NO MORE HEROES ANYMORE
As he kicks off his brilliant new trilogy telling the story of the Roman emperor Nero, Conn Iggulden voices his concerns over the judging (and cancelling) of historical figures by modern standards. Even the greatest lionhearts had flaws… just like us
IN HIS Dangerous Book of Heroes, Conn Iggulden shone a light on Britain’s pioneers, champions and adventurers – men and women who, as the jacket blurb memorably put it, fought for what was right and good. From Captain Scott to Douglas Bader, Gertrude Bell and Emmeline Pankhurst, the 2009 bestseller was a glorious primer in courage. Now, as the author wryly concedes, the tales of derring-do he co-wrote with his brother David feel more like a roll call of the cancelled – such is the vogue for judging historical figures by our own, sometimes achingly woke, modern standards.
“I began to wonder if someone was using it as a template because everyone we put in there – Cecil Rhodes, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, to name a few – suddenly became controversial,” Iggulden says today with only the slightest exaggeration. “It’s almost as if they’ve been going through our book and ticking them off one by one.”
Among others, Rhodes has been slated as a colonial-era imperialist and progenitor of apartheid in South Africa, ironically in part by students who’ve benefited from his generous scholarships. Naval heroes Raleigh and Drake’s achievements have meanwhile fallen out of favour because of their debatable links to the slave trade.
Iggulden – author of the seven million copy-selling Dangerous Book For Boys, of which more later, as well as bestselling tales of everyone from Julius Caesar to Genghis Khan – isn’t about to start debating their rights and wrongs.
His point, made simply but compellingly as befits a former secondary school head of English, is that no one is perfect and, by airbrushing history, we risk pandering to mediocrity and mendacity. “Of course our heroes are flawed. Of course they’re imperfect,” he continues.
“But what is so odd is that we accept it in ourselves, yet we won’t allow it in our heroes, they can’t have feet of clay… it’s madness.
“There was an acceptance when I was a boy that we were all sinners. We were all flawed and this was a vale of tears. You couldn’t expect people to be angels and saints, because that was incredibly rare.
“As we’ve become less religious, we’ve also become less forgiving. Turning the other cheek might be a ridiculous concept but, my God, it’s an important one.
“History especially has become a battleground. I thought when I was a kid that it was done and dusted – there was no way to change what everyone agreed was the truth.
“But I’ve since heard serious people say history is a constant process and always being re-evaluated. I get it.That’s just not how I saw it when I was a kid. It was ‘Spanish Armada, 1588’. That was it. Don’t tell me now that it’s something else!”
The ex-teacher turned bestselling writer warms to his theme: “We are aware, I think, of the fragmentation of opinion, so if I say, for instance, ‘I like tomatoes’, there will inevitably be someone who replies, ‘You evil b ***** d, you tomato killer’.
“Because of that, there’s a temptation for writers to try and fend that off by being as inoffensive as possible, saying nothing controversial and trying to make some of the counter-arguments before they even get hit by them.”
That can’t make for very good books, I suggest.
“No it doesn’t, it makes for terrible, dull, vanilla books and that’s a real shame. We need to rediscover common sense and nuance.”
Thankfully, if not unsurprisingly, pandering to the new puritans of language and opinion in his books is not a trap Iggulden is likely to fall into.
His latest blockbuster historical novel Nero, published next week and the first in a new trilogy, imagines the early life of the fifth emperor of Rome – last in the line of the Julio-Claudians, founded by Augustus, and the adopted son of Julius Caesar.
It’s another stonking read from one of the world’s leading authors of historical fiction, Iggulden’s flair for bringing the past to life and passion for history sparkling like a polished legionary’s gladius. And it’s fair to say that Nero – born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus in AD 37 in Antium (modernday Anzio, Italy) – doesn’t exactly come with a glittering reputation either.
HAVING orchestrated the murder of his mother, the ruthless Agrippina, he was implicated in the deaths of first wife, Claudia Octavia, and stepbrother Britannicus, while being described as tyrannical, self-indulgent and debauched.
The emperor, who died aged just 30 in AD 68, was said to have kicked his second wife, Poppaea, to death while she was pregnant, and infamously “fiddled” while Rome burned in the great fire of 64 AD (though it was actually a lyre).
Not entirely unjustified, says Iggulden, but also not entirely fair either.
“Nero was the last of the Julius Caesar line, so everyone who came after him had to justify why they were sitting on an inherited throne when they weren’t part of the line,” he continues. “So all these people had to justify why they were right to bring down Nero. It’s like Richard III – the worse you make him look, the better you look.
“I don’t believe he deliberately killed his second wife. He needed an heir to secure his line, partly because his mother had killed almost everyone else.
“And at the end of his life, he was loved. He was greatly missed.
“There were three ‘fake’ Neros after he died, who said, ‘I am Nero reborn’. And they were all welcomed by joyous crowds.
“Admittedly we’re talking about the mob of Rome and he was incredibly generous to them. He would throw out brass tokens and they could be [enough] for a chicken, or a country estate. He gave away billions of silver coins. He was the most phenomenally profligate man.”
Equally, Nero’s predecessor, Claudius, was more ruthless in terms of the damage he did and the people he executed. His predecessor,
‘as we’ve become less religious, we’ve also become less forgiving... history has become a battleground’
Caligula, made both his successors appear benign by comparison.
“Caligula’s death was like the lancing of a wound. There was blood on the walls but they had to deal with him, otherwise they were all going to die. It was absolutely horrific.
“Almost everyone around Caligula was killed except for his uncle Claudius, who pretended to be an idiot and the court jester.
“They kicked him, beat him, mocked him, and made him stand in the corner. But he was actually a highly intelligent man surviving an impossible situation.”
Iggulden has already delivered the two remaining books in the trilogy, which will both be published next year in something of a departure – like binge-watching a box set.
The author jokes: “I hate it when I read the first book of a good trilogy and have to wait a year for the next, and then another year for the finish!” The first book is mostly concerned with Nero’s mother, Agrippina.
“She was Caligula’s sister and the one who created Nero, physically and by his reputation and his character,” says Iggulden. “She was an extraordinary survivor; her father was murdered, her mother was blinded and she herself was sent into exile, losing absolutely everything, her son reduced to poverty. “The only reason she survived Caligula is because she was in exile for the entire, major part of the reign.
“She was damaged beyond belief. And then she was expected to raise her one child after nine years of marriage to one of the most aggressive, violent men you can imagine. Yet she has one perfect child and he becomes emperor at 16.
“I’ve got all three Nero books written before the first one has come out. I’ve never had a purple patch like it. It’s been weirdly exhausting, but I love the story, I love the characters. The material was fantastic. I always thought, ‘I can’t touch Caligula it’s going to be too grim’, but I found a way.”
Partly that was treating the depravity and violence with a light touch.
“Writing one of my Genghis Khan books, I included a scene somebody objected to, and they told me, ‘Terry Pratchett’s definition of the difference between erotica and pornography, is the difference between using the feather and the whole chicken’. He said, ‘Could we have a little more feather and a little less chicken?’ which I really took to heart.
“Obviously, you can’t write Genghis Khan or Nero without doing death and destruction. These are the stories that have to be told. But there’s a way of telling it, I hope, without being too graphic.” It’s a line he’s successfully trodden since his first novel, The Gates of Rome, which launched his Emperor series about Julius Caesar and his subsequent career. Until then, he’d been an obsessive – and unsuccessful – writer. After ancient Rome became a hit, Iggulden turned to the story of the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan with his Conqueror series, starting with Wolf of the Plains. Since then he’s dipped into Ancient Greece and the Wars of the Roses.
Iggulden, who lives in Hertfordshire with wife Ella and their four children, is scrupulous about his research, visiting the places he writes about to get a sense of the ground.
GIVEN the recent revival in fantasy fiction, I wonder whether he’s ever considered putting history aside and simply making it all up, Game Of Thrones-style?
“The depressing thing is I’ve done that once. I wrote a fantasy trilogy. They did okay but the publishers aren’t knocking on my door asking me for another,” he smiles.
Ironically, Iggulden’s greatest success, The Dangerous Book For Boys, written with his younger brother Hal and published in 2007, was almost cancelled by its own publisher when they balked at a chapter about hunting and cooking a rabbit.
He refused to back down and, thankfully, a steer from Sharpe creator Bernard Cornwell took him to a new publisher who happily put out the book and enjoyed its fruits as a global bestseller. Today he remains sanguine about the whole episode. But while no doubt wiser, and certainly richer, he remains true to the ideals that have always driven him.
“When I started writing historical fiction, people said the one thing you must never do, the worst rule to break, was to judge the past by the ideas of today,” he adds.
“Now it’s the complete opposite. If you write about the past, you’re expected to bring in the rules and the morals of today, which is disastrous. We should absolutely leave those characters back in the societies they knew and understood with their own values.
“That’s why I don’t have Genghis Khan standing on a hilltop asking, ‘Am I a good man?’ Equally, with Julius Caesar, there was no hint of doubt and no introspection in his own memoirs. He writes third person, ‘Julius Caesar went and slaughtered the tribe’. He doesn’t ask ‘Was he a good man?’ or ‘Was it the right thing to do?’ He just did it.”
All of which explains why Conn Iggulden remains a hero to history.
●●Nero by Conn Iggulden (Penguin, £22) is published on Thursday. To pre-order, visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK