Review of A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum by Emma Southon, pub. Oneworld
It isn’t often I fail to finish a book, especially on a topic that interests me. But the style of this one was such an irritating mixture of childish, chatty, patronising and potty-mouthed that I just couldn’t live with it.
It’s about violent crime in ancient Rome and I had bought it as a present for a fan of Roman history (and foolishly didn’t read it myself beforehand). And yes, the title clearly indicated that it was “popular” history, but its cover also called it, on the authority of people like Sarah Perry, BBC History magazine and the Wall Street Journal, “scholarly” and “erudite”. I assumed, therefore, that it would be written in normal literate English, albeit with more contractions than your average scholarly history. I didn’t expect to find phrases like the following (my italics):
“we can yada yada yada the lead-up to Tiberius Gracchus”
“He went Full Centrist Dad to be honest”
“but it was still a bit like the Archbishop of Canterbury going full dark no stars”
What does that last one even mean? Or indeed Full Centrist Dad? I have no idea. It was also soon apparent that the author had a very low opinion of her readers’ intelligence and attention span. Sentences like the following are everywhere: “I’m sorry but it involves a lot of politics and chat about land reform policies and it’s awful. We can get through this together; I believe in us”. Only she clearly doesn’t, or she wouldn’t be so damn insulting.
What is worse, and what the back-cover blurb really should have made clear, there’s quite a lot of vulgar and offensive language, which actually rather upset the person I bought it for. Nobody is annoyed if they can be “p-d off”; nobody makes a mess of something if they can “f-ck up”. It all reminded me of those children’s books written by (or ghosted for) celebs, which talk down to their young readers by larding the story with the kind of words five-year-olds snigger at.
Why someone with a PhD in ancient history should want to write in this look-at-me-being-trendy style is the question. I can only assume the idea is to “popularise” the subject and bring it to a wider audience. But while trying to do this, one may chance to alienate the audience one already has, and for this dedicated history fan, who speaks standard English and can take an interest in politics, it quickly became incredibly tiresome. It also strikes me that, given the way popular argot dates, parts of it may well soon be as unintelligible to the target audience as they now are to me. I have heard it argued that one should not review a book without having read the whole of it. Say, then, that I am reviewing the reason I couldn’t get more than a few chapters into it.
