Wednesday 19 October 2022
Book review: Toyman
Tuesday 18 October 2022
Book review: The Narrow Land
Book review: Count Belisarius
My best guess is that this is a sort-of potboiler for him: read the old sources and lightly novelise them. But it works: as a novel it is a good read; this was my second reading, the first was decades ago.
The story: Belisarius, a noble but somewhat obscure, err, nobleman of the Byzantine empire, rises by virtue of his sheer military quality to the highest command and achieves astonishing victories in Persia, Africa and Italy; but alas all his noble deeds are undone by a combination of evil at court, the tenor of the times, rivalrous equals and incompetent subordinates; nonetheless he remains stubbornly loyal.
As the book realises at the end - and I cannot tell if Graves suddenly noticed this, or it was the plan all along - although Big B is definitely the Hero, and definitely both Heroic and Noble and Good, his Noble Deeds achieve little more than the slaughter of countless people and the destruction of vast swathes of land. Because while he is a military genius he is a political cretin; and while his victories are - as portrayed - as bloodless and clean as possible, and ditto his capture of cities, regrettably the inevitable recaptures by the other side are not clean, and the poor inhabitants get the short end of the stick again and again.
So this is either a deliberate parable of "good intentions and good people don't always lead to good results"; or an accidental one. Take your pick.