George Gardiner

Really liked it, in fact. So the fourth star is in store for next edition, which I'm really looking forward to read.

I liked the dreamlike quality of the scenery (Suetonius-as-sleuth and his friends wandering through a camp looking endless and somewhat unreal).
I liked the character of Antinous: not a dreaming teenager, but a determinate young man, and quite a match for the emperor; and divine, of course, as usual; but the god associated with Antinous here is neither Dionysus, nor Hermes, let alone Ganymede; Antinous here is rather like Apollo Alexikakos, the heavenly healer.
I liked the ability of some characters to renounce revenge and set themselves free from the burden of the past.

So, for the next edition, I would like:
A better filtering of information (the documentation is very careful, but there is still an excess of data not well converted in narrative form).
Better control of POVS: sometimes, it looks like the author has forgotten the presence of a narrator.
A bit of language reworking, in order to eliminate such expressions as "phallocentric," "alpha male", “risk assessment skills”, not to mention poker language, and similar, all likely to put the suspension of disbelief in serious jeopardy.

And finally ... IMHO a declaration of love should definitely not look like public tendering combined with a lesson in cultural anthropology (what would have happened – or not happened – had Antinous been less smart?).… (mehr)

I really wanted to love this book because the death of Antinous is one of those historical mysteries that has always fascinated me. Sadly, I thought it was badly written and poorly edited. Tenses and points of view were all over the place. We changed from a past tense to a present tense in the same sentence. Events, dialogue and emotions were reported by people who couldn't have possibly known those things. Almost identical descriptions and information were repeated over and over again, some historical points were reiterated a tedious number of times so that I found myself skipping pages. The dialogue was at times little better than clumsy and lengthy info-dump. Characters were described in great physical detail but failed to come to life as personalities. The totally random italics, anachronistic words and (in the Kindle version) sudden changes of font-sizes were likewise off-putting.

Lest I sound very harsh, I must add that I did actually enjoy the book more than my criticisms suggest. It was rather engaging and admirably bold in its intentions. The author clearly researched rigorously for it and just need a lighter hand in applying the results. A good edit could have rectified a lot of the more glaring writing faults and cut out much of the repetition and superfluous characters.… (mehr)

The author chose to present this novel as M/M romance, but as much as I love the genre, I think in this particular case it’s a limitation. The Hadrian Enigma is more a mainstream novel, a detailed romancing of a real episode.

To a normal reader the novel will probably appear like a tour de force: almost 500 pages of historical fiction, full of details, with different point of views, and with interleaves of Greek and Roman words. This last point it’s probably easier for an European reader, especially an Italian one, since we study Roman culture and Latin as other students all around the world study their own origins. The strange thing, considering our strict upbringing on regard of homosexuality, is that Antinous, the favourite of Imperator Hadrian, was never “hidden” away like a skeleton in the closet; probably the tragic love story was bigger than the restriction of morality. The tragedy itself is probably the reason why this story was not buried with the layers of time, these two lovers had not the change of an happily ever after, and so it was allowed to them to be remembered. Sure, Hadrian’s behaviour after Antinous’s death, his tentative to turn him in a god to be worshipped, he was even given a constellation in the sky as only ancient gods were allowed to have, all of this was seen as sign of madness, the madness of a disrupted lover.

So yes, when this novel starts, Antinous is already dead, and Hadrian assigns to historian Suetonius Tranquillus the task to investigate on this strange death, officially recorded as accidental death; but too much mystery is behind this death and probably too many people gained from that for being really an accident.

This is for sure not an easy read, and probably the novel stands in the middle between fiction and non fiction; if during the read someone wonders on the abundance of details, indeed you have to consider that the starting point of this novel is to be a recording of Suetonius Tranquillus’s investigation on the death of Antinous. So yes, it’s like if a modern reader is going through the files of an old buried case, a case that was filed as suicide or accident, but too many hints let it go that it was something else. You have not the chance to ask to who was there, and so you basically rebuild what it was, what they though, what they did, all on the basis of some old papers.

What is the purpose of this research? Antinous is dead, there is no way for Hadrian to have him back again, so what he is searching? What the author is trying to prove? Probably that Antinous was not “superfluous” to history, that he was not only a shiny accessory to Hadrian’s arm, that he was something more than a pretty face Hadrian forced artists to immortalise. Above all that Antinous really loved Hadrian and that was his condemn; if it was only a question of sex, sex between men wasn’t so uncommon, under specific “rules” (the old and more important man was always the one “on top”, only slaves, women and young men could be penetrated); love instead was not an option. Indeed it was not even a question of being both men, love at that level was out of question point; marriage was a political agreement, murder was the common resolution to get free of enemies, and plotting a normal activity at dinner time.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0980746914/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (mehr)