whatever we read about the madness and bloodlust of those “deranged autocrats” lay a story of statecraft in a “dystopia built on deception and fakery”. Holland’s PAX: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age (Basic Books) is not a character study as such but a panoramic celebration of Pax Romana. This can be read as the last of Holland’s trilogy of Roman histories, after his study of Julius Caesar (Rubicon) and Augustus (Dynasty). Read it as a stand-alone exploration of the golden age of Roman rule, as I did, and, even as you get dazzled by the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall, you are taken by the narrative panache of Holland to an era of unmatched power and glory. Holland is a historian with a higher sense of narrative morality: he doesn’t measure the past with the yardstick of the present. When he is among the Romans, he follows the Romans’ law of conduct to study them. It makes their lives even more riveting.

The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, as a storyteller who survived the Iron Curtain, had coped with dictatorship as the best of them did. They vindicated that famous Borges aphorism: censorship is the mother of metaphor. The Palace of Dreams is my favourite Kadare, and as an indictment of totalitarianism, with its magical ingenuity and political subversion, it’s an original. The ministry for interpreting dreams brings out in chilling metaphorical clarity communism’s struggle to control conscience—and even the subconscious. His new book, A Dictator Calls (Harvill Secker), is many things: fic­tion, personal history, and narrative essay. It is built on Stalin’s three-minute telephone call in 1934 to Boris Pasternak to talk about the arrest of the poet Osip Mandelstam. We don’t know whether the call was a rumour or a historical fact, but what emerges from Kadare’s pages is a daring exploration of how totalitarianism and imagination can afford a conversa­tion. Stalin, even as he built the gulag, had a sneaking admiration for writers and composers. In Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time we get to know why the dictator spares Dmitri Shostakovich who had made music with a conflicted conscience. In Kadare’s book, the writer’s lived experience turns a brief encounter between the dictator and the poet into a meditation on what it means to dream and write and remain alive in a place where illusions have been institutionalised as the only reality.

In Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (Hamish Hamilton), an empire, whose indebtedness to history apart, is built on the imaginative powers of one of fiction’s most captivating enchantresses, Pampa Kampana. Poet, prophet and sorcer­ess, she herself is born in Rushdie’s imagination, and who, in life and death, proves that history, in this case that of the Vijayanagaram empire, is redeemed by imagination: “Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real.”

One of the narrator’s refrains in Terry Hayes’ The Year of the Locust (Bantam Press) is: It’s not the weapon that saves you; it’s the training. About spy thrillers, it can be said: it’s not the plot alone that matters; it’s the authenticity. After I Am Pilgrim, few of Hayes’ fans, count me among them, thought he would outperform himself. He didn’t. Part espio­nage drama, part survival saga, part science fiction, The Year of the Locust, his first book in a decade, in the end, is a spook’s picaresque across some of the most dangerous places on earth—and oceans. The hunt by a Denied Access Area agent, CIA’s superheroic lone ranger, for the world’s most dreaded terrorist, the theatre of action ranging from the secret chambers of CIA headquarters to Iran to Siberia, becomes a meandering, atmospherics-rich action thriller in which the existential struggles of the spy are as compelling as the plot he unravels. He, too, could have said, I am pilgrim.

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