- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Hutchinson; First Edition edition (Oct 1971)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0091081203
- ISBN-13: 978-0091081201
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.6 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 687,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I was pointed in the direction of this excellent book by a member of staff in a bookshop. It was recommended to me as the best Roman historical fiction novel the man had ever read. While I won't give The Boat of Fate that title, because The Eagle of The Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff has that honour, I will afford it a place in the top five.
This book is astonishingly well written, and details the life of Sergius Paullus, an Iberian Roman whose life spans the last years in the western Roman Empire, when men such as Theodosius ruled, and generals like Stilicho fought to save the last parts of the formerly great empire from destruction. Sergius, an angry and troubled young man, wanders from Iberia to Rome, takes service with the army in Gaul and is then sent to Britain, where he is intimately involved in the last struggle after the legions left in 410 AD. The prose wears its historical detail very lightly, yet conjures a wonderfully intense image of Rome and its empire. I couldn't put it down.
It's a book which has only recently come back in to print, and I sincerely hope that a large publisher takes it on board and rejackets it, because it would sell in large numbers. In its current incarnation, that is unlikely, unfortunately.
Take a chance, buy this book. I guarantee that after the first chapter you'll be hooked. It's a fantastic read.
Ben Kane, author of The Forgotten Legion.
This book is astonishingly well written, and details the life of Sergius Paullus, an Iberian Roman whose life spans the last years in the western Roman Empire, when men such as Theodosius ruled, and generals like Stilicho fought to save the last parts of the formerly great empire from destruction. Sergius, an angry and troubled young man, wanders from Iberia to Rome, takes service with the army in Gaul and is then sent to Britain, where he is intimately involved in the last struggle after the legions left in 410 AD. The prose wears its historical detail very lightly, yet conjures a wonderfully intense image of Rome and its empire. I couldn't put it down.
It's a book which has only recently come back in to print, and I sincerely hope that a large publisher takes it on board and rejackets it, because it would sell in large numbers. In its current incarnation, that is unlikely, unfortunately.
Take a chance, buy this book. I guarantee that after the first chapter you'll be hooked. It's a fantastic read.
Ben Kane, author of The Forgotten Legion.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The Boat of Fate is a thoroughly entertaining historical novel by Keith Roberts set in the last days of the Roman Empire. More famed for his science fiction works, this book was a venture into a different type of genre by Roberts, and for me it was a success.
The books appears to me (who knows next to nothing about Roman history) to have been thoroughly researched and takes the reader into a completely different age when Rome ruled most of Europe, but whose empire was on the verge of collapse. Although the text contains a lot of vocabulary no longer in common use, I soon forgot that once the story unraveled, and put my dictionary away!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The publishers' blurb calls this "a fine thumping panorama of Rome's death throes in Gaul, Africa and Britannia : high romance".
Certainly, that encapsulates the core of the plot and locations, but there is more than that there.
The tale is of an Hispanic son of a Roman and a Briton who seeks himself, if he but knew it.
Seduced,as a boy, by dreams of glory in the Roman Army, he stumbles through his puberty and early adulthood, fumbling for a real life, and encountering expulsion from his home, work in Rome with his uncle and through a lucky accident finally he ends up in the army, he dreamed of, as a Tribune in Gaul.
We follow his military adventures ( although these are in no way like those in Scarrow's or Cornwell's books : here the military action is limited, since this is a novel, and not an action novel ! ) with each part well described in natural language and simple action.
Misfortune on misfortune puts our (anti-) hero in various interesting situations until he ends up in Britannia at the point that the Roman legions leave. Here is the crux of the novel and here the complex character of our hero arises and is resolved.
A well-written novel with varied locations, descriptions, incidents, all well-described and very satisfying.A great novel of the decay of the Western Roman Empire and how one man copes and comes to terms with it, and growing up inside it.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
Certainly, that encapsulates the core of the plot and locations, but there is more than that there.
The tale is of an Hispanic son of a Roman and a Briton who seeks himself, if he but knew it.
Seduced,as a boy, by dreams of glory in the Roman Army, he stumbles through his puberty and early adulthood, fumbling for a real life, and encountering expulsion from his home, work in Rome with his uncle and through a lucky accident finally he ends up in the army, he dreamed of, as a Tribune in Gaul.
We follow his military adventures ( although these are in no way like those in Scarrow's or Cornwell's books : here the military action is limited, since this is a novel, and not an action novel ! ) with each part well described in natural language and simple action.
Misfortune on misfortune puts our (anti-) hero in various interesting situations until he ends up in Britannia at the point that the Roman legions leave. Here is the crux of the novel and here the complex character of our hero arises and is resolved.
A well-written novel with varied locations, descriptions, incidents, all well-described and very satisfying.A great novel of the decay of the Western Roman Empire and how one man copes and comes to terms with it, and growing up inside it.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
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