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Saints Alive! New Stories of Old Saints: Saints of Empire

Andrew M. Seddon

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Mar 08, 2013 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, short-stories

Note, Feb. 4, 2017: I've just updated this review to correct some outdated author information.

The Goodreads description for this book simply reproduces the various tributes to the author's achievement on the back cover. Several of these are from well-recognized scholars, pundits, and writers; but one is from yours truly. Andrew and I have been Internet pen pals for nearly a decade; I had the privilege of beta reading these stories (a role he was kind enough to mention in the acknowledgements), a Note, Feb. 4, 2017: I've just updated this review to correct some outdated author information.

The Goodreads description for this book simply reproduces the various tributes to the author's achievement on the back cover. Several of these are from well-recognized scholars, pundits, and writers; but one is from yours truly. Andrew and I have been Internet pen pals for nearly a decade; I had the privilege of beta reading these stories (a role he was kind enough to mention in the acknowledgements), and he asked me if I could supply an endorsement for the cover. Given the difference in our relative literary standings, I'm sure the honor of having my name on the cover here does more for my reputation than my recommendation does for his! :-) But be that as it may, this is a collection I'm glad and proud to endorse.

The British-born author, who also writes science fiction, is both a devout Christian with an interest in the ancient traditions of the church (he's of the Roman Catholic faith, a convert from Anglicanism) and a serious student of Roman history, which he uses as the background for historical fiction like Imperial Legions, and melds with SF in his story cycle about a time-traveling historian (Ring of Time: Tales of a Time Traveling Historian in the Roman Empire), which I've also beta read. Here, he's blended the two interests, with twelve stories set in late Roman antiquity, in various parts of the Empire, and having as their central figures various historical saints (sometimes, as in "The End of the Games," seen through the eyes of other viewpoint characters), ordinary men and women living --and sometimes dying-- by their faith in a culture which, for all its differences, has some significant similarities to our own. (Four of the stories previously appeared in print in various publications, though all four are slightly revised here.)

Like all historical fiction that uses actual people as subjects, the treatment here is a work of imagination, with invented dialogue and some invented characters and events. But the author has been faithful to the basic facts (sometimes scanty) as we can learn them from legend and history, weaving them into realistic vignettes that could have happened. (The role of the miraculous here, as it usually is in real life, is low-key and unobtrusive.) He explains the principles underlying his craftsmanship in more detail in an introductory "About the Stories" note, and the known facts and sources behind the stories are set out in the notes at the end. His storytelling skills are impeccable here, in keeping with his high standard elsewhere. There's no sex or bad language in any of the stories, but it's probably advisable to be warned that stories like "Wheat of Lions" reflect the sometimes grisly brutality of Roman society, with arenas where Christian believers were literally thrown to the lions, etc. (And the mentality behind that isn't a thing of the past, as the current anti-Christian slogan "Bring Back the Lions!" reminds us. :-( ) But the violence in some stories is never gratuitous.

Short-format descriptive fiction, for the lack of general markets today, has been pushed into a decades-long era of decline and decay. When I say that these stories are of the sort that could have been published and widely read in general circulation magazines in the early decades of the last century (when some of the finest authors of the short story in its history were writing), it's a well-deserved compliment. Indeed, the current nine-day wonders whose tree-wasting "short fiction" is adulated by today's critics could probably benefit by taking lessons from Andrew Seddon in the creation of plotted fiction with a positive point (but alas, probably won't). As always with any collection, different readers will have favorite stories. (I'm partial to "The Penitent Pigeon" myself). But there aren't any that I wouldn't say are good. The greatest appeal of the collection will probably be to Christian readers who'd like to learn something about early Christian history through the "painless" medium of fiction. But even non-Christian short fiction fans who aren't repelled and horrified by the idea of Christian content in fiction may find some entertainment here --and maybe some food for thought as well. ...more

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