‘I learned in the war that civilisation anywhere is a very thin crust.’
(Buchan’s central message, delivered in this book by John Heritage, poet and soldier, page 116)
I’ve been reading old John Buchan novels I’ve picked up in second-hand shops as a break from the Africa project which overflowed with famine, civil wars, military coups, massacre, torture and child soldiers.
However, reading the series of five novels about Sir Edward Leithen has not turned out to be as easy and relaxing as I imagined. They all show the same weaknesses, which include the off-puttingly upper-class milieu, his terrible way with names but, above all, the weirdly contorted and contrived storylines.
Having finished the five Leithen books, as an experiment I tried one other novel (he wrote 30), this one the first of the series of three novels featuring on the face of it a very different protagonist, the retired Glasgow greengrocer and businessman, Dickson McCunn, ‘late of Mearns Street, Glasgow, wholesale and retail provision merchant, elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and fifty-five years of age’ (p.55).
He makes an effort to show McCunn as coming from a different class than the hunting, shooting and fishing, Oxford and the bar Leithen, moving in his high society circles – instead McCunn is obviously intended to be a broadly comical figure and the story does, here and there, raise a wan smile, although ‘comic’ is not the term. It’s quite funny that Heritage mishears Dickson’s name and insists on referring to him throughout as ‘Dogson’.
Instead the plot is standard Buchan thriller i.e. a number of thriller tropes strung together on a wildly improbable and frequently incomprehensible plot.
The plot
So this Dickson McCunn is not just any old greengrocer, that would be a bit too déclassé – instead he has, until the novel opens, been the owner of the largest food and greengrocery supply business in all Glasgow
- The big provision shop in Mearns Street—now the United Supply Stores, Limited
- ‘you’re a household name in these parts. I get all my supplies from you,’, says Lord
‘Comic’ touches are that he is a member of a literary society and likes to quote Tennyson and Browning i.e. is amusingly behind the times, and is inordinately proud of the safety razor he has just treated himself to. He has just the day before sold the grocery store he has built into the city’s premier emporium. Now, aged 55, he wants to have adventures. The broad comic joke of the entire novel is that he stumbles into an adventure and discovers that real-life adventures are not at all the entertaining romances he imagined.
What had become of his dream of idylls, his gentle bookish romance? Vanished before a reality which smacked horribly of crude melodrama and possibly of sordid crime. His gorge rose at the picture, but a thought troubled him. Perhaps all romance in its hour of happening was rough and ugly like this, and only shone rosy in the retrospect. (p.53)
So McCunn packs his bags and heads off for a walking tour of the Carrick district of Galloway (p.25). Before he goes:
That morning he had received an epistle from a benevolent acquaintance, one Mackintosh, regarding a group of urchins who called themselves the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’. Behind the premises in Mearns Street lay a tract of slums, full of mischievous boys with whom his staff waged truceless war. But lately there had started among them a kind of unauthorised and unofficial Boy Scouts, who, without uniform or badge or any kind of paraphernalia, followed the banner of Sir Robert Baden-Powell and subjected themselves to a rude discipline. They were far too poor to join an orthodox troop, but they faithfully copied what they believed to be the practices of more fortunate boys. Mr. McCunn had witnessed their pathetic parades, and had even passed the time of day with their leader, a red-haired savage called Dougal. The philanthropic Mackintosh had taken an interest in the gang and now desired subscriptions to send them to camp in the country. Mr. McCunn, in his new exhilaration, felt that he could not deny to others what he proposed for himself. His last act before leaving was to send Mackintosh ten pounds.
Tramping the roads turns out to be not quite as glamorous as the poets make it sound. On the first day he meets beggars and tramps who are not as picturesque as he hoped. The second day he is tired and the weather takes a turn for the worse.
At the Bull Inn at Kirkmichael McCunn meets John Heritage, a posh Englishman and would-be poet. They have an argument of sorts because Buchan makes Heritage the kind of superficial posing socialist that he despised. He makes Heritage a) sympathise with the Bolsheviks in Russia the novel was serialised in 1921 i.e. while the Russian civil war was still in full swing) and b) take a ludicrously dewy-eyed view of the working class. To which an irritated McCunn delivers an eloquent rebuke:
‘You ideelise the working-man, you and your kind, because you’re ignorant. You say that he’s seeking for truth, when he’s only looking for a drink and a rise in wages. You tell me he’s near reality, but I tell you that his notion of reality is often just a short working day and looking on at a footba’-match on Saturday…. And when you run down what you call the middle-classes that do three-quarters of the world’s work and keep the machine going and the working man in a job, then I tell you you’re talking havers. Havers!’ (p.28)
McCunn then reads the slim volume of verse Heritage has published (titled Whorls), which is an opportunity for Buchan to ridicule modern poetry, thus showing what a philistine he was. NB Also at the inn is a stranger he chats to for a while, a handsome young man with an Australian accent. Anyway, after his argument with Heritage he goes back to Mrs Morran’s place and so to bed.
Next morning McCunn has breakfast early and sets off. He comes across a detour from the main road which apparently leads to a peninsula of land which leads from Kirkmichael down to the sea, with a sign reading ‘Dalquharter and Huntingtower. (The peninsula is known as the Cruives, an old name which is ‘something to do with fishing.’ Hence the name of the village pub, The Cruives Inn.)
McCunn tosses a coin to decide whether to walk on or take make a detour to see this Huntingtower place and it comes down tail, for the detour.
He is irritated, after walking a way, to see the poet’s figure approaching up a tributary road. They fall in together and walk onto a pretty village. The innkeeper here is surprisingly rude and says there’s no room, so they poke around and come across a private house which does rooms in the care of sweet little old lady Mrs (Phemie) Morran.
She makes them a fine tea and when McCunn asks about this Huntingtower delivers a handy history. It’s always belonged to the Kennedy family, until the most recent heir to the family, name, Quentin Kennedy, went off to the war and died of the influenza. Now the place is up for sale.
After lunch our boys set off to see the house but when they come to the lodge are met by a rude and officious gatekeeper who tells them no. This, of course, is a red rag to a bull, and Heritage and McCunn follow the wall round till it turns to hedge, slip through it and go to explore the house. En route they flop down in pretty fields with a view and talk about poetry and Heritage whistles an aria from a Russian opera then goes on to tell the story of how he was posted to Italy at the end of the war and from his rooms by the Spanish Steps heard a guest in the same hotel, a pretty Russian girl, sing this air.
Finally they arrive in sight of the house but are disappointed to see that instead of a weathered rocky old pile it is a newly built house but a pastiche of a Tudor mansion, completely inappropriate for this harsh northern clime.
Dickson had never before been affected by an inanimate thing with so strong a sense of disquiet. He had pictured an old stone tower on a bright headland; he found instead this raw thing among trees. The decadence of the brand-new repels as something against nature, and this new thing was decadent. But there was a mysterious life in it, for though not a chimney smoked, it seemed to enshrine a personality and to wear a sinister aura. He felt a lively distaste, which was almost fear. He wanted to get far away from it as fast as possible.
Buchan uses the same tactic in The Dancing Floor where he just asserts that the Greek village his heroes arrive at is eerie and spooky, without very much evidence, and then repeats the assertion in various ways until the reader is compelled to buy into it if you’re going to accept the story at all. He often does this. Asserts a factitious mood of foreboding with absolutely no justification, just because he needs to concoct an atmosphere of menace which then underpins the flaky plot.
Dickson’s mind was a chaos of feelings, all of them unpleasant. He had run up against something which he violently, blindly detested, and the trouble was that he could not tell why. It was all perfectly absurd, for why on earth should an ugly house, some overgrown trees and a couple of ill-favoured servants so malignly affect him? Yet this was the fact; he had strayed out of Arcady into a sphere that filled him with revolt and a nameless fear. Never in his experience had he felt like this, this foolish childish panic which took all the colour and zest out of life.
And:
‘I called this place Paradise four hours ago,’ Heritage said. ‘So it is, but I fancy it is next door to Hell. There is something devilish going on inside that park wall and I mean to get to the bottom of it.’
Forced. Contrived.
Then several things happen which justify the accusation of outrageous coincidences. They hear footsteps as another officious porter or lodgemaster arrives and so begin to head away, but Heritage suddenly falls to his knees. He’s heard singing coming from the open window of the house and it is the voice of the beautiful Russian girl he met at the Spanish Steps!!!!! Of all the people in all the world, they just happen to bump into the very one Heritage was telling a story about 5 minutes earlier…
They hasten back to the nice cottage of Mrs Morran for tea where they spread out a map, with Heritage determined to go back, defy the gatekeepers and get into the house, when there’s a commotion as a dirty ragamuffin boy forces his way through to the parlour where he identifies himself to McCunn as…the very leader of the Gorbals wanna-be Boy Scouts who McCunn gave some money to as his last gesture before leaving the city. Quite a coincidence!
The Die-Hards are on some kind of outward bound, Boy Scout trip to the region, when they, also, had stumbled across the mysterious house and then been rebuffed by the rude gatekeepers, since when they’ve taken to staking out. So not only a coincidence that the boys McCunn gives charitable donations too just happen to have come to the exact same corner of Scotland as he has, but are staking out exactly the same house which he and Heritage have developed an interest in!
Apparently Buchan sub-titled the novel ‘A Glasgow fairy tale’ and he tells us straight out from the first that McCunn was looking for romance and adventure. The Russian princess is referred to three times as ‘a fairy tale princess’. And the characters themselves archly refer to being in an old fashioned romance:
‘You should be happy, Dogson,’ said the Poet. ‘Here we have all the materials for your blessed romance – old mansion, extinct family, village deserted of men and an innkeeper whom I suspect of being a villain.’
Long story short, these lads, known as the Gorbals Die-Hards and led by one Dougal Crombie, join forces with McCunn and Heritage. Through a series of convoluted complexities and a great deal of sneaking down the valley of the adjacent river, and crossing fords, and sneaking behind bushes and across lawns etc etc they eventually gain admittance to the house and discover it contains two Russian women, Saskia and her elderly cousin, Eugènie (first named on page 67). Saskia is, of course:
- tall – that he could tell, tall and slim and very young. (p.63)
- Dickson insisted on stripping off his trusty waterproof and forcing it on the Princess, on whose slim body it hung very loose and very short.
- the slim girl, into whose face the weather had whipped a glow like blossom
And:
Dickson’s first impression was of a tall child. The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson. (p.65)
And:
Again Dickson was reminded of a child, for her arms hung limp by her side; and her slim figure in its odd clothes was curiously like that of a boy in a school blazer. (p.70)
Right at the end of the story:
She is no more the tragic muse of the past week, but a laughing child again, full of snatches of song, her eyes bright with expectation. (p.206)
Later:
He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy’s. (p.137)
All the classiest women are slim. The best kind of women have the quality of children. But the absolute bestest women are actually boys.
The younger prettier one, Saskia, explains. They once belonged to one of the grandest families in Russia. When the revolution struck they formed part of the general resistance of their class. As the tide turned against them they were tasked with saving jewels belonging to the Russian royal family. These they smuggled out as far as France.
But here some thriller voodoo intervenes because Saskia emphasises that the criminal Bolsheviks have agents everywhere on the lookout for them and the jewels. When these agents closed in on them in France they fled to Scotland. Saskia had met a noble Scot named Quentin Kennedy who told her he owned a fined house where she would be welcome to stay, and gave her a letter of introduction to his ‘factor’, Loudon (p.69). But when she arrived in Scotland and came to the house she found herself imprisoned and guarded by the three men who Heritage, McCunn and the Die-Hards have seen patrolling the grounds.
Illogically, although her coming was anticipated, none of these bad guys intercepted her before she actually got to Huntingtower nor, since she arrived, have they searched or interrogated her to find the whereabouts of the jewels. Well, they asked her where the jewels were and she refused to tell them and these international terrorists left it at that! This simply doesn’t make sense and is typical of the yawning plot holes or lack of logic which lace Buchan’s ‘shockers’.
Saskia says her gaolers are awaiting the arrival of another man, their master, the leader of the conspiracy, who McCunn and Heritage nickname The Unknown.
Chapter 6
Well, they decide McCunn should take the jewels to his bank in Glasgow. This he does, although the episode is milked of as much paranoid thriller voodoo as possible, with a messenger from the besieged house racing after the horse and cart McCunn goes to the railway station in, the creepy inn-keeper Dobson who is clearly in on the conspiracy leaping onto the train and keeping tabs on him, and then the package which McCunn accidentally on purpose leaves exposed in a cab he’s hired, sure enough being stolen. As in The Power-House, as in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan is at pains to convey the sense of a vast invisible conspiracy with its tentacles in every city.
Anyway, the box the baddie steals from the cab was a decoy and McCunn gaily walks into the biggest bank in Glasgow to reveal that he has the princess’s precious jewels sown into his shirt and waistcoat, he cuts them free and puts them in a safety deposit box.
So, on the face of it, grocer supremo Dickson McCunn has done more than his fair share of helping a damsel in distress and ensuring that her treasure is safe. However, this is a thriller and we all want to know what happens back at Huntingtower and how the siege will play out, right?
And so Buchan gives his middle-aged grocer a crisis of conscience, making him pause as he catches a tram back to his town house and ask himself whether he isn’t running away precisely when his friends need him most etc (p.85). Maybe this is a plausible piece of plotting but it feels a lot like Buchan bending his character in order to reinvolve him with the entire convoluted plot to the end.
By the time he’s gotten off the tram he has come to the decision to go back into the valley of doom and help Heritage and the beautiful princess. However, being a practical businessman he takes practical steps. First of all he orders a huge hamper of luxury provisions which he will take with him to feed the allies (Heritage, the ladies, the Die-Hards).
Then he goes to see his Glasgow lawyer (Mr Caw of Paton and Linklater) to ask him to contact the firm in Edinburgh responsible for renting out Huntingtower. He makes as if he, the wealthy Glasgow businessman, wants to buy it and to warn the factor, Loudon, that he is on his way, today or tomorrow.
Then he goes to see Mr McNair a gunsmith who is a fellow elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk. Unfortunately, the careful Scot says he can’t sell him a gun – but he can lend him a service pistol and 50 cartridges (p.88). Thus armed, McCunn hastens to catch the 7.33 from Glasgow to Kirkmichael.
Chapter 7
McCunn checks into the Salutation Hotel at Auchenlochan and sets off to visit the lawyer Loudon. Loudon gives him a thorough, intelligent summary of the state of Huntingtower and is readily willing that McCunn see it and buy it; he just reasonably insists that he needs to inform the owners, who live abroad, how about visiting sometime next week? He insists that nobody is allowed inside the building so is fazed when McCunn insists he saw some women in it. He then changes his story to tell some cock-and-bull yarn about a mad old relative of the family that’s being kept there – it’s she who will take a week or so to get out of the way before McCunn can visit. At this point McCunn realises Loudon is lying and is in on the conspiracy.
He doesn’t let on and instead says he’ll be returning to Glasgow by the late train, shakes hands and leaves. His suspicions are confirmed when he hangs around in the shadow on the other side of the street and see Dobson, the dodgy inn-keeper, slouch up and go round the side of Loudon’s house. They’re in on it together.
McCunn walks along the main road to Dalquharter and is accosted by one of the Die-Hards who takes him to their camp in the woods, very neatly done with a fire burning. Dougal tells him they’ve smuggled Heritage into the house again. McCunn tells Dougal to send some of the boys to the station to fetch the big hamper of food which has been delivered to the station. Dougal then introduces him to the rest of the ‘men’, being:
- Thomas Yownie, the chief of staff
- Peer Pairson
- Napoleon
- Wee Jaikie
- Auld Bull
Chapter 8
After this sojourn with the Die-Hards McCunn goes straight to Mrs Morran’s, checks in and falls fast asleep. At 1o the next morning Dobson pays a visit and is rudely officious, warning McCunn that he is not allowed to go near the house nor to walk along the coast. it degenerates into a shouting match with McCunn saying Dobson is obviously hiding something he doesn’t want other people to see and Dobson losing his temper, shouting abuse, banging his head on the lintel and falling down the stairs on his way out (p.107).
To be one the safe side, to forestall attack, McCunn persuades little Mrs Morran to accompany him along the main road to the bridge across the river where she turns to go home while he cuts down a track beside the river running to the sea. Maybe this is intended to be spooky, maybe it’s intended to be comic, but it comes over as bizarre.
After a great deal of unnecessary fuss and complication, McCunn crosses the river where it hits the beach under the guidance of Auld Bill and arrives at cliff tops beneath the house and has to be helped up them etc etc. All instead of just walking up to the house and pulling out the gun if any of the three guards try to stop him. There’s always a huge amount of sneaking over heather, and fording rivers, and clambering up cliffs in Buchan stories, rather than just knocking on the front door.
Chapter 9
Incomprehensibly, rather than just take the princess far far away, for example to Glasgow, the allies have decided to spirit her out of the main house and down to the old ruined watch tower in the grounds (!?). Having dumped equipment here, they all then sneak up to the house, across the verandah (pretty easily avoiding the supposed guards) and into the garden room.
Here he meets Heritage who tells him the latest news. Saskia has given more details about Mr Unknown, about the Mastermind behind her (not very effective) kidnap. He comes from a rich family but when the revolution broke out, threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He is a kind of evil genius, ‘none of your callow revolutionaries’.
A digression on antisemitism
Buchan, or his character, betrays the typical bourgeois or aristocratic belief that mere working class people couldn’t have overthrown an entire social order, couldn’t possibly win a war against armies led by aristocrats and bolstered by British and allied forces. Ghastly oiks couldn’t possibly do all that by themselves. This is one source of the popular stereotype that there must be mysterious powers behind the revolution, either renegade aristocrats (as here) or, much more perniciously, the Jews. According to the notes to this book there was an academic spat about whether Buchan was antisemitic or not, a long time ago, in the 1970s. Buchan may or may not have been but some of his characters certainly are. Here’s the view of the ‘fairy tale princess’ Saskia:
‘Our enemies were very clever, and soon the hunt was cried against me. They tried to rob me of [the jewels], but they failed, for I too had become clever. Then they asked the help of the law – first in Italy and then in France. Oh, it was subtly done. Respectable bourgeois, who hated the Bolsheviki but had bought long ago the bonds of my country, desired to be repaid their debts out of the property of the Russian Crown which might be found in the West. But behind them were the Jews, and behind the Jews our unsleeping enemies.’ (p.68)
And here’s Heritage, supposedly one of the good guys:
‘The place for you,’ said Dickson dryly, ‘is in Russia among the Bolsheviks.’
Mr. Heritage approved. ‘They are doing a great work in their own fashion. We needn’t imitate all their methods – they’re a trifle crude and have too many Jews among them – but they’ve got hold of the right end of the stick. They seek truth and reality.’
Mind you, Heritage’s antisemitism lies alongside his ignorant support of the Bolsheviks, of which he is later completely cured. So possibly antisemitism is expressed by characters who are intended to be callow, naive and ignorant, and who eventually learn better. Maybe.
Anyway, the allies all conclude that the Big Bad Man is coming that very night. They continue into the house and deliver McCunn’s magnificent hamper of luxuries to the Russian ladies. Saskia is overwhelmed and gives McCunn a kiss. This transports him to seventh heaven, a moment familiar from a million movies where the glamorous young heroine gives the middle-aged old hero’s assistant a kiss and transports him back to his youth!
Heritage has a plan. They’re inside the house now. Rather than go outside to engage in battle he plans to lure the three guards inside and lock them up. And using the Die-Hards, this is exactly what they do, wait for the guards to enter, then turn the lights off and lure them via noises or mutterings or distant lamps into three separate cellars or rooms where they can be locked tight. But not before one of them, the one called Léon, bumps into McCunn and, mistaking him for Dobson, shares the news that the Unknown is arriving at dawn aboard a Danish brig. When the bad guy realises it’s not Dobson he’s talking to there’s a mad scuffle in which Heritage gets knocked to the stone floor and knocked unconscious. At which point half a dozen Die-Hards jump on him, disarm him and bundle him into a cupboard which they lock.
All the good guys emerge onto the verandah, along with provisions, waterproofs and whatnot. There’s a banging of pots at the other end and McCunn sees a figure against a glass door. In that moment McCunnis convinced that this must be the Fourth Man they are all waiting for and pulls out the loaded pistol he was lent by Mr McNair and fires. He wings the figure who spins and disappears into the house. but something about the way he moved makes McCunn realise it is Loudon the factor (p.125).
Now, I was genuinely shocked by this. McCunn, up until now a figure of fun, is ready to shoot dead someone whose identity he can’t even make out in the dark. He’s as bad as the Bolsheviks.
Chapter 10
Inexplicably, rather than heading inland and getting as far away from the coast where the boat full of baddies is about to arrive, heading, for example, to the bloody train station, catching a train to Glasgow, reporting everything to the police and putting Saskia under diplomatic protection, the Allies decide instead to hole up in the ruined tower stop the cliffs. Here they Heritage comes round from his concussion, and they have another long debate about their plight.
Here something emerges into the full light which I hadn’t noticed previously which is somewhere along the line, Saskia had told them that she had been told to wait at Huntingtower for ‘her friend’. McCunn makes the super-sensible point that they should get to safety then send this ‘friend’ a message. Saskia obstinately refuses to leave (p.130). This is just stupid and feels like a contrivance to drag out the already thin and creaking plot.
Now McCunn comes up with a hare-brained scheme. Coming into the village several times he’s noticed a big white house (i.e. country house) on a hill. Why doesn’t he go there and try to recruit the laird and his people? He’ll need some evidence or they’ll think him mad, so he says he’ll take Saskia and, improbably, she agrees to go. Meanwhile, they’ll take Eugenie to Mrs Morran’s where she can be put to bed in a nice warm bed. (Good grief, do they think a gang of international terrorists aren’t capable of storming a little old lady’s b&b?)
So first McCunn accompanies both women through gathering rain and wet grass and grounds and along the empty road to Mrs Morran’s cottage. Here the old lady, with the instinctive reverence for aristocracy which conservatives like Buchan like to believe hide in the hearts of every peasant, curtseys to the princess. Then she tells McCunn to go stay in the attic room while the strips, dries and dresses both ladies in good solid highland clothes. McCunn is astonished in the change in Saskia’s appearance once she is wearing:
a heavy tweed skirt cut very short, and thick homespun stockings, which had been made for someone with larger feet than hers. A pair of the coarse low-heeled shoes, which country folk wear in the farmyard, stood warming by the hearth. She still had her russet jumper, but round her neck hung a grey wool scarf, of the kind known as a ‘comforter’. (p.135)
Mrs Morran then makes them a fine breakfast with hot tea as if they had all the time in the world. Eugènie is put to bed and McCunn and Saskia, covered in waterproofs, set off into the rain again, and there is a typically tortuous description of the elaborate route via roads, tracks, heather, moorland and whatnot till they get to the front door of the big house on the hill overlooking the railway station. (Get on a train at the railway station and hie to Glasgow, maybe then to London and complete safety? No.)
Mrs Morran had told McCunn over breakfast that this house belonged to the dashing hero Sir Archibald Roylance, one of Buchan’s recurring characters. The one-armed butler shows them into Roylance who is lounging in a chair bored, reading a book. As McCunn tells him the story, he leaps out of the chair exclaiming, in an impeccably posh dropped h, that ‘It’s more absurd than this shocker I’ve been readin’.’
Chapter 11
Astonished at the turn of events, Roylance bows to the princess and then they converse. He confirms that he was one of Quentin Kennedy’s best friends, they went to the same school together etc. Saskia tells him her story but Buchan says explicitly that she gives more detail now that she is talking to someone of her own class. In particular, she identifies the Great Unknown as a Russian man named Paul Abreskov.
Once he’s heard the full story, Roylance declares he’ll take Saskia to the local head of police and then bring her back here where he can defend her. But Saskia obstinately insists that she return to the hunting tower, to meet with her friend and to support Heritage and the Die-Hards who are fighting on her behalf.
When McCunn expresses his wish to get back in the fight, too, Roylance is inspired to join them. Unfortunately every single member of his staff, including himself, was wounded or crippled in the war. So McCunn tells Roylance to take Saskia to see the cops while he borrows his bicycle to get back to the house. But on the way his bike has a stick through the spokes which sends him flying and knocked unconscious, by two mercenaries paid by Dobson to get him.
Out for a walk, Mrs Morran comes across McMunn’s hat, sees a scuffle took place in the roadside mud, finds the bicycle hidden in bushes and concludes that McMunn has been captured. On the road back she comes across Wee Jaikie and tells him to sound the alarm (p.149).
Chapter 12
When McCunn comes round he’s tied to a tree. He has a couple of pages of regretting ever getting caught up in ‘romance’ and adventures (‘He did not want to die’ etc) before Wee Jaikie appears and cuts most of his bonds but is interrupted by the return of his capturers. These loiter just long enough to taunt him for being captured and sharing with the reader the vital information that the Danish brig has arrived and anchored and the baddies will be landing in half an hour. Then they move off, allowing Wee Jaikie to return and finish cutting McCunn free.
McCunn staggers back up to the public highway and encounters a man squatting down and repairing his motorcycle. He is a handsome young man who McCunn recognises as the man with the Australian accent he met at the Black Bull inn way back at the start of the story. Now the thing is that, during one of the many conversations between McCunn and Heritage about the mysterious Unknown Man who Saskia has told them she’s terribly afraid of, the mastermind of the kidnappers etc, our guys had decided it must be this Australian fellow. So the chap has barely looked up from his tinkering with his bike before McCunn grabs a spanner and takes a wild swing at him. Luckily the man ducks and then stands and punches McCunn, knocking the older man flat.
After some moments of understandable confusion, the man reveals that, far from being the Enemy, he is in fact The Friend who Saskia keeps going on about, the one she promised she’d meet here, the meeting which is her excuse for not doing the sensible thing and catching a train to Glasgow.
He introduces himself as going by the name of Alexander Nicholson but his real name is, of course, Russian, being Alexis Nicolaevitch. He quickly gives his backstory i.e. he left Russia before the war and emigrated to Australia, went back when war broke out, and when Russia signed its ceasefire made his way to join Australians fighting on the western front, and so found himself in Paris after the war.
And, of course, he is not just a ‘friend’ but the fiancé of the beautiful princess (‘She is my kinswoman. She is also my affianced wife’ p.159). He is, in fact, the fairy prince. And of course, desperately interested when McCunn reveals that he, McCunn, knows where the princess is and has been helping her.
So he helps McCunn onto the back of the bike and they set off towards the village but are almost immediately intercepted by Dougal, head of the Die-Hards. He tells the two men that the enemy ships have arrived, three boatloads of 23 or 24 men.
As usual with Buchan the situation feels needlessly complicated. Dougal tells them the enemy are on their way to besiege the tower. Heritage and some of the boys are inside and will put up a stiff fight. But when Lord Roylance returned with Saskia, Dougal insisted on putting them up in the house, allowing the enemy to think they’re in the tower, while they remain safe and at large (why oh why don’t they head away from the blasted enemy?).
Apparently, Roylance and Saskia got to meet the chief constable who believed their story but said it would take a while to rouse his men (really?) so there’ll be no help from that quarter for a while (really? when the country is being invaded by foreign nationals?)
Chapter 13
Cut to John Heritage holed up in the old tower and barely believing that an enlightened modern man could be caught up in an adventure out of romance. He’s alone in the tower but a) notifies the guards (who have managed to get out of their locked rooms in the main house) by shouting at them from the windows, b) and convinces them the princess is with them by waving skirts around and mimicking conversations in French for the guards’ benefit.
Dawn comes up and the morning passes and then the afternoon with nothing much happening except Heritage becoming more and more anxious. He fondly imagines the police, tipped off by Roylance, will arrive any moment and capture the whole pack of enemies. It gets chilly and in a typically waspish incident, Buchan has the one-time poet tear up his own slim volume of verse in order to feed the fire in the tower. You see, once a young man has tasted ‘action’ all his poetic vapourings, as well as his foolish left-wing tendencies, will evaporate.
Finally something happens which is a whole crowd of wet-looking rough sailors arrive and form a siege party. A posh man yells up at him to let them in, but Heritage stoutly refuses. He has been charged with defending the tower and he will stay to the end. When several try the door he shoots. Then they get a battering ram and pound the door again, and he shoots through a crack in the masonry and hits someone. Finally he sees something lob a bomb at the door which explodes in a great crash of timber and he hears the mob pouring into the ground floor of the tower. So Heritage retreats up the stairs to the topmost parapet and prepares to sell his life dear.
But at that moment he sees a white figure come running from the house and with horror realises it is the princess who he thought was miles away. She’s obviously seen the mob besiege and then storm the tower where a brave man is prepared to give his life for her. And so she runs down to within earshot of the mob and harangues them in Russian, then turns and runs off. The enemy forget all about Heritage, pour back out of the tower and set off in pursuit of the girl.
So really, Heritage’s occupation of the tower for most of the day had absolutely no practical value because it didn’t allow the princess to go anywhere, in fact the opposite, as soon as it began to fall she rushed within sight of her enemies. Like so much in Buchan it’s quite exciting and action-packed so long as you don’t actually think about its plausibility.
Chapter 14
Back to Dougal when Sir Archie arrives along with Sime the butler, Carfrae the chauffeur, and McGuffog the gamekeeper, and an armful of guns and two big cartridge-magazines. There is a typically long-winded debate about what to do: Roylance is for going to join Heritage in the tower, but Dougal objects that they would then be presenting themselves as sitting ducks. Dougal; counter-suggests that the ten or so of them go down to the beach heavily armed and fire on the sailors when they try to land, killing many of them. Roylance says that is illegal in a law-abiding country, and so they find themselves pushed back into the strategy of reoccupying the house and withstanding a siege. Innumerable details of how they barricade every door and window, Roylance all the time worried in case the whole thing is a mistake and they get in bad trouble with the law.
Eventually they see the figures coming from the seaward end of the house’s lawns and making for the tower. Panic stations. They hear the shots Heritage fired and then the explosion of the bomb. Saskia is wound up into a fever of concern and suddenly tells Roylance she’s going to save Heritage, wriggles through one of the blocked doors and is gone.
As we saw through Heritage’s eyes, she breasts a ridge and shouts at the attackers who promptly leave the tower to chase her. We see the breathless pursuit through Roylance’s eyes, who shoots the lead enemy who is getting within yards of the tiring girl in the leg. She reaches the ladder up the steep wall to the veranda as the leaders of mob close in but then suddenly a tall man emerges from nowhere, picks her up and forces her up the ladder our boys had leaned against the wall and turns to face the mob, addressing them in Russian. It is, of course, Alexis the fairy prince.
He harangues the mob then turns, races up the ladder, drawing it up after him, and through a part-open door into the house which is quickly barricaded. Saskia recognises her Alesha and runs into his arms. Our chaps hurriedly deploy their forces and then the whole thing turns into the defence of the Alamo or Rorke’s Drift, as the enemy try to break through various doors or windows only to meet fierce resistance.
Despite valiant fighting our team are forced to make an orderly retreat to the first floor landing. Suddenly out of the mob of sailors steps the elegant figure of Paul Abreskov, former lover of Saskia and now Bolshevik leader. In impeccable English he politely says the fight is now over and asks Saskia to come with him.
Obviously Saskia defies him, backed up by Roylance. Suddenly the mood in the mob at the bottom of the stairs changes. Messengers come from outside and they start to waver. Paul makes another plea as Dobson re-enters and tells him they must go now, the police have arrived, they’ll all be arrested. Then an evil look comes into Paul’s eye and he says if he can’t have Saskia, no-one can have her, and he reaches into his pocket, they hear a click and his hand comes out ready to throw.
At that second a figure comes out of nowhere, grabs Paul’s hand and makes a throw into the corner. The bomb Paul meant to throw at our team goes off with a terrific bang, blowing a hole through the fireplace into the next room. When the smoke clears their saviour is revealed to be Heritage, come from the tower, and Paul, like all the attackers, has gone.
Heritage announces that the police have just this moment arrived. Then who the devil was worrying the mob so for the previous ten minutes? At which one of the Die-Hards enters the room, wet and torn and scratched and bleeding, to be greeted by his chief, Dougal. Yes it was the Gorbals Die-Hards who saved the day!
Chapter 15
Goes back in time a few hours to tell things from McCunn’s point of view. Having escaped from being tied up, and mistakenly hitting out at Alexis, he had let the fairy prince and the Die-Hard zoom off on their motorbike and walked to Mrs Morran’s. Here he discovered was the command post of Thomas Yownie. He, the other Die-Hards and especially Mrs Morran are very concerned for nice Mr Heritage. First they hear the bomb go off which blows in the tower door, then Napoleon bursts in to report that he’s seen at least 27 baddies swarming up from the beach. At which point Yownie has a brainwave. Dobson is a lead figure in the opposition and he has a mortal fear of the police. Now night has fallen it is very dark so…why don’t the Die-Hards pretend to be the police?
And that’s what they do in a great comic set-piece which Buchan emphasises by adopting the tones of a military historian or, even better, a bard singing of the deeds of heroes. So he describes how the five or so boys dispose themselves around the building, blowing their police whistles from near and far, engaging in threatening conversations about how many of the mob had been captured, a constable informing his superior that the boats have been seized, Loudon is taken and so on, sowing doubt and fear into their listeners, especially Dobson who keeps rushing into the house to tell the irritated Paul that their cause is lost and they must flee.
There’s then a tense description of how Heritage escaped from the burning tower which was more fraught and dangerous than you’d think since he tried climbing down the outside only to find a great hole blocked his way and had to climb back up to the attic room and fight his way down the red hot stairs where he picked up burns and set his clothes alight before finally making it out into the cool wet heather.
Meanwhile McCunn and Mrs Morran listened to the effective cries of the Die-Hards and then witnessed the arrival of the actual police, some mounted on horses, who gave chase to the fleeing baddies. In the bay two boats are riding and pitching in heavy seas but the third is still ashore waiting for someone. McCunn and Napoleon realise it must be the enemy mastermind and then he’s upon them, rushing through the dark across the grass. Both McCunn and Napoleon try to tackle him, the boy being thrown off and McCunn being shot at at close range, but both fail to stop him and the agile young Russian leaps into the third boat, which quickly casts off.
But the storm is blowing up and the Atlantic breakers growing with each passing minute. From his vantage point ashore McCunn watches the three ships, one by one, founder and sink. Next day the dead bodies are washed ashore.
Chapter 16
Which ties up the loose ends. It’s only a week since McCunn set off on his merry ramble through the countryside but what a week! Now the storm has blown itself out and spring has arrived and the house, which seemed so threatening under lowering skies, now seems handsome set amid beautiful gardens.
1. The affair is hushed up. The police are leaned on by a superior not to make a report. The coroner gives death by drowning of unknown sailors to the baddies. Loudon is found dead at the foot of the cliff and the papers give him a glowing obituary as a sound member of the community (cf the glowing obituary given to Andrew Lumley who everyone thinks is a leading light of the community and only a handful know is the leader of a wicked international conspiracy in The Power-House).
Anyway, this is a fairy tale so all the goodies live happily ever after. 2. Some of the Russkies survive the storm and Alexis, in fine aristocratic style, forgives them and pays their passages to British Dominions where they can start new lives.
3. Saskia and Alexis walk hand and hand on the sunny greensward with their lives ahead of them.
4. Dickson and Heritage can see the lovers from where they’re sitting. Dickson is worried that Heritage will be devastated that Saskia, who he was in love with, is affianced to another man. But on the contrary, Heritage has the true gallant knight’s happiness that he served a beautiful princess. And he goes on to deliver an Author’s Message:
‘The trouble about you, Dogson,’ says Heritage, ‘is that you’re a bit of an anarchist. All you false romantics are. You don’t see the extraordinary beauty of the conventions which time has consecrated. You always want novelty, you know, and the novel is usually the ugly and rarely the true. I am for romance, but upon the old, noble classic lines.’ (p.207)
Which reminds me of the huge biography of Lord Salisbury I read a year ago, a lifelong arch-conservative whose philosophy was summed up in a pithy quote:
Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.
If you are convinced that change, any change, is for the worst, then of course you will try your damnedest to prevent any change and conserve things just the way they are. And that is the conservative mindset.
5. Dickson wanders on and looks down on the camp of the Die-Hards who are camping in the house’s empty grounds. He reflects on how few chances they’ve had in life and decides he will adopt them as his wards, house and clothe and feed them and pay for their educations.
6. Throughout the tumultuous week McCunn’s wife, referred to only as ‘Mamma’, has been away at a spa. Now she returns home to find her husband looking tanned and with a few cuts and bruises. He seats her by the fire and treats her to some of their maid’s scones. Then McCunn ends the novel by taking out and giving to her a beautiful necklet of emeralds. It is, of course, a gift from the grateful Saskia and Mamma is delighted.
Thoughts
I watch too many movies for my own good. The thing about American films is how smoothly (by and large) they are plotted and how swift the action is. By complete contrast, Buchan’s shockers come from another era, when readers (apparently) enjoyed rickety plots and an extreme amount of circumstantial detail.
The descriptions of McCunn or Heritage or one or other of the Die-Hards creeping through heather, hiding in bushes, fording the river, sneaking across the lawn, doubling back on this road, that track, this path, that bit of beach or wood or orchard or whatnot, initially add atmosphere but eventually become very wearing.
Arguably, these long, long descriptions of the scenery the various protagonists traipse or creep or hurry through is a central characteristic of Buchan’s novels. All the kind of thing which would be immediately dropped if American scriptwriters got their hand on the plot, stripped out the persiflage and made it simpler and more coherent.
The comic climax, with the Die-Hards running round pretending to be the police, entirely makes sense, in its own terms, as a comic scene in a comic novel. But plenty of the other scenes – for example the immense fuss surrounding McCunn’s train trip to Glasgow with the princess’s jewels – feel clunky and over-detailed.
The basic premise, of a Russian princess bearing priceless jewels hiding in a remote Scottish house make reasonable sense and you can imagine it being the workable premise of a movie or TV series – but almost everything else about the story (starting with how she is imprisoned but her captives make barely any efforts to ask where she’s hidden them) would have to be radically rethought to achieve something like grown-up plausibility.
The rejuvenating effect of adventure stories
It’s a recurring theme in the six Buchan novels I’ve just read, that adventures make you young again.
But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution. He was intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture of audacity which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood. ‘I haven’t been doing badly for an old man,’ he reflected with glee. What, oh, what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a Bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men? In the past three days he had levanted with jewels which had once been an Emperor’s and certainly were not his; he had burglariously entered and made free of a strange house; he had played hide-and-seek at the risk of his neck and had wrestled in the dark with a foreign miscreant; he had shot at an eminent solicitor with intent to kill; and he was now engaged in tramping the world with a fairy-tale Princess. I blush to confess that of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud, and thirsted for many more in the same line. ‘Gosh, but I’m seeing life,’ was his unregenerate conclusion. (p.133)
But not just McCunn:
Sir Archie was never very clear afterwards about the events of the next hour. The Princess was in the maddest spirits, as if the burden of three years had slipped from her and she was back in her first girlhood. (p.183)
When I mentioned this to a friend she pointed out that it’s not just the character who is rejuvenated by these boyish adventures, it is the reader, too, who feels young again. The rejuvenation of the character in the text mimics or echoes the juvenilisation of anybody who reads what is, in effect, an adventure story for children.
And this is because, in this type of adventure yarn, we the readers know beyond any doubt that the good guys will win – and, indeed, that there are clearly identified good guys and bad guys. (Almost as simple-minded as US foreign policy.) There is a reassuring, comforting predictability about these ‘shockers’ so that immersing yourself means that all the complexities of adult life not only fall away from the characters, but from the reader as well.
After that Dickson leaves him [Heritage] and wanders among the thickets on the edge of the Huntingtower policies above the Laver glen. He feels childishly happy, wonderfully young, and at the same time supernaturally wise. (p.208)
And, of course, the stars of the story are a group of slum children, ranging from teenage years to toddlers. It is a child’s adventure story which features a gang of spunky kids, themselves readily envisionable as cartoon characters.
The Gorbals Boys 1948. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, currently on display at Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace at the Photographers’ Gallery until 2 June 2024
The character of Russia
‘You do not understand,’ she said. ‘I cannot make any one understand – except a Russian. My country has been broken to pieces, and there is no law in it; therefore it is a nursery of crime … My people are not wickeder than others, but for the moment they are sick and have no strength … Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilising everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. Today that is true about criminals… It is not Bolshevism, the theory, you need fear, for that is a weak and dying thing. It is crime, which to-day finds its seat in my country…’ (p.142)
Exactly a hundred years later I’m listening to current affairs programmes which countenance the idea that Russia might trigger a third world war, while Putin’s security state works day and night to undermine the economies, infrastructure and culture of the West. So plus ça change…
In praise of the middle classes
In contrast with a Russia that has been run by proletarians, commissars, a communist tyranny, and now oligarchs and yet another dictator, Buchan has his character Alesha, the exiled Russian aristocrat, deliver a paean to the value of the British middle classes, which is also a tribute to the unflappable nature of the book’s hero, Dickson McCunn:
‘You will not find him in Russia. He is what we call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which above all others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.’ (p.206)
1977 BBC Scotland dramatisation
Credit
Huntingtower by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1922. References are to the 2008 World Classics paperback edition.
Books & Boots 
Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)
‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)
This is the third and concluding novel in the Robert Harris’s epic ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.
Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.
I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:
Tiro’s memoirs
As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:
I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)
A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.
Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).
Sources
Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.
Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:
Part one – Exile (58 to 47 BC)
‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.
The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.
They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.
Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).
Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.
But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).
Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)
Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).
Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).
Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).
Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.
Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.
Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).
Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).
But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).
Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)
The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.
Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).
The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)
Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).
Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.
First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).
And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.
Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).
He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).
Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.
After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.
And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.
Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.
But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).
Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).
(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).
Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):
Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission
Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators
detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)
Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).
En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).
In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.
Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.
Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.
So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.
Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.
Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.
Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.
Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.
It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).
The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.
And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:
out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)
In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).
Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.
Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.
Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).
Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).
In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.
Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.
It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.
‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)
The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).
Part two – Redux (47 to 43 BC)
They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).
He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.
Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).
Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).
Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.
Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).
His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).
Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:
One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:
‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).
Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.
Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.
Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.
Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).
Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).
Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).
Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.
On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.
Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.
Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:
A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)
Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)
So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).
The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).
Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.
Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.
One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.
An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.
Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).
Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.
Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.
He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).
Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).
It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).
Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).
It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.
Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).
Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).
Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.
BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).
But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.
A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.
The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.
It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.
Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)
In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.
When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:
That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)
And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.
Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.
At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).
Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).
Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).
Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.
A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:
the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)
So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.
At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).
Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.
It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.
They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).
They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.
Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.
They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.
They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.
The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).
Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.
They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).
Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.
All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.
My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)
The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.
It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.
And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.
Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.
Key words
Politics
As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.
But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.
Power
I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.
And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.
It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.
With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).
And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.
It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.
Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.
The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.
The law
A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.
Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.
Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.
So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:
‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)
War atrocities
As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:
It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.
Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.
Family ties
Dated diction
In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.
I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.
Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.
It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.
‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).
On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?
Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.
When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:
Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.
I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)
Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.
Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.
The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.
But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.
Scraps
Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).
Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).
Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).
Credit
Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. All references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.
The Cicero trilogy
Robert Harris reviews
Roman reviews
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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/dictator-robert-harris/