Nero really doesn’t gain much from ‘Confessions’
It’s Nero 2.0. Certainly when it comes to historical revisionism, few could benefit more from a kinder, gentler second look than the Roman Emperor Nero — best known in the popular imagination for fiddling while Rome burned (which he almost certainly didn’t do) and killing many of his friends and relatives (which he almost certainly did).
And who better to take on this
task than Margaret George ( The Autobiography of Henry VIII, The
Memoirs of Cleopatra), a bestselling author adept at writing the kind of historical fiction that forces us to re-evaluate previously formed famous-figure beliefs. And so we get The Confessions of Young Nero (Berkley, 528 pp., out of four), which takes ★★✩✩ Nero from around the age of 3, through his ascension as Rome’s Emperor in 54 AD at the age of 16, to that famous Roman fire 10 years later.
The picture George tries to present in this first of a planned two-part series is that of a misunderstood musician, statesman and poet: talented, sensitive, astute, and yet hated by the aristocracy while alive and slandered by them in death.
It’s a story filled with characters familiar to anyone who ever read (or watched) I, Claudius, from Nero’s predecessors Caligula and Claudius to, most notoriously, his mother, Agrippina — who among other things in this version of the story, drugs and rapes her son.
And it’s all told against the backdrop of a great teaming city, brought to life by George through vivid word pictures and an array of fascinating small facts. (Roman men used chives in olive oil to soothe their throats and wet bread crumbs to soften their beards. Who knew?)
In short, it’s a city you’ll believe — filled, unfortunately, with people you won’t.
The central problem — well, beyond the fact that the overlong book is a slog — is that it’s more a treatise than a novel. George is so intent on burnishing Nero’s image, she forgets to paint him, or anyone else around him, as a real human being. As a child, young Nero sounds like an adult. As an adult, he sounds like a droning history professor intent on defending and dismissing every charge ever laid at Nero’s feet.
Every crime he’s ever been accused of is either dismissed as being untrue or excused as being a form of self-defense. Unfortunately, in order to cleanse Nero’s name, George goes even further than Nero’s enemies did in blackening Agrippina’s, until she comes across as some ludicrous mix of Cruella de Vil, Cersei Lannister and Alexis Carrington.
Inaccuracy isn’t the issue: None of us can ever know for certain what Nero was truly like, and authors of fiction have great leeway to invent and embellish. But they either have to convince us their creation is credible, or enchant us with an entertaining distortion, and George does neither.
In the end, Confessions’ efforts to rehabilitate the last of the Julio-Claudian Emperors merely shifts him from infamous monster to colossal bore. Readers are unlikely to consider that an improvement.
Chances are, neither would Nero. ROBERT BIANCO