Adventures in Bookland: The Exiled by David Barbaree

What responsibility
does the writer of historical fiction have to the historical record? This tautly
written, rather bleak thriller of Imperial Roman politics raises that question for
the reader. In his author’s note, David Barbaree inform the reader that The
Exiled is a work of fiction and that he has taken liberties that a novelist
is allowed. But since many readers of historical fiction read the genre to be
informed as well as to be entertained, it behoves the writer to inform his reader
where he has taken these liberties. Unfortunately, Barbaree does not. So the
unsuspecting reader might believe that Domitilla, the sister of the Emperor
Titus, was alive and a key player in the events of his reign, including the
aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, when in fact so far as we know she
died a decade before all the events of this story took place. Barbaree’s entertaining
fancy as to the true fate of the Emperor Nero, which was the focus of his first
novel, The Deposed, continues in The Exiled, and its inclusion is
more understandable given the world he has constructed. Perhaps the book is best
taken as an imaginative working out of the ‘What if?’ scenario that Nero did
not die, but lived on, working behind the scenes of Imperial politics. As such,
the book might perhaps be best thought of as historical fantasy, sans dragons
and gods and nymphs, but with similar scant regard for what probably happened. Readers
allergic to the use of the present tense and modern-day vocabulary in historical
fiction might also want to be wary.