Imaginative ... Thrilling ... A swift-paced romp through a few crucial decades of Roman history, breathing life into a figure who played a central role in the story of the late republic.
Has the strengths of most Harris novels: a strong sense of the story’s time, place, and culture, many historical insights, and sure-footed storytelling. Unfortunately for this reader, however, his protagonist turns out to be a bit dull.
It is a sign of Harris’s discipline as a novelist that he has Agrippa tell his tale in almost comically unambitious prose ... From all this elegantly drab stuff emerges a more subtle portrait of the man and the age than you might expect. You get a persuasive portrait of a Rome exhausted by civil strife, and of the serpentine manoeuvrings of its rulers.
Deft ... The great strength of this novel is also a weakness. Harris’s ventriloquising of Agrippa is utterly convincing ... This strong narrative voice also means that Agrippa is not given to introspection, or to interrogating the mission he and Augustus set themselves.
Suffers from the problems of the Cicero trilogy, without demonstrating its strengths. Because its protagonist dies at the end, making this a single-volume effort, the novel barely has space to cram in all the events, let alone take the reader inside Agrippa’s head ... Please, Mr Harris, give your next Roman subject enough room to live. A three-volume account of this novel’s breakout star, the piratical Sextus Pompey, would be a treat.
Although Agrippa was responsible for all kinds of slaughter and skulduggery, I found myself rooting for him. That is due in no small part to a delicious fictional twist Harris introduces at the centre of Agrippa’s life ... If I have one criticism, it is that Harris occasionally moves a little too quickly ... That said, when Harris does pause to let a scene breathe, the novel comes alive. You’re transported into the period, the room and the intrigue. I gobbled up its nearly 400 pages in no time.
