The Nile-man and the Roman
Peter Jones
THRESHOLD OF FIRE by Hella S. Haasse Allison & Busby, f8.99, pp. 255 Anyone who tottered up to Martin Amis and ordered him to write a novel featuring these characters with these chapter-headings in this plot with this out- come on this theme and in this setting would probably wind up with a nose full of false teeth and a bill for £200,000 for their replacement. A novelist constructs his own world, not someone else's. Not, however, the historical novelist. He is rather like a translator. The original sources and their scholarly interpreters are always peering over his shoulder. He must, in part at any rate, dance to someone else's tune, always alive to the accusation of misinter-
pretation.
One response is to off-load over the story groaning filing-cabinets of hard-won Realien. Such novels begin with a Roman senator waking up in bed and reflecting to roughly MLitt standard on his day (divided, as he recalls, into 12 hours, or horae), his wall-decorations, toga, hair-style and sandals. Only then does he get up, throw- ing off some insights into Roman lamp manufacture as he does so. Others go to the opposite extreme, abandoning any pretence at imaginative engagement and launching their characters into a world where everyone may wear togas but the conversation would not be out of place on a late night Channel 4 arts pro- gramme.
That the prolific Dutch novelist Hella Haasse is a generally splendid exception is now open for English readers, for the first time, to appreciate. Her historical under- standing of the period is somewhat simplis- tic, but she has still produced a rich and disturbing novel about the ancient world, set in Egyptian Alexandria and Rome in the period 380-414 AD, when the western Roman empire was on the point of collapse. The Prefect of Rome, Hadrian (of Egyptian origin and fervent Christian conviction), is trying a Roman aristocrat, Anicius, for idolatry.
One of the people arrested in the swoop on Anicius' villa is a scruffy Egyptian, Niliacus (`Nile-man'). His answers to Hadrian's questions suggest that there is more to him than Hadrian can quite fath- om, and the novel turns on the gradual rev- elation of the various points over the past generation at which their lives, consciously and unconsciously, have intersected. Indeed, at one point 20 years earlier, Hadrian had introduced Niliacus into the court at Rome under the name of Claudi- an, where he had become court poet to the emperor Honorius and his chief adviser Stilicho (Claudian's rather good poetry is in fact a major source for our knowledge of the period).
As their interlocking pasts are revealed, however, so there surfaces the debate in which they have been engaged throughout their lives: Hadrian, the zealous Christian, determined to 'save' Niliacus at any cost, Niliacus himself, passionate about the idea of Rome but seeing his vision of it crum- bling before the onslaughts of Goths, Christianity and a feckless court, resistant to Hadrian's overtures but unable to see where his future lies. The consequences for both turn out to be fatal (though surely not with prussic acid, identified by Scheele c. 1780).
This is a powerful novel. Haasse's mise- en-scene is convincing, she weaves together the threads of a complicated past and pre- sent with considerable dexterity, and the extended debate is conducted with subtlety and passion. On this evidence, her work demands to be more widely available in English.
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