I’ve read a few of Rutherford’s books. He takes an unseemly delight in writing sex scenes with really young girls. I know girls got married at 14 way back in the day, but there’s a hint of regret in his writing that this is no longer the case.
I’ve never been able to get through one of Michener’s long novels, but his collection of short stories Tales of the South Pacific is pretty good. You’re correct though, that the movie/musical version is even better.
This is the best conjunction of post and username EVER!
Not out to defend Follett here, who has been amazingly uneven. (I’m still pissed off that his Hornet Flight has no mention that it is based on a true story.) However there is a passage in “The Eye of the Needle” which suggests a familiarity with mediaeval architecture. In a pre-war vignette, the counter-intelligence officer, at that time a university don, is examining a cathedral (I forget which). There is a row of arches interrupted by one of a different design (perhaps a Gothic arch). A bystander (the spy, entirely fortuitously) suggests that this was constructed by the architect as a demonstration for his next project. “It’ll look like this!”
I thought at the time that this showed some insight and at the least some knowledge of mediaeval architecture. A real life cathedral was described, so I presume this anomaly in the arches exists. (If it is a well known anomaly with a well-known explanation then of course Ken Follett can …)
I’m bumping this thread, to go along with Sampiro’s “Historically Inaccurate Movies” thread, but also because of a historical error in a book that I just don’t understand. Colleen McCullough, the author of The Thornbirds, wrote a series of historical novels about the end of the Roman Republic. The books start with the rise of the Roman general Gaius Marius, and end with the battle of Actium and deaths of Antony and Cleopatra. They’re really dense books, and she fills in a lot of details about Roman life and history (and we also learn that she loves Julius Caesar. I mean, she really loves Julius Caesar. If she could have found a way to write herself into the books having a love affair with Julius Caesar, she would have) Now, these books certainly aren’t my least favorite historical fiction novels, but they do sometimes play pretty fast and loose with history. She is after all, writing a novel, and if she draws kind of fantastic conclusions sometimes or changes things around a little to make things more exciting, then I can understand that. But there’s one scene that doesn’t make any sense to me.
One of the most important families in the late Roman Republic, and certainly the most prominent plebeian family, was the Caecelia Metelli. They managed to accomplish this by having a lot of kids, being remarkably loyal to each other, and, whenever a major dispute or faction war would break out, always hedging their bets by having people in both camps. Throughout the late republic, there wasn’t an office they could hold that they didn’t. Three of them managed to become pontifex maximus, three of them plebeian tribunes, sixteen of them consuls, and five of them censors. Anyway, they were important, and a bunch of them show up in the book, largely as villains, because they were, as a rule, opposed to both Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar (and she loves Julius Caesar, and I think has the hots for Gaius Marius too).
Anyway, in the first book, two of Gaius Marius’s enemies are Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus (“Numidicus”), and his son, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius (“Pius”). This is all accurate, because Marius and Numidicus hated each other. There were a few reasons, but a big one was that Numidicus was consul and general in the war against Jugurtha of Numidia, with the help of Gaius Marius as his second in command (and his client, btw, which makes what Marius did to him especially bad). When the war was nearly over with Jugurtha almost beaten, Marius outmaneuvered Numidicus politically and got the Senate to give him command in the war, in the hopes that he would get the credit for the victory. Marius’s plan backfired, in that he got the command, but Numidicus got the credit for the victory (and hence the cognomen “Numidicus”), and it started a feud between Marius and the Caecelia Metelli that didn’t end until Marius’s death. All this happened in 109 BC
Anyway, in 100 BC, Gaius Marius outmaneuvered Numidicus politically again, this time over a land bill. Gaius Marius had passed a bill through the Senate to give State land to his retiring soldiers, along with a clause that said that anyone who refused to swear an oath supporting Marius and the bill would have to pay a pretty big fine and be banished. The rest of the Senate swore the oath, but Numidicus said basically, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to swear an oath to support a law I think is wrong”, paid the fine and went into exile. Over the next year, his son, Pius lobbied and managed to get his father recalled from exile (and got the cognomen “Pius”, which means more in Latin than pious means in English…pietas in Latin means dutiful and devoted to the gods and your family. The model of pietas in ancient Rome was Aeneas, who, according to the stories, escaped Troy carrying his old father and the family’s gods on his back). Pius was successful, and Numidicus came back to Rome.
Up to this point, history and McCullough agree. However, in the book The First Man in Rome, the day after Numidicus comes back, Sulla comes to see him and poisons him, killing him. This is just silly. Putting aside the fact that in real life, Numidicus lived about eight years after he got back from exile, Sulla had, by that point, broken from Marius and was on good terms with the Caecelia Metelli. Sulla would go on about ten years later to marry one of them, and when Sulla was maneuvering to become dictator, Pius was one of his strongest supporters and most loyal followers (and one of his few followers who didn’t try to benefit from his position or the corruption that surrounded Sulla’s rule). He wouldn’t have had any motivation to do it, and in the book, she doesn’t even bother giving him one…Sulla’s just in a bad mood, thinks Numidicus is tedious and decides he’d enjoy killing him). It’s just a choice of hers that I don’t understand.