Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday February 12, 2011
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THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS: A Record of Secret Service
Erskine Childers
Penguin Classics
ISBN 978-1453687550
299 pages
$15
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Like the novel of sensation, the spy novel came in with a glorious bang. Just as Wilkie Collins' "The Woman in White" (1860) is not only the progenitor of all mystery novels but still one of the best ever written, so Erskine Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands" (1903) is a pioneering spy novel -- and still near the top of the heap.
Childers' story of Britons trying to foil German spies takes place partly on the Baltic Sea, with which he was familiar as a yachtsman. His day job was clerking for the House of Commons, but at night he toiled away at this novel, adding a romantic subplot at the suggestion of his sister Dulcibella, whose mellifluous first name he gave to the yacht in his book. Among other virtues, Childers was superb at depicting action, as in this scene in which the narrator, Carruthers, senses that he is not alone on deck: "I started up involuntarily, bumped against the table, and set the stove jingling. A long step and a grab at the ladder, but just too late! I grasped something damp and greasy, there was tugging and hard breathing, and I was left clasping a big sea-boot, whose owner I heard jump on to the sand and run."
The facts of Childers' life add a frisson to reading his pathbreaking book. Though born in London, he grew up in Ireland, and his agitation for Irish independence led to his execution for treason in 1922.
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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LIVIA, EMPRESS OF ROME: A Biography
Matthew Dennison
St. Martin's
ISBN 978-0312658649
320 pages
$27.99
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
The first six episodes of the British Broadcasting Service's extraordinary adaptation of Robert Graves' equally extraordinary novel "I, Claudius," first broadcast in 1976, have at their center not the Emperor Augustus or his successor, Tiberius, but Livia Augusta, wife of the first and mother of the second. As depicted in the script by Jack Pulman and portrayed by the Welsh actress Sian Phillips, Livia is one of history's great villains, whom Matthew Dennison describes in this biography as "a caricature of feminine ruthlessness which remains current despite repeated debunking by classicists and scholars."
This caricature -- of "Livia's scheming, her malevolence and, above all, her unbridled maternal ambition and lust for power" -- existed nearly two millennia before Phillips' brilliant performance, but the widely watched "I, Claudius," of which a handsomely remastered DVD set is now available, embedded Livia's villainous legend even more deeply in the public mind. Reading Dennison's "Livia" moved me to watch those first six episodes once again, for the fifth or sixth time, and to marvel at the skill with which Phillips brings to life not, perhaps, the historical Livia, but certainly the fictional one.
Which brings to mind the immortal line from John Ford's film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." The legend of Livia Augusta connects her, in her relentless quest to put her son Tiberius on the Roman throne, "with the deaths of Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Agrippa Postumus, Germanicus," even Augustus himself, though there is little or nothing that actually establishes those connections beyond accusations made by Tacitus in his "Annals of Imperial Rome," written nearly a century after Livia's death and based on sources of uncertain accuracy.
Obviously, Livia deserves a fairer shake than she has received at the hands of Tacitus, Graves and Pulman. Indeed, it is interesting that the rather perfunctory portrait of her in Suetonius' "The Twelve Caesars," the chief source for Graves' novel, is essentially neutral and in some respects favorable. Graves plainly wanted an eminence grise for his tale, and apparently invented a truly wicked one essentially out of whole cloth, an invention that Pulman seems to have been happy to embroider upon. Dennison, by contrast, believes Livia is entitled to a portrait "more finely balanced, more equivocal -- and less indebted to burlesque."
She was born Livia Drusilla in 58 B.C., the daughter of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, the very wealthy son of a powerful, aristocratic family who himself eventually "attained the rank of praetor, one of the Republic's senior magistrates with a powerful judicial role." In 43 or 42 B.C. she married Tiberius Claudius Nero, a marriage that produced two sons, Tiberius and Drusus, but not a lot of happiness or achievement. Then she met Julius Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, a fast-rising star in the imperial hierarchy as the republic moved into its final hours. Even though he had played a role in the death by suicide of her father, she threw everything aside for him, and in January 38 B.C., a mere three days after giving birth to Drusus, she married him.
By almost all accounts, it was a love match -- Suetonius calls Livia "the one woman whom (Octavian) truly loved until his death" -- but it is difficult to believe that there was no calculation on either side. Marriage among Roman aristocrats "was men's business, managed in order to create alliances that were firstly political and afterwards economic or social." For Octavian, who was a bit of an arriviste, marrying into Livia's rich and important family had obvious benefits, and, for Livia, alliance with Octavian had potential benefits as well, as was proved correct in 31 B.C., when Octavian routed the forces of his rival Mark Antony in the great naval battle of Actium. The engagement led to the suicides of Mark Antony and his lover Cleopatra, and Octavian's seizure of the Roman throne -- where, only four years later, he "received at a meeting of the Senate the title he would retain until his death: 'Augustus,' 'revered one.'" By then Tiberius was still a boy, but because Augustus' previous marriage had produced only a daughter, Julia, and because of various complexities in relationships among the descendants of Julius Caesar, the line of succession was unclear. What we do know is that Livia badly wanted Tiberius to follow Augustus and that along the way a great many men who stood in his way conveniently dropped dead. Among these were Marcellus, who had married Julia and who died (probably of a "nameless fever"), leaving Augustus "without a son-in-law or the immediate prospect of heirs of his blood, and temporarily lacking any nominated successor from within his family"; Gaius Caesar and Lucius, Augustus' grandsons by his first marriage, the first of unknown causes and the other after a wound; Agrippa Postumus, the last of Augustus' three grandsons; and Germanicus, Livia's promising and popular grandson.
Probably, it was all macabre coincidence, but it's easy to see how the legend of Livia emerged from it. Even her partisans readily admit that she was drawn to power, not merely influencing its exercise -- as she did regularly in private conversations with Augustus, who valued her intelligence and trusted her counsel -- but exercising it herself. As Dennison writes:
"Livia's true 'crime' was not murder but the exercise of power. In a society so assertively masculine that its historians avoided mentioning women save as exemplars of outstanding virtue or vice -- or, in the unique but vexed case of Cleopatra, as a ruler in her own right -- Livia created for herself a public profile and a sphere of influence. The wife of one princeps ('leading citizen') of Rome, she became the mother of his successor after a series of unforeseeable deaths. In the early years of Tiberius' reign she was acknowledged by several sources as almost his equal in power. Unofficially she was hailed as 'Mother of Her Country.' But any power she exercised was always circumscribed. Assiduously she confined her visible sphere of influence to acceptable, traditionally female areas. That she won public plaudits for her contribution to Roman life was in itself enough to condemn her -- in the eyes not only of contemporaries but also of influential later writers."
This judgment obviously is shaped by our own much altered views about the proper role of women in government and all other places where power is wielded, but it is almost surely accurate. Like Cleopatra, she confounded her contemporaries and was consigned to caricature: Cleopatra as a voluptuary, Livia as a murderess. The more we learn about both women, the more we understand how inappropriate these caricatures really are.
We don't know all that much, though, so too often the biographer or historian is left with little to do except speculate.
Dennison is not reluctant to do so. "Perhaps" occurs so often in his narrative that it becomes almost a refrain, along with phrases such as "What form that took we do not know" and "Libo's intention ... may have been." Et cetera. This is not Dennison's fault, given the paucity of hard evidence, but he certainly is to blame for the endless backing and filling with which his narrative is cluttered. People are dead on one page, alive on the next, dead again a few pages later. Reading "Livia, Empress of Rome" is like punching one's way through a truckload of cotton candy and is no more nutritious. Give me "I, Claudius" any day.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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The Violence of Peace
Stephen L. Carter
Beast Books
ISBN NA
$24.99
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
In his "Devil's Dictionary," Ambrose Bierce memorably defined "peace" as "in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting." Those periods of fighting are the subject of these new books, which look at the subject both here and now and from an ageless perspective.
1. Stephen L. Carter's title, "The Violence of Peace" (Beast Books, $24.99), sounds Bierce-like indeed. But the subtitle, "America's Wars in the Age of Obama," explains the Yale law professor's concerns more fully. Although President Obama hasn't started any wars, he has vigorously waged the ones he inherited, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Carter's book weighs the ethics of the president's approach. Among Carter's conclusions is that Obama and his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, have not differed markedly as war presidents and, moreover, that Obama has argued in favor of "means that Bush did not -- (such as) the right to assassinate American citizens" in certain circumstances.
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War
Little
Brown
ISBN NA
$27.99
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
In his "Devil's Dictionary," Ambrose Bierce memorably defined "peace" as "in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting." Those periods of fighting are the subject of these new books, which look at the subject both here and now and from an ageless perspective.
2. In "How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War" (Little, Brown, $27.99), Dominic Tierney, a political science professor at Swarthmore, ponders the discrepancy between the gung-ho crusading instincts with which Americans launch wars and the reluctance to follow through with nation-building that tends to characterize our behavior once we have toppled a threatening regime.
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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