Jan Napier

Sophia McDougall. Romanitas. London, Orion Books, 2006

Rows of steel crucifixes line the banks of the Thames. They don't use hammers and nails anymore. Now, leather straps are drawn tight until the backs of your wrists rest flat against the metal, and your feet are pressed hard into each other. Then a switch at the bottom of the cross is turned, and three steel spikes spring out to impale your limbs. A hydraulic pump lifts the crucifix into place as you sag forward, weight supported by your broken hands. The Roman Empire did not decline and fall. This is London NOW.

Una is possessed of a strange ability to draw people's attention away from her presence. This is an ideal gift for a runaway slave girl searching the city for her brother. Sulien is able to both cure illness, and remove pain — by imagining the body's interior workings. Wow! What a pair. They should prove invincible. Sadly, this is not a Marvell comic, and the siblings prove not to be super heroes.

Once reunited, the pair hit the road. They team up with Rome's sixteen-year-old Emperor to be, Marcus Novius, who is fleeing after the murder of his parents and a failed attempt on his own life.

This is a quest story. The trio are searching for both sanctuary, and insight, into themselves, their situation, and the workings of the imperial state.

Although there is enough conflict in this book to keep Genghis Khan going for years, the main protagonists seem to spend most of their time in a state of fugue. The action sequences seem to be clumped across a narrative landscape studded with uncertainty. As far as I am concerned, the characters could do with a massive shot of multi-vitamins.

The characterisations of Una, Sulien, and Marcus, in particular, appear flat, and two-dimensional.

Towards the story's conclusion, (in between the intrigue of discovering who did what to whom), we manage to lose one of the main characters. He just vanishes, and is never heard of again. Hmmm! Mind you, there are two more books to come, apparently.

For me, this read was an effort. Despite some unusual twists, the plot seems to be overlaid by a grey sameness. If you like your SF as convoluted as a dragon's intestines, yet as irksome as gutting rabbits, this is for you.

Jan

Jan's story of her years in a side-show alley, All the Fun of the Fair, is available for $20, (includes postage), at PO Box 1127, Nedlands. WA. 6909.