Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a 'non-fictional' historical novel, 14 Aug 2005
This is an absolutely gorgeous book.
The author skillfully uses a mixture of literary techniques which keeps you utterly enthralled, paragraph to paragraph. I am trying to write a historical novel about first century Palestine; if only I could live up to this standard.
Besides the exceptional skill of the writing, there is something truly unique about this as a historical novel. While it reads like a novel, it has such a nonfictional approach. And this is the story of a man in the ancient past about whom we know practically nothing. Without ever actually inventing dialogue or plotline for Pilate, she skillfully suggests, using references from Moses to Ovid to medieval passion plays how things might have been. The only invention is the beautiful similes, metaphors and parallel stories illustrating analogies.
Best book I've read in years (and I read a LOT).
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Diary of a Nobody?, 26 May 2009
Who was Pilate? He could, as Wroe suggests, be any one of three individuals: born of the tribe of Pontii, the Samnite nobility in the ancient Roman empire, relative of Gavius Pontius; a Spaniard, born in Seville, whose "residents had the right of Roman citizenship", "saturnine and ingratiating, [who:] hung around Rome, and especially round the court of the emperor; or, thirdly, A German, born at Forscheim, near Mainz, from "the appalling German forest gloomy with pines and overrun with wolves", wearing "barbarians' cloth trousers, his hair flaxen, and in his cold blue eyes the gleam of the north."
Wroe draws on a wide variety of sources: from the earliest texts of Josephus, Catallus, Seneca, Cicero; through the Apocrypha, the Gospels, the various cycles of Mystery Plays with their often Rabelaisian take on events: here, for example, Pilate placing the guards around the tomb of the newly dead Christ, to ensure that no one comes to snatch him away in order to proclaim that he has risen from the dead.
At his side trotted an attendant with wax in a bowl and a torch to melt it. Behind him came the soldiers, a reluctant posse. These were the same men Pilate had cheated of the seamless garment; they dragged their feet and grumbled, "Look here", moaned one, "what the hell's the point of watching him, if he's dead?" "If they're going to pay me, I don't care what he is. Just give me the money, mate."
And over these "lumpen auxiliaries" Pilate fusses and frets: "Boas,the clumsiest of the soldiers, [is] placed to the east and ordered to be nimbler than usual. He rattle[s] his good sword Klinger in its scabbard, promising to "split the pants" of anyone who [comes] past.
"If anyone comes here he's a dead man, sir!" cried Affraunt. "I'll guard his feet sir, even if both Jack and Jill come to get him!" Arfaxat shouted. "He'd rather he had the whooping cough, I tell you!"
"I only hope he really is dead", the governor muttered.
"Dead as a log sir! He's not going anywhere."
Whatever we think of Pilate, and whether we believe, or not, the Gospels, this is an excellent account of a man trapped by events both political and religious, who lost control, of himself and of the wider events at the time and ultimately of his own destiny. Who wanted desperately to ingratiate himself with, and also to protect himself from, the emperor Tiberious and his wrath and who, returning, summoned, to Rome, by overland journey through freezing Anatolia and Greece, covering some 2,000 Roman miles at a rate of at most 40 a day, to a fate he dreaded, he finds people laughing in the streets, dancing. "The Circus and the Aventine laid waste by fire, and the houses by the Tiber still flooded with mud and refuse. Tiberious is dead; and the "blank-eyed, monkey-haired Gaius was emperor in his place."
History and its various interpretations come so vividly to life in this superbly written book.
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