Para Bellum

This is a long review – I think all you really need to know is that if you like Turney’s books you will love this one. But if you need to know a bit more …

On the Danube border a treacherous Roman general invites a pair of Gothic chieftains to a conference and then tries to have them assassinated. Only partially successful, one chieftain escapes and rampages around what-is-now-Bulgaria until the Romans reassert partial control, largely by integrating the Gothic invaders. That chieftain, Fritigern, drops out of the historical record and this novel is about what happened to him.

The premiss of this enjoyably dramatic novel is that, after a few years, Fritigern gathers a death squad to exact revenge on the elite Roman unit responsible for the assassination attempt. Our story follows that elite Roman unit, who had dispersed and gone to ground, but now need to reassemble and work out how to defend themselves against impossible odds.

The set in 382, 6 years of the battle of Adrianopole. It has a very visual, cinematic, feel – they have to exploit the landscape and cities to track, hide, and escape. That rural and urban landscape tells its own story about the end of the Roman Empire as it transitions into the medieval era (into Christianity, multiculturalism, and that mix of corrupted power and a desperate underclass). There are a series of set scenes: farms, ports, fortified villas and cities, connected by imperial posting stations that ironically serve the hunters better than the hunted. The author skilfully leads us from one to the other as the hunters close in.

In many ways it reminded me of Harry Sidebottom’s A Falling Sky – an imperilled journey brings father and son together and that sense of a trek through enemy territory that must end somewhere and somehow. The structure and pacing are the same, but the vibe is different – this is more Mad Max and Rambo (as the author suggests) than the American Civil War memoirs and Cormac McCarthy novels that Sidebottom cited for his book.

An intriguing and very enthralling book interpreting a little known event around 376/77AD that Simon Turney has (rather well) turned into a revenge story. It centres on a father, his son and the fathers ex tent party colleagues against Fritigern, leader of a merciless Thervingi war band and hell bent on revenge, who chase them around Thrace and the Black Sea coast culminating in a standoff of epic proportion. Thoroughly enjoyable read.