AUTHOR: Sam Barone
PUBLISHER: Harper
RATING
5/5 "The Empire Strikes Back"; 4/5 "Empire of the Sun"; 3/5 "Emperor Penguin"; 2/5 "Inland Empire"; 1/5 "The Soviet Union"
SCORE: 2/5
At the dawn of history, one man sketches the first outlines of a civilization on a dangerous and uncaring canvas. By the time you finish reading Empire Rising, you may wish he hadn't bothered.
Sam Barone's Empire Rising is so epic in scope and ambition, you desperately want to like it. And there's no denying Mr Barone's dedication and energy. What's more, the first jottings in recorded history offer enormous dramatic potential. Consider: the people of ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) built one of the world's earliest civilizations out of nothing more than mud and reeds. However, this potential is sadly left to rot, as the book is plagued by historical inaccuracies, turgid writing and connect-the-dots plotting.
Eskkar, a former barbarian solider, is now leader of the fledgling city-state of Akkad. In the wake of a barbarian invasion, described in the previous book of the series, Dawn of Empire, and the resulting breakdown of order, the land is overrun with bandits and outlaws. Eskkar sets out to restore peace, leaving his pregnant wife, Trella, in charge of the city. In his absence, an ruthless and greedy Egyptian fugitive, Korthac, seizes Akkad for himself. Eskkar rallies his men and mounts a desperate counterattack.
The novel starts by giving us the date 3157 BCE, and you wish Mr Barone had left things a bit vaguer, since he immediately introduces a series of historical inaccuracies that poison any goodwill you might have been willing to grant him for taking on this topic.
Admittedly, a work of historical fiction isn't a textbook, and we might expect the author to take liberties with the facts to cook up a better story, but the anachronisms that lace Mr Barone's work smack more of shoddy research than literary craft. The author is guilty of jumping the gun on a number of inventions, including coinage and sandals, as well as the domestication of the horse. The former two didn't enter use for another 2,000 years, while the Mesopotamians apparently didn't even have a word for "horse" until 2000 BCE, 1,000 years after the book is set.
I suspect Mr Barone's choice of reading material is partly to blame for these errors. For example, his personal website lists "The End of the Bronze Age" by Robert Drews as one of his sources--despite the fact that Empire Rising is set at the beginning, not the end, of the Bronze Age. More puzzlingly, he also lists a book about the Mongol invasion of Europe--an event that happened 4,000 years later, on a different continent, using weapons, tactics and technology totally unrelated to those of ancient Mesopotamia. Then again, Mr Barone also claims on his site that the book came to him in a series of dreams, so perhaps he knows something we don't.
Tellingly, Mr Barone lists techno-thriller author Tom Clancy among his influences, and Empire Rising has more in common with Mr Clancy's Red Storm Rising than Polybius's Rise of the Roman Empire. Character and plot are secondary to action, of which there is plenty--the final climactic battle alone runs around 100 pages. We get each sequence from the perspective of two or three characters, but rather than presenting us with a Rashomon-like mosaic of conflicting perceptions, we just get the same hack and slash over and over again. Bows and arrows become the machineguns of the ancient world, mowing down baddies by the dozen. Eskkar's stratagem to retake the city is pure Splinter Cell. Complex questions like "How did the first set of laws get created?" are presented with almost childish simplicity: Trella sits down with her councilors and says, "Hey guys, I've got a great idea..."
Character development is handled by providing the reader the character's entire life story the moment they are introduced. We know the hero's wife, Trella, is wise and intelligent, because all the other characters say so. Eskkar, meanwhile, is called upon to do nothing more challenging than lop off heads and engage in the requisite, mechanical sex scenes--more Conan-era Arnie than King Arthur. The resulting prose is a trial to wade through.
Of course, literature's bookshelf is wide enough to accommodate some trashy, cod-historical action and romance, but shouldn't guilty pleasures feel, well, more fun? Nicholas Guild's Assyrian (1988) tackles a similar historical period and theme with far more verve. The action sequences of Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire (1998), are shorter but punchier, and far more convincing. May Renault's Alexander Trilogy (Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games) features both more exacting research and more believable characters. All three authors show how you can color within the historical lines, but still paint a pretty picture.
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