Showing posts with label Toga Porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toga Porn. Show all posts

Monday, June 23, 2014

Slaves Of The Empire #3: Brotan The Breeder


Slaves Of The Empire #3: Brotan The Breeder, by Dael Forest
August, 1978  Ballantine Books

Stephen Frances (aka “Dael Forest”) delivers another melodrama set during the Roman Empire, once again picking up immediately after the previous volume. It seems more and more that the Slaves Of The Empire series is really just one very long book split into five separate volumes. No attempt is made by Frances (or the publisher) to catch the reader up on anything, so if you’ve forgotten minor characters or situations, you’re out of luck. 

However, one stumbling block for Brotan The Breeder is that, while it starts off where Haesel The Slave ended, with Hadrian and the now-vanquished-by-love Haesel waking up together after a night of (non-detailed) good lovin’, the narrative soon jumps over to the new-to-the-series character Brotan, a freedman who runs a “farm” outside of Rome. This material goes on for about 60 pages, as we learn all about Brotan’s Farm. Frances pulls out all the stops here, showing how very different the ancient world was from our own. 

Brotan’s business scheme is to buy leases on slaves who are knocked up – slaves forbidden to get pregnant, of course – and to trundle the women off to his farm, where they will work the land in various degrees of difficulty in accordance with their stage of pregnancy. Brotan leases the women for three years, and to get more bang for his buck, so to speak, he tries to get each of the women pregnant again, as many times as possible, using the “randy guards” who patrol the farm! Brotan then sells off these infant slaves, taking them from their mothers immediately after birth.

We see how the farm works through the eyes of Fabia, a minor character who only appeared long enough in the previous volume to lose her virginity to Strabo (muscle-bound pleasure slave of the depraved Poppea). But Strabo also succeeded in getting Fabia pregnant, and now she’s shipped off to Brotan’s Farm. Along the way she is taken advantage of by one of the freedman guards, though this dude’s gentle and Fabia falls in love with him…not that Frances really follows up this subplot. Instead more time is devoted to Malen, the doctor who oversees the pregnant women on the farm, and there follows a long sequence as we watch him on a normal day’s work.

Finally we get back to the main storyline(s) of the series. Brotan decides to venture into Rome for the first time in decades, carting in a new shipment of slaves, which he sells to his colleague Brotan, last seen in the first volume. Brotan has an auction, and Saelig shows up – Brotan uncomfortable around the now-wealthy Briton who was once himself a slave on Brotan’s auction block. Saelig buys all of the women; there is a touching scene where one of the slave-girls, “comely” but for one leg shorter than the other, only succeeds in generating a thirty-sesterce bid, and that’s after scant bidding, and Saelig offers a hundred for her.

Saelig has been busy building a villa in a large swath of land he’s bought, inland from resort destination Baiae. Here he treats the slave-girls like friends and lovers, trying his hardest to drum out their servile attitudes and make them call him by his name. Areta, Hadrian’s wife and Saelig’s former lover, visits him from nearby Baiae, which she’s decided to make her permanent home. Now much more cool-headed, Areta has sworn off the haughy bitchiness expected of the typical Roman highborn woman, but nonetheless is shocked over how casually Saelig treats these women; he’s even managed to get one of them pregnant.

Areta is further shocked over Hadrian’s blasé announcement that he’s in love with Haesel and intends to treat her as his equal. Areta isn’t upset because Hadrian’s her husband, as they no longer live together and Areta herself has picked up a new lover, some dude named Sark; she’s upset because treating a slave equally will make Hadrian look like a fool. But Areta is such a changed character that eventually she dismisses even this, content that Hadrian is happy.

Since Areta has dropped the mantle as the series harlot, Poppea takes it over. Oft mentioned since the first volume but unseen until now, Poppea turns out not to be the Empress of Desire or even Poppea the Elder; Frances has a habit of just using various names from Roman history, this being another instance. Poppea is though a whip-wielding, slave-beating hussy, and when her wealthy husband realizes she’s making a fool of herself, debasing herself in her lust for studly slave Strabo, he arranges for dumb-as-an-ox Strabo to be kidnapped onto some merchant vessel and conveniently taken from Rome for several months.

Another ongoing plot concerns tomboy Melanos, who is about to give birth to the child she conceived with the now-dead Plautus. Meanwhile she still entertains herself by taunting Alexander, the wealthy fop who continues to lust for her. As we’ll recall, Melanos now owns Mertice (ie the sister of Haesel, Saelig, and the other Britons of the first volume), having bought her from Alexander, who barely registered the girl, despite her obvious obsession for him.

Melanos, playing a game, dresses Mertice up like a highborn lady and invites Alexander over for dinner, with Alexander immediately pining for this girl he’s certain he’s seen before. But Mertice, following Melanos’s orders, leaves Alexander in the lurch, and Melanos digs the knife deeper by revealing to Alexander that he’s been lusting over a slave. It all ends with Alexander swearing vengeance and Mertice crying due to her continued love for the fop.

As usual there’s a bit of sex here and there, particularly when it comes to detailing how casually it was treated in the ancient world, but it’s relayed in the same antiseptic style as previous such scenes. More focus is placed this time out on the travails of the pregnant women in Brotan’s Farm and the ongoing melodramatic storylines. And speaking of Brotan, he continues with this volume’s continued theme of men debasing themselves (willingly or not) for slave-girls.

In a very strange storyline, Brotan happens upon Vanus, an attractive Roman woman. Brotan, fat and lecherous despite (actually due to) his wealth, immediately latches upon the woman, not just due to her beauty but because she treats him like shit. Brotan, having ruled his farm for the past twenty-odd years, is so used to being obeyed by slaves that it takes him for a loop that here, finally, is a woman who tells him where to go.

So what does Brotan do? He turns himself into a slave, following Vanus around and doing everything for her; things get pretty lurid when he makes himself her bed-slave, not there to have sex with her, but to lick her feet after she’s had sex with other men (and women)! In fact Brotan is so thoroughly taken with Vanus that he signs out of his contract on the farm, turning it over to doctor Malen, and decides to stay here in Rome as Vanus’s slave. It’s all very strange.

Once again Frances turns in a short book, about 160 pages, that still seems to be longer, due to the small print and thick chunks of text. As with previous installments, more focus is sometimes placed on telling than showing, and as stated there’s still a distant vibe to the book, same as the ones that came before, of an author who wants to write Roman trash but doesn’t want to get his toga dirty.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Slaves Of The Empire #2: Haesel The Slave


Slaves Of The Empire #2: Haesel The Slave, by Dael Forest
August, 1978  Ballantine Books

This second volume of the Slaves Of The Empire series seems to bear out my theory that the five volumes were planned as (or at least written as) one long book. The story picks up immediately after the preceding installment, with no attempt at filling in readers who might’ve missed the previous volume. Author Dael Forest (aka Stephen Frances) whittles down his sprawling cast this time out, allowing the reader to better appreicate the story. And also he slightly increases the lurid quotient, something apparent from the first pages, which open on an orgy our main protagonist Hadrian attends.

As we’ll recall Hadrian has been hired to build a new town, which he does with the assistance of his co-planner, the slave Haesel, who has a long-simmering sort of thing for Hadrian, and vice versa. But now at this orgy Hadrian also is asked to head up a new Games, so he must figure out how to get animals and prisoners and gladiators for the event; he tasks his chief slave Cornutus with this, so there’s yet another new character to contend with. Meanwhile Haesel’s brothers and sisters still are slaves, except for studly Saelig, who remember had a fling with Hadrian’s wife Areta.

Saelig was whipped very harshly at Areta’s command in the climax of the previous volume, and we discover that Areta is bereft and has gone down to Baiae to mope. Saelig meanwhile has made a full recovery and has forgiven her. So moved by the slave’s obvious love for his wife, Hadrian gives Saelig his freedom. He offers to do so for Haesel as well, but she’s vehemently opposed to the idea; for reasons unexplained, she is determined to remain Hadrian’s slave until he feels that she has rightfully won her freedom. She doesn’t want a free handout, and this rightfully puzzles Hadrian, given how outspoken the girl has been about the unjustness of her slavery.

Meanwhile Haesel’s sister Mertice still pines away for Alexander, despite that he’s given her to the lusty object of his affections, Melanos. As sick as we readers are of seeing Mertice moping around, Melanos orders her chief of slaves to fondle the girl on a daily basis! Melanos herself has some fun; while at the Baths in a nicely-elaborated scene, she runs into Plautus, a young soldier of high family who has just returned to Rome after years away. Frances here really brings to life the decadent atmosphere of the Roman Baths, and the new couple rush back to Melanos’s place to have sex.

Frances does a better job sensationalizing his otherwise tepid soap opera: the long-simmer relationship between Hadrian and Haesel catches a little fire when Haesel gets bitten by a snake on her thigh and Hadrian does the ol’ “suck out the poison” routine. He also has Saelig, now a free man, making obvious moves on Areta. The most lurid sequence though would have to be the very long scene at the Ampitheater (which Frances confusingly refers to as “the Forum”), all of it pretty much taken straight out of Daniel Manix’s Those About To Die, with virgins being raped, prisoners being gutted, and charioteers crashing spectacularly.

I’m still having trouble putting together when this all takes place. The Emperor briefly appears during the Games sequence, but he is not named and we are just informed that he’s old and that there are factions of highborn and soldiers aligning against him. At first I thought a clue might be found in the name of the town Hadrian is building, Trebula, but a cursory Googling reveals that there were three such towns in Italy during the Roman era, and all of them predate the Empire. At any rate the Slaves Of The Empire series definitely takes place after the days of Nero, mentioned here as “long dead.”

The lurid quotient continues apace as Frances dives straight into a chapter-long recounting of a Bona Dea ceremony, as Melanos and her fellow female worshippers strip down, anoit themselves with oil, and get themselves nice and randy so they can set themselves loose on some lucky men of their choosing. In Melanos’s case it is Platus, Frances having built up the anticipation between the two, Melanos abstaining from sex until the night of Bona Dea, and Platus grinning and bearing it.

Platus meanwhile serves to bring more action to the tale, at least indirectly; plotting against the Emperor with others, he maneuvers an assassination attempt which is quickly uncovered, and we learn in passing that Platus has been tortured to death! Oh well, so long Platus. Melanos however finds herself knocked up after that night of Bona Dea passion, so she politely informs Hadrian that she’ll no longer be having casual sex with him. So too does another high-born Roman gal Hadrian has a relationship with, so that within a short span of time Hadrian finds himself without any friends-with-benefits.

This leads to the culmination of the Hadrian-Haesel situation, at least. Growing increasingly short-tempered due to his lack of sex, Hadrian finds himself snapping at others and even checking out the female slaves. Plus Haesel has become more and more distant ever since he sucked the poison out of her thigh, and it gets to the point where Hadrian can’t take it anymore and orders Haesel to remove her tunic in his presence. He’s going to make her his sex-slave whether she likes it or not, even giving her a place of her own and calling on her every once in a while – there will no longer be any need for her to actually work.

But Haesel again turns the tables, going into “slave mode” and telling Hadrian she will do whatever he orders, when Hadrian can easily see that she is against the whole thing. But it all finally leads up to the two having sex, at long last – the trick being that Hadrian breaks down and tells Haesel he can’t order her to love him, he can’t make her do what it is against her nature to do, she can only do what she wants to do, and this it turns out is all Haesel has been waiting to hear.

And with this long-simmer relationship coming at long last to boil, the book abruptly ends. It would probably be smart to go immediately into the third volume, but the placid nature of this series sort of dulls the reader’s senses, so it’s best to take some time between installments. But overall Haesel The Slave was at least more entertaining and sordid than its predecessor, which makes me hope that future volumes will continue the trend.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Slaves Of The Empire #1: Barba The Slaver


Slaves Of The Empire #1: Barba The Slaver, by Dael Forest
August, 1978 Ballantine Books

This was the start of a five-volume series, originally published in the UK in 1975, which takes place during some unspecified time in the Roman Empire. The author, Stephen Frances posing as “Dael Forest,” namedrops a few people here and there: Poppaea for one is often mentioned, but it’s never stated if in fact this is the same woman who was Nero’s Empress of Rome (or, for that matter, Poppea the Elder). And one of the protagonists is named Hadrian, but it’s certainly not the future emperor. So there's no way to exactly pinpoint when it all takes place.

Anyway, the awesome Boris Vallejo cover and the exploitative title have you expecting a full-on blast of toga porn, but the novel itself is moreso a drawn out soap opera. The story is very domestic, with none of the empire-spanning travel you normally get in such books. Instead everything plays out on an almost humdrum level, not even bothering to play up on the salacious aspect of life in the ancient world.

Five young siblings from Briton are taken captive and imported to Rome as slaves, and I assume they will be the driving force of the series: Haesel, a pretty young girl who hates slavery; Saelig, a good-looking hunk of muscle who makes the ladies quiver; Redwall, who takes up a smidgen of the narrative but thrives in slavery, given his business acumen; Thane, a hot-tempered leader who quickly revolts and therefore is sent into hard labor; and beautiful Mertice, with the flowing blonde hair to her waist who falls in love with her handsome young master.

This first installment is titled “Barba The Slaver,” but Barba himself has little screen time. He’s the Rome-based slavemaster who sells the five youths, but other than a brief scene where he oversees their selling he doesn’t have much to do with the book. I’d imagine the book was named after him for the exploitative effect…which, again, the novel itself really doesn’t have much of.

Instead we hopscotch across a wide group of characters, sometimes from the point of view of the slaves, other times from their masters. Nothing much really happens, and given the book’s short length (barely 160 pages) it comes off more like the opening quarter of a larger novel – my assumption is all five books were written at once, but that might not be so. What I mean is, you could probably just read all five books as one novel.

But really, the multitude of characters overwhelms the paucity of pages…it’s like Frances has a hard time juggling everything and just says to hell with it and spins his wheels. So for one storyline we have Hadrian, intelligent business leader who has been given the job of building a new town. His slave is Haesel, who herself is intelligent, given that she was a high-born Briton. But as mentioned Haesel burns with a hatred of slavery and takes to her new lot in life hard, especially when she begins to grow feelings for Hadrian. Frances appears to be building up something between her and Hadrian, but leaves it open at the end of the novel.

Then there’s Areta, Hadrian’s wife, who has dedicated her life to pleasure and so is very much the cliched Roman harlot-wife. Her daily routine consists of going to the Baths, gossiping, and going home with some random guy – not that Frances ever gets explicit in the least. In fact the whole novel is written in a sort of antiseptic tone, which as I’ve mentioned before I find pretty common in British pulp. Dammit, I want trash, not psuedo-literature!!

Anyway, Areta initiates the novel because she’s envious of the oft-mentioned but never-seen Poppaea, who shows up at the Baths with a studly male slave that has all the women atwitter. Areta wants one of her own. So Hadrian takes her to Barba’s slave shop, where they spot Saelig, who is everything Areta could want. While there Hadrian kills the proverbial two birds by picking up Haesel, not because she’s Saelig’s sister but because he needs a new slave anyway. I guess Barba’s is like the Wal-mart of slave shops, but he does not discount on the double purchase.

The majority of the novel is given over to the interractions between Hadrian and Haesel and Areta and Saelig, with for example much focus given to Areta preparing Saelig for his debut at the Baths, where she’s sure he will be the envy of all the Roman women. Frances also dwells on initially-unrelated characters, like Melanos, a highborn Roman lady who has a casual sex thing with Hadrian and who enjoys competing against men in various pursuits. Frances intimates she might have Sapphic tendencies as well, but doesn’t elaborate.

Then there’s Alexander, studly young Roman of the priviledged class who gets ownership of beautiful Mertice, but doesn’t even notice her given that he owns a few hundred slaves. Mertice notices him, though, and so pines for him throughout the book, in what is by far the most annoying part. In fact Mertice is so stupid and docile that you eventually get a sick delight in her ensuing bad treatment, particularly when Alexander only notices her in his attempts to gain favor with Melanos, whom he lusts for (Melanos meanwhile loathes him).

A problem with the book is not only the similarity of characters and situations but also of names. Frances does himself no favors with character names like Melanos, Mertice, Areta, and even Rheta (Areta’s female slave steward). There are others besides, and it gets to be a chore keeping them apart.

Another problem is the aforementioned lack of events. The novel moves at its own torpid pace, with nothing major occurring. Saelig mimics various people for Areta’s amusement, Areta later throws herself at him demanding that he love her, Hadrian works on his new town with Haesel eventually becoming his right-hand woman, and in the only moment when the novel comes out of its own lastitude Alexander orders Mertice to wrestle another slave-girl, again in the vain hopes of gaining Melanos’s favor.

What’s missing is the sense of escapism one looks for in historical fiction, or the feeling of a lost age. Frances relates it all in a casual, offhand manner. I guess that could be seen as part of the book’s charm; whereas other Rome-centric historical fiction goes big and flashy, Frances here instead plays it low key and subdued, but still. When you read a novel titled Barba The Slaver which is announced as the first installment of a series called Slaves Of The Empire, you want something more than “low key.”

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Empress of Desire


Empress of Desire, by Jack Mertes
March, 1982 Pocket Books

Here's a sentence I don't get to write every day, but I got burned out on toga porn. A couple years ago I went through a fit of madness, trying to find these trashy works of historical fiction, the majority of which were long forgotten. (I listed all of the ones I'd found on two Amazon Listmania lists, which can now be found on my Toga Porn Mania post.) I read a lot of them at the time, but unfortunately it was before I started this blog...back then I'd post reviews on Amazon, where they'd just collect dust, due to the obscurity of the books.

Anyway, I've been meaning to read Empress of Desire for a few years now. This is a late-model release in the genre, which had mostly dried up by the late 1970s. But it's a big fat paperback original which promises a trashy excursion back into the days of Imperial Rome, detailing the sex-filled maneuverings of Poppaea Sabina as she plots to ensnare emperor Nero and marry him, thus becoming empress of Rome.

Poppaea in my mind will always be the ultra-sexy Claudette Colbert (my favorite actress, by the way), as she appeared in the role in Cecil B. DeMille's 1932 sex-and-sin extravaganza The Sign of the Cross:


And that's not even a shot from her infamous (and topless) milk bath scene!

Ironically, even though Claudette only appears in about a quarter of the film, her portrayal of Poppaea is more memorable than the one Jack Mertes presents. Claudette's Poppaea is a powerhouse of erotic force who dominates every character (not to mention scene); Mertes's Poppaea is more of a shrill harpie who, if her wiles don't work, throws tantrums to get what she wants. But then, the Poppaea of the film is already empress of Rome. Mertes shows the torrid path she took to get there, though he does take a few liberties with history. Not that it matters - this is fiction, after all.

The majority of the novel is given over to Poppaea's scheming to first meet Nero, and then seduce him. Really though Empress of Desire is in the vein of the sex-filled Romance novels that were all the rage in the late 1970s, with a duplicitous and headstrong female character who thinks she wants power, but it turns out that all she's really been searching for is a good orgasm. There's also the obligatory love-hate relationship, in this case with a gruff horse-breeder named Tigellinus (an actual historical figure, but changed here), whom Poppaea just hates and hates...that is, when she isn't jumping his bones or planning to give up her dreams and marry him.

But Poppaea's sexual antics aren't limited to Tigellinus. Over the course of Empress of Desire she beds a veritable army of men, Mertes never shirking on the good stuff -- though, humorously enough, he likes to employ euphemisms that were all the rage with early 20th century Loeb Classical Library translators: mound of Venus, love-spear, etc. So while it doesn't get full-on Baroness hardcore, the book still packs a hefty punch. Just to give you an idea, Poppaea seduces (then poisons) her present husband while carrying on an affair with the porcine Otho, whom she later marries -- all in a bid to meet Nero. Along the way she manages frequent encounters with Tigellinus, even at one point hooking up with a Gallic barbarian. And all of this is before we even get to Nero!

Mertes though has this super-strange tendency to always specify that the men stink. It's really weird and disconcerting, mainly because it's mentioned in every sex scene. The men either reek of garlic, cheap wine, or just a general funk, and it gets pretty old after a while. Even pampered Nero, we learn, has an unsavory smell about him. Maybe Mertes's theme is that men just stink in general, who knows. But after you've read for the umpteenth time about Tigellinus reeking of garlic as he hops on Poppaea, you've pretty much had enough.

Another strange quirk of Mertes is his occasional attempt to gross us out. There's a sequence where Otho, as a way to teach her a lesson, has Poppaea thrown into the Mamertine prison. After enduring this squalid existence for a few days, Poppaea is freed during a slave revolt. (Here is where she bumps uglies with the aforementioned barbarian, right on the street!) After which Poppaea passes out; it turns out she has contracted some plague from the prison, and over the next several pages Mertes delights in telling us all about Poppaea's vomitous spewings and so forth. Later on there's an even more nauseating sequence where Poppaea gives herself an abortion. I mean, not that I'm squeamish or anything, it's' just that these scenes don't seem to fit into the trashy decadence of the novel itself.

For Mertes proves himself a master of trashy decadence. There are some great scenes here, from when Poppaea rents out a room in a whorehouse in the hopes of fooling Nero into thinking she's the house's prized courtesan, to Poppaea and Nero's later plotting to kill off Nero's family. Mertes generally does a good job bringing to life the torrid world of Imperial Rome, though not with quite the mastery that Sylvia Fraser displayed in her 1982 The Emperor's Virgin (one of those toga porns I read before I started this blog -- and it was a good one). But there are many scenes here that capture the exotic glory of Rome, even an overlong sequence in the Circus Maximus.

Empress of Desire could almost be seen as a psuedo-sequel to Jack Oleck's Messalina. Poppaea's mother killed herself as a result of Messalina's scheming, and Poppaea grew up consumed with vengeance. Poppaea's story is unusual because you know this woman deserved to gain her revenge, but fate robbed her of it -- everyone who deserved comeuppance was dead by the time she reached adulthood. So instead, Poppaea just became as cruel, vindictive, and calculative as Messalina herself; there are many scenes in the novel where she goes into conniptions when someone actually compares her to Messalina.

So, Poppaea sets her sights on Nero, because she wants the power of being empress. She quickly ensnares him, Poppaea's beauty such that Nero is overwhelmed (Mertes skirts over the popular notion -- as intimated by Charles Laughton in The Sign of the Cross -- that Nero was gay), and soon enough she has the emperor eating out of the palm of her hand. Nero, constantly dominated by women throughout the novel, plots the deaths of various people at the behest of Poppaea, who sees all of them as obstacles in her path to becoming empress.

Top target is Agrippina, Nero's mother. Like Poppaea, Agrippina suffered a miserable childhood in which most of her family was murdered, insinuating herself into politics as an adult. And she sees Poppaea using the same wooing tricks on Nero that Agrippina herself used on emperor Claudius. Mertes delivers some awesome soap opera-esque catfights between Poppaea and Agrippina, complete with delicious putdowns and the like. Agrippina is losing her firm hold on Nero, even resorting to incestual propositions in a desperate attempt to keep him in tow.

But those who know their history know that Agrippina's time is limited, and Mertes enacts her famous murder toward the end of the tale, having Tigellinus witness it. (Empress of Desire by the way also takes place around the same time as Lance Horner's Rogue Roman, but in that novel at least Agrippina was busy counter-plotting against her son.)

The title of the novel is misleading in that Poppaea doesn't actually become empress until the last page. Mertes leaves Poppaea's fate unmentioned, and indeed serves up foreshadowing in the narrative that he doesn't follow through on, leaving it up to interested readers to seek out Tacitus or Suetonius. For example, he intimates that Poppea may one day regret having Nero ban her former husband Otho, but never tells us why -- namely, because upon Nero's death Otho himself became emperor for a brief time, and actually ordered the death of Tigellinus (who in the novel as in history becomes the leader of the Praetorian guard). As for Poppaea's fate, which again Mertes doesn't cover, she was killed (accidentally?) by Nero, who either kicked her or fell on her while she was pregnant.

Given that he ends the tale so early in Poppaea's life, Mertes doesn't even get to the well-known stuff. We don't get to see the infamous "Great Fire" of Rome, Nero's Golden House, or any of the other sordid events as recounted by the ancient historians. It makes me wonder if Empress of Desire was planned as the first volume in perhaps a trilogy about Poppaea -- as it is, the novel ends with the fate of all the characters still in question.

In a final note, Mertes thanks several people on the opening page, and closes his acknowledgements with the statement, "This is only the beginning!" Ironically enough, this appears to be the only novel Mertes published. So I guess it was the beginning and the end.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Messalina


Messalina, by Jack Oleck
July, 1960 Dell Books

Published in hardcover in 1959 and continuously in print for the next several years, Jack Oleck's Messalina is now long out of print and barely remembered. Yet it is historical fiction of the best sort: trashy, exploitative, packed with violence and sex. No "detectives in togas," no poorly-written military fiction, no thinly-veiled Christian glurge -- this is a full-on romp in the salacious world of Imperial Rome, more Technicolor than Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra.

Messalina recounts the tale of the real-life woman who married Claudius, the fourth emperor of Rome. She's known to history as a backstabbing schemer with an insatiable lust for sex, so don't go into this novel expecting a G-rated story of ancient Rome. Oleck takes us from her youth to her end, barring no details of her cold-blooded and predator-like ways: for Messalina, sex was a means to power, and boy did she know how to use it.

Within the first 60 pages Messalina has already caused a slave to be facially mutilated, the death of two men, and a Roman senator to be disgraced and publically ruined -- and she's still only 15 years old. Within a few more pages she's pregnant -- still only 15. And they say kids today grow up too fast. This is the type of ride Oleck takes us on, the kicker being that it's all cut straight out of history. Oleck changes a few things here and there, but for the most part he gives us a thorough retelling of this malicious and cunning woman.

Those who know Messalina's story will know what's missing -- namely, the all-night sex competition that, according to Pliny the Elder, Messalina once took part in with a prostitute. It goes unmentioned here, though Oleck does at one point state that various rumors are circulating about Messalina -- the implication being that this competition might be one of those rumors. There's also no acknowledgement of the young Nero, whom the real-life Messalina wanted dead, as she realized that he could one day become emperor rather than her son Germanicus.

A warning: Messalina will perhaps be the most unlikeable protagonist you ever encounter in a novel. She has no redeeming qualities. With cold detachment she plots and counterplots throughout the narrative, ruining lives, ordering deaths, toying with emotions. Even the two children she bears Claudius go unloved. Here Oleck veers from the historical record. For it's often speculated that Messalina's plotting was the result of her fear for her children's lives; anyone who knows Roman history knows that the children of the aristocracy always lived near death.

Messalina's children Octavia and Germanicus would be next on the kill-list if their father Claudius was murdered. In real life it seems that, when Messalina orchestrated various deaths and banishments, it was only of people she believed to pose a threat to her children. In many cases it seems her hunches were correct; Poppaea Sabina the elder was one of those whom Messalina had killed, and Poppaea's same-named daughter actually did cause the death of Messalina's daughter, many years later.

But in this novel, Messalina is self-centered to the fullest extent; all of her plotting and manipulating is for her own gain and no one else's. This makes her into such a hateable and loathsome character that you soon find yourself rooting against her, and when her end comes on the very last page you nearly toss the book aside with a celebratory cheer.

Oleck's writing is mostly fine, though I found a few too many awkward and confusing sentences. And despite the abundance of sex, he's pretty conservative in the graphic department -- no doubt due to when the novel was published. Also, every character speaks like they are in a 1950s historical film, something that has always annoyed me about historical fiction. Oleck's superb however at setting up scenes and peering into the minds of his characters.

If only Oleck had made Messalina a bit more likeable, at least allowed us to sympathize with her. His greatest stroke is creating an archenemy of sorts for Messalina: a Jewish slave named Isaac whose life mirrors Messalina's like a negative reflection; the irony being that Messalina, empress of Rome, the most powerful woman in the world, is obsessed with ruining the life of an anonymous Jew.

And Oleck gets bonus points for never -- not even once -- mentioning Christianity. Finally, an author who realizes that the majority of Romans in the first few centuries CE had never even heard of the religion.

This is an old review, by the way, originally posted on Amazon back in 2008. I've always meant to post it here on the blog, as I have my other old toga porn reviews from Amazon. What made me finally get around to posting it is that I recently read Jack Mertes's psuedo-sequel Empress of Desire, all about Poppaea Sabina the younger and her hatred of Messalina; review coming soon.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Voyager In Bondage: Final Volume of the "Voyager" Trilogy



Voyager in Bondage, by Simon Finch

Souveneir Press, 1981

The final book of Simon Finch's Vesuvio trilogy, Voyager In Bondage was published in 1981. Whereas the second book, Pagan Voyager, had come out just one short year after 1978's Golden Voyager, it took Finch two years to write this final volume. Voyager In Bondage is also very short. Golden Voyager was over 400 pages, with Pagan Voyager coming in at almost 300. Bondage is just over 200 pages long. But still, you can't blame Finch for struggling to come up with material. I mean, early second century CE in pagan Europe, with its manifold religions and larger-than-life characters and scheming Roman aristocrats; what writer could come up with an interesting novel from such meager material?

Coincidentally, Voyager in Bondage, unlike the previous two novels, was not published in the US. Either Finch's agent couldn't secure a deal or no US publisher wanted it. Strange, because according to the UK publisher, Souvenir Press, the Voyager trilogy was "best-selling." Perhaps it's moreso that US readers didn't cotton to the near homoerotic content of Golden Voyager and Pagan Voyager, and preferred historical fiction which didn't feature every character discussing the size of the hero's "phallus."

Bondage takes place twelve years after the previous book in the trilogy, the dire Pagan Voyager (published in the US as The Pagan). Hadrian's now emperor of Rome, and Vesuvio has spent the past decade living in peace on his estate in Campania, raising his son (Aurelius, now 14 years old), and living in contentment with his wife Miranda. In fact, so content is Vesuvio that his son doesn't even realize the brutal travails Vesuvio endured before Aurelius was born; the kid actually looks up to one of Vesuvio's slaves - the wily Orphic Christian Lexor - as a man of adventure.

In the previous two novels Finch proved he was capable of plagiarizing from himself: Pagan Voyager was in many ways just a reworking of Golden Voyager. To whit: in Pagan Voyager Vesuvio was cast into slavery, flung from one new owner to the next, competed in a high-stakes chariot race in an arena, befriended a kindly old Jew who eventually helped him, and finally regained freedom thanks to the help of Roman aristocrats. All just like in Golden Voyager. Bondage continues this trend, ripping off Pagan Voyager. In that novel, Vesuvio's wife was abducted. Here it's his son who's abducted. In that novel, the villains were an evil man and woman who propagated a strange new god named Bendis. Here the villains are an evil man and woman who propagate a strange new god named Christ. In Pagan Voyager Vesuvio allowed himself to be passed around from one master to another, losing all sense of urgency in finding his kidnapped fiancé. Here Vesuvio, despite his son being kidnapped, finds time to visit the Games in Rome, plans to visit Trajan's Bath, and goes on impromptu sight-seeing tours. The parallels continue, and add further proof that Finch was running out of ideas.

Bondage follows the same twisted path as the preceding two books. It's infuriating in a way. Finch sets the groundwork: Vesuvio's happy life shattered by a unappreciative slave who steals Vesuvio's son and demands a massive ransom. Vesuvio and twenty year-old Antony, son of Vesuvio's head slave (and hence a slave himself), set off in pursuit. The reader expects a vengeance-driven romp through Hadrian-era Rome. The reader is disappointed. Because, just as in past novels, Finch chooses instead to indulge in go-nowhere digressions and pointless, page-consuming dialogs between immaterial characters. Not only that, but Vesuvio himself is relegated to a nonentity. I mean, if YOUR son was kidnapped, would YOU find time to visit the bordello of a prostitute friend and plan to relax in the Trajan Baths? That's what Vesuvio does. It would be fine if he was a deadbeat dad, but Finch wants us to believe that Vesuvio's going nuts with rage, trying to get young Aurelius back. It's laughable.

But here's the best part: during the course of this book, Vesuvio is again captured and thrown into the miserable life of a slave. Just like in the previous two novels. Granted, this happens toward the end of the book, but it happens all the same. Arriving in Alexandria at the climax of his lame "search" for Aurelius (which basically constitutes talking to remote-area Roman aristocracy and visiting bordellos), Vesuvio is thrown in prison for half-baked reasons and sent to the arena as a gladiator. You'd think the guy would get the idea and never again leave his estate in Campania.

The finale of Bondage (and the trilogy) sees Finch at last writing what the series has been leading to: outright s&m with a heavy gay subtext. Basically, the Gor novels set in ancient Rome: all leather armor and chain mail and edged weapons and strapping young lads. The penultimate section of this novel is even titled "Leather and Chain," for all those who don't get it. Vesuvio finds himself about to become a retiarri, fighting with net and trident against lions. But then Finch pulls the carpet out from under us once again, denying readers the scene he's spent so many pages setting up. It was at this point I realized something: not once in this entire trilogy did Vesuvio fight anyone. How strange for an epic of historical fiction! No sword fights, no mortal combat, not even a fisticuff or two...no, Vesuvio, over the course of this trilogy, instead spends his time rushing a la Don Quixote from one poorly-plotted and poorly-conceived situation to the next, flung about like a frisbee on a windy beach.

Bondage is the first of the Vesuvio novels to deal with Christianity in any depth. I assume Finch had read the recently-published Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, which was an international bestseller in 1980, around the time Finch was writing this book. Because the Christianity Vesuvio encounters is of the Gnostic bent, with Orphic rituals overlaid. Unfortunately Finch didn't do much research: characters actually refer to their Christianity as "Gnostic" (whereas the designation wasn't coined until the 1800s), and several Christians refer to their "scripture," which as any Robert Price/Earl Doherty reader would know is a misnomer; despite the best efforts of Josh McDowell et al, there is no evidence of extant Christian scripture until well into the second century. But this is a minor problem; luckily, Bondage features no scenes of characters experiencing "salvation" through Christ on the arena floor or other ilk expected of religious-themed historical fiction. Indeed, the Christians come off rather badly in this novel, so I give Finch credit for that.

A strange thing about Bondage is that Finch backs off on the homoerotic context so prevalent in the previous volumes. That's not to say it's entirely gone. This time young Antony gets most of the attention, with prostitutes and young boys trying to get some quality time with his "manhood," which, Antony is sure to remind them, isn't as big as his master Vesuvio's. I'm not making this up. Adding to the strangeness, in Bondage Finch seems to finally realize that ancient Romans cursed fluently, and so spices up the textbook blandness which had bogged down the sex scenes in the first two novels. This does not make these scenes any sexier, unfortunately. Instead it all comes off as Finch's last-ditch attempt to finally make his books steamy and shocking. Failure all around.

As far as the writing itself goes, Finch actually got worse with each volume of the trilogy; the first, Golden Voyager, was easily the best written. Bondage is riddled with bizarre grammar, lackluster scenes, flat characters, and outright mistakes: at one point, Antony tells some friends that he and Vesuvio saw a woman get stoned to death upon their arrival in Alexandria, whereas Antony and Vesuvio saw no such thing in the narrative itself; instead, they learned about the stoning through a conversation, a conversation that didn't even take place in Alexandria. Mistakes like this mar the entire book, little things Finch should have caught with even a cursory edit. In addition, Finch apparently discovered semicolons shortly before writing this novel. He uses them to break up just about every other sentence, even sentences that don't need them.

Finch seems to have published only one more novel: 1985's Slave Island. After this I'm not sure what happened to him. He has no Web presence; an online search yields only sellers with copies of his extant novels, which no one seems to have taken the time to review. It's sad in a way. A casualty of the information age, maybe? Because I imagine this Vesuvio trilogy, trashy and poorly-written as it sometimes is, had its fan in the day. In fact it certainly did, otherwise Souvenir Press wouldn't have reprinted the lot in 1985. So where is Finch today? My bet is he burned out in the novel-writing world. Or, as I opined in my Pagan Voyager review, he took on a pseudonym and delved into a whole `nother sort of male-centric fiction...

Pagan Voyager: Book Two of the "Voyager" Trilogy



Pagan Voyager

Souveneir Press, 1979

Published in the UK in 1979 as Pagan Voyager and in the US as The Pagan (as seen to the left), this is book two of Simon Finch's Vesuvio trilogy, the epic struggles and sexual adventures of one man in the Roman Empire of the early second century CE. We pick up with Vesuvio six years after the first novel, 1978's Golden Voyager (and again we're informed that the year is "110 AD by the Christian calculation" - whereas this form of dating wasn't invented for a few more centuries). Vesuvio's now an established and wealthy member of Roman society, the owner of the land in Campania which was stolen from his family in the previous novel. Vesuvio also owns many slaves (despite his thought at the end of Golden Voyager that he would never own any), giving them easy means of freedom, and treating everyone with respect and kindness. Not yet thirty years old, Vesuvio is still unmarried, though he plans to free the beautiful slave Miranda, with whom he's recently fathered a baby boy. The novel opens with Vesuvio in Rome, arranging to free her - so he can legally marry her.

Of course, this being Vesuvio, things go to Hades quick. Miranda is taken captive by slave traders (much as Vesuvio himself was in Golden Voyager) and our hero plunges into a quest to get her back. Only problem is, Vesuvio proves to be one underwhelming hero (or maybe it's just that Finch is an underwhelming author). Because, well, he doesn't get very far in his quest. Instead, Vesuvio is quickly captured and then sold into slavery, and this novel, just like Golden Voyager, details his plight in servitude. And just as Finch focused on episodic tales of Vesuvio in slavery in Golden Voyager rather than on Vesuvio's betrayal and eventual vengeance, here too he denies readers the epic quest of revenge and reunion which is promised in the opening pages.

One of the major frustrations in Golden Voyager was its lack of a strong villain. Even though Vesuvio was sold into slavery and his family killed, his eventual revenge was given short shrift by Finch, with the humdrum villain appearing for a scant few pages. Pagan Voyager is no different. We meet the villains in the early chapters, and a loathsome pair they are; the reader truly wants to see them get their comeuppance. But Finch drops the ball and mostly forgets about them, instead getting sidetracked with the background stories of the various slaves Vesuvio meets. In other ways too Pagan Voyager is a rewrite of its predecessor; just like that novel, this one features a major and deadly chariot race in which Vesuvio proves his mettle against all competitors.

But the thing is, whereas Golden Voyager was at least fun in its addle-headed way, Pagan Voyager just comes off as dire and pointless. We've already seen Vesuvio cast about the ancient world in various modes of slavery; why do we need to see it again? And here, just like in Golden Voyager, the villains - the ones who ordered Miranda to be kidnapped and who cast Vesuvio into slavery - are dealt with in a perfunctory manner. Indeed, as the climax approaches, with the villains on their way to Vesuvio's present location, Finch instead obliviously wastes time with pages and pages of Vesuvio being groomed and dressed for a party, where he is to serve as a pleasure slave. Imagine if in the film Ransom Mel Gibson's character spent the last ten minutes trying on a few different pairs of clothes and you'll get the idea. Worse yet is that Vesuvio doesn't even play a part in the villains' eventual comeuppance, thereby rendering the whole thing moot.

What's really unfortunate is that Vesuvio goes through his ordeals without question. This was understandable in Golden Voyager. There he was just a kid, snatched from a wealthy family and thrust into the world of slavery. But he suffered through a three-year ordeal in that novel, emerging as a triumphant Roman citizen. So it's really strange that Vesuvio so readily accepts his return to slavery in this novel. He goes from one owner to the next, taking to his chores and scoping out the lay of the land. This man is a high-born Roman with his own villa in southern Italy, whose wife-to-be has been kidnapped! It's all very frustrating, and there's no way such a thing could be depicted onscreen; audiences would be throwing refuse at the ineffectual "hero" of the film.

In my review of Golden Voyager I mentioned - a bit too thoroughly - the homoerotic subtext so apparent in Finch's prose. Pages and pages about Vesuvio's good looks, his superb physique, his large "phallus." Here Finch goes even further. In Golden Voyager Vesuvio made it through the book without engaging in "unnatural sex," ie sex with another man - even though this seemingly was Vesuvio's greatest fear/obsession. But he does not fare so well in Pagan Voyager. Because, not even a few days out into his quest, Vesuvio is captured by pirates who proceed to use and abuse him. I've never seen a main character so debased in a novel. Vesuvio is used as a sexual toy by the decrepit men on the boat, so brutally and thoroughly that he's eventually cast aside as useless. Finch of course goes into hyper-description mode, recounting what the pirates do to Vesuvio.

But here's the thing: Vesuvio never once fights back. He just gives in to his fate, and accepts the men's abuse. It's all very, very disturbing. And when one takes into consideration the amount of detail Finch gives the male characters as compared to the women (he'll spend pages on the various males Vesuvio encounters, each with "rippling muscles" and "deep chests," etc, whereas the women characters are only minimally described), you know for sure something's up. But like in Golden Voyager, despite Vesuvio's constant fear of being taken advantage of by another man (reading Finch, one gets the impression that men had only two worries in the ancient world: 1.) being sold as a slave, and 2.) being sold as a slave and then sodomized), despite the minutiae of detail Finch gives the "burly" and "handsome" men Vesuvio meets, Finch still wants to tell us that gay sex is "unnatural." There's even a lesbian in this book, with another female character unsuccessfully struggling to think of her in "that way" in order to use her for her own ends. So one can easily see Finch was having some issues which he tried to work out in the narrative. Finch's last novel appears to have been 1985's Slave Island, something about 17th Century pirates, but I imagine he eventually began writing gay fiction under a pseudonym. Because let me tell you, folks, he was already pretty much there in Pagan Voyager.

Otherwise Finch is up to his usual tricks: the book is moreso softcore porn than historical fiction. Finch follows the same method throughout: he'll set up a scene with some details gleaned from his knowledge of the ancient world, and then proceed into several pages of minutely-detailed sex scenes. But not a single one of these scenes is arousing. I read stuff in Penthouse Letters as a kid (one of the benefits of having an older brother) that was more scintillating. Also, the s&m elements in Golden Voyager are even stronger in this sequel. For example, within the first three pages Finch gives us a harrowing scene of a brutal whipping, providing the details of each wicked snap of the whip, complete with characters soiling themselves in agony. Characters who, by the way, have absolutely zilch to do with the rest of the novel; indeed, the scene itself has nothing to do with the rest of the novel. But this is just one of the many sadomasochistic pleasures Finch indulges in throughout; Colleen McCullough this ain't.

I'm not sure about the UK edition, but the US version of the novel, The Pagan, is filled with bizarre grammatical errors and misspellings. I'll go ahead and give Finch the benefit of doubt and assume the publisher was at fault. But beyond that, the book really is poorly written, filled with gross coincidences (everyone Vesuvio meets either knows Miranda or the people he's searching for), muddled plotlines, and go-nowhere digressions. Worse yet is that in this novel Finch tries to impress us with his modicum knowledge of Latin, peppering the narrative with occasional words and phrases. Only problem is - and this is a problem I have with much historical fiction - these characters are already speaking Latin. So why must Finch (and other historical fiction authors) give us a few words in that language? The book's already historically-inaccurate in that characters are speaking English; a few "actual" words here and there won't change things.

Pagan Voyager came out one exact year after Golden Voyager, but it wasn't until 1981 that Finch published the final volume of the trilogy, Voyager In Bondage. That one wasn't even published in the US, but thanks to the fantabulous Internet I've gained my copy from an overseas seller, and am now duty-bound to read it. Jupiter give me strength.

Golden Voyager: Book 1 of the strange "Voyager" trilogy...


Golden Voyager, by Simon Finch

Souveneir Press, 1978

Published in 1978, Golden Voyager was Simon Finch's first novel, and also the first in a trilogy concerning main character Vesuvio and his adventures around the Roman Empire during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. The novel is of course an epic, with Vesuvio cast about into a variety of locales and environments that would even have Ben-Hur envious. According to the "About the Author" page, Finch was 32 when he published the novel, and in his spare time travelled the globe giving lectures on ancient slavery. It's a living, I guess. But truth to tell, Finch's knowledge on this subject is put to good use in Golden Voyager, lending a grim note of reality to what is otherwise your typical pulp-fiction male fantasy of purple prose.

The novel opens in 101 CE (strangely, we learn this through Vesuvio's thoughts - that the year is "101 AD according to the Christian calculation," when meanwhile this form of dating wasn't created for several more centuries), with our hero Vesuvio a strapping young lad 18 years of age, a walking mass of muscle, a young man wise beyond his years, his hair a thick mop of blonde (super-rare in Vesuvio's homeland of southern Italy, Finch often reminds us; in fact, Vesuvio's "golden" tresses are what give the novel its title). In other words, the typical lead male character in the typical historical fantasy - super-strong and super-smart, a demigod amongst lesser men. To ram this home even more, we are treated to several scenes where other characters have nothing better to do than sit around and talk about how great Vesuvio is, particularly the size of his "phallus" (more about that later).

Born to a wealthy, aristocratic family, Vesuvio is the firstborn of two sons and thus being groomed for military greatness. In another "huh?" moment, we learn Vesuvio was named thusly after the "recent" eruption of nearby volcano Vesuvius (which covered Pompeii in 79 CE, four years before our hero was born). This would be like naming your daughter "Katrina," in honor of the hurricane which killed so many and destroyed so much. Regardless, Vesuvio is soon to marry his beloved, and has often found himself thinking of her, even when lying with the attractive women amongst the 4,000 slaves his family owns (and trust me, Vesuvio lays with a LOT of women in this book).

Political machinations result in Vesuvio being taken captive by slave traders. Not backing down to the traders on the slave galley, he's thrashed for disobedience and then taken to the captain's quarters (where, even though he's bound and chained and bleeding, Vesuvio still has time to enjoy the oral arts of a female slave...male fantasy at work, people!). Here the reader get a look into the mind of an ancient slave trader, and you realize once again how little life was worth in ancient times. Eventually sold to a pirate captain, Vesuvio spends the next three years working the oars, escaping the Romans and stealing bounty. Here Finch indulges his inner Robert E. Howard, with Vesuvio becoming entangled (so to speak) with the Red Sonja-esque Athana, a beautiful, Hispanic piratess/former gladiatrix who employs Vesuvio as her right-hand man and who discovers that he (of course) is the only man who can satiate her womanly needs.

After a few hundred pages of digressions, with Vesuvio sent from one new master to the next, the plot finally comes together and our hero gains vengeance in Rome. This is a stirring scene, cut whole-cloth from Ben Hur, as Vesuvio challenges his nemesis Gaius Lucretius to a chariot race in the Flavian Ampitheater (rather than the Circus Maximus, where most chariot races were held). The only problem is, despite his being the cause of all of Vesuvio's suffering, Lucretius only appears for about five pages of the novel. Therefore Vesuvio's vengeance comes off as perfunctory; having just met Lucretius (and rather quickly learning that he was responsible for Vesuvio being sold into slavery and having his family being killed), we just as quickly see him get his comeuppance. Imagine if Emperor Commodus only appeared in the final five minutes of the film Gladiator and you'll get the picture. The revenge scene is overshadowed by what comes next: showered with praise after his victory in the Flavian, Vesuvio attends a Fellini-esque party in which Finch heaps on vividly surrealistic, X-rated description; no doubt the best-written sequence of the book.

Unusually for the typical historical novel, Golden Voyager features scenes of characters getting high. Drugs were in fact used in the ancient world, particularly marijuana - see Chris Bennett's Green Gold: The Tree Of Life. Vesuvio's fellow pirate slaves in the second half of the book chew cannabis before their plunderings, and our hero joins in. This is a nice touch, only Finch ruins it. You see, the cannabis turns the pirates into slavering beasts who only want to rape and pillage. It's all straight out of Reefer Madness. Anyone who's anyone knows that dope mellows the senses; despite the terror-mongering of the Christian Right, it does NOT turn you into a maniac. I'd assumed that sort of mentality had disappeared long before 1978, and it's even stranger when you consider Finch was in his 20s in the Psychedelic Sixties! So I assume he was one of those horn-rimmed glasses/buzzcut hair types, one of those guys you'll see in the Let It Be documentary, asking the cops to shut down the Beatles' impromptu rooftop performance.

The reader catches a glimpse of life in the Roman Empire, with mentions of the manifold gods and goddesses, even the di rigueur mention of "the Nazarene." But the tale is more focused on Vesuvio's adventures, resulting in something more akin to Conan or any other pulp fiction set in ancient times. What I'm saying is, this is just a straight-up revenge tale with action, intrigue, and sex to spare, which just happens to be set in the era of Trajan's rule. In many ways it's no different than the average Conan or King Kull novel, save for the fact that it's set in an actual, historical era, and also due to the copious and detailed sex scenes. But even these are reserved; Finch writes pages and pages of descriptive sex, but uses mostly medical-textbook terms for the bodyparts involved, and not a single profanity is uttered in the book (strange, when one realizes how absolutely profane Latin could be). So even though it attempts to be a "raw blockbuster of sensual adventure," as the cover blurb declares, the novel could easily have been published a few decades earlier and not have caused much of a stir.

Which brings us to the heart of the issue. A fun thing about pulp fiction is how much can be read into it - for example, see Norman Spinrad (under the guise "Homer Whipple") giving himself a Freudian reading in the superb The Iron Dream. You see, Finch goes on at great length about Vesuvio's good looks, his superhuman physique, and - especially - his "phallus." Get used to that word; you'll be seeing it a lot in Golden Voyager. Vesuvio's equipment is the focus of conversation for a panoply of characters, both men and women - the men envious, the women enraptured. Yet, as Finch constantly reminds us (or himself?), Vesuvio does not engage in "unnatural sex," ie relations with other men. Even though his fellow male slaves do so (and Finch of course gives us a few scenes graphically attesting to this), Vesuvio stays off to the side, mulling over man's seeming desire for self-punishment. It's all very funny and even an untrained reader could divine layers of subtext in the prose.

A third of the way into the book Finch tosses the subtext out the window. Sold as a "pleasure slave" to a Mesopotamian king, Vesuvio is taken by caravan to the palace. Along the way he is informed he will have to pleasure the king himself, and so must force himself to think of another man in "that way." With his new master demanding that he "practice" on a fellow male slave, guards posted outside ready to kill him if he disobeys, and Vesuvio forcing himself to realize that if he doesn't do it he will die (also telling himself that "Good men have practiced sodomy"), you just want to open that closet door for Finch and let him out. But the King dies, and Vesuvio never has to go through with it; though this scene gives us more priceless dialog concerning his "manhood." I want to say Vesuvio's endowment acts as a symbol of something, or that Finch is poking fun at the purple prose typical of the historical revenge epic. But I can't; the novel itself just doesn't justify it.

Golden Voyager was followed by Pagan Voyager in 1979 (published in the US under the title The Pagan), and the trilogy concluded with 1981's Voyager In Bondage. There are several editions of Golden Voyager. My copy is the US paperback, complete with a lurid, airbrushed cover of golden-haired Vesuvio surrounded by a bevy of nude women. The artist read the book, at least. The UK Pan Books edition sports a detail from Frank Frazetta's painting The Rogue Roman, which itself was the cover for Lance Horner's 1965 novel of the same title - a novel, by the way, with many similarities to Golden Voyager.

The Last Nights of Pompeii, by Martin Saul

The Last Nights of Pompeii, by Martin Saul
Signet Books, 1966

Published in 1966 as a Signet mass market paperback and never reprinted, Martin Saul's Last Nights of Pompeii is more novella than novel - it's a mere 125 pages of tiny type with a poorly-constructed plot and barely-developed characters. It jumps from one illogical extreme to another, and, all told, not much happens. So what's to recommend? Simply put, it's a great example of the historical trash fiction genre of the sixties and seventies, a genre which gave us such gems as Jack Oleck's Messalina and Lance Horner's Rogue Roman.

It's 79 CE and Marcius Longinus is a tribune in Pompeii. Vesuvius, of course, is about to erupt, but Marcius and his fellow townsfolk are blissfully unaware. Marcius fought in Jerusalem with Emperor Vespasian's son Titus - Titus, who himself is soon to become Emperor, as Vespasian is near death. While in Jerusalem Marcius and Titus rescued a young girl from the carnage outside the great Temple; Marcius went on to raise her, thinking of her as a younger sister. This is Selene, and she is neither Jewish nor Roman - indeed, no one is certain who or what she is, as when rescued she had no memory of where she was from or even who her parents were. Selene is now a beautiful young woman, one of Marcius's many slaves, though he's sure to point out she's only a slave by way of warfare. And Selene has become fixated on Marcius, in love with him; Marcius gradually realizes he too is in love with her. Yet problems loom: turns out Titus's Jewish lover Berenice has prophesized that Selene, if she fulfills her love with Marcius, will cause much devastation. (Read: If Marcius and Selene get it on, Vesuvius will erupt.) Intrigue ensues as Berenice attempts to foil Marcius and Selene's blossoming love.

The above could easily fill a much longer book, but as mentioned Last Nights of Pompeii is only 125 pages long. The novel comes off more like a synopsis, Saul rushing through his story. Beyond that, he has difficulty lending credibility to the Marcius/Selene romance; Selene doesn't even appear until 60 pages in, and we're supposed to believe that she's suddenly fallen in love with this older man who took her captive after butchering countless Jews. (Even more disturbing: the whole "I raised her but now I love her like a woman" deal reminds me of the whole Woody Allen/Soon Yi situation.) So this isn't a love story written by the stars, and Saul doesn't help himself by rushing through it: in just a few chapters Marcius has convinced himself that he does in fact love Selene and plans to marry her.

In addition to the main plot you have the usual requirements for fiction set in Rome: a graphically-detailed arena scene complete with battling gladiators and helpless victims being mauled by lions, chariot races, priests of forgotten religions muttering mumbo-jumbo as they wave their wands, walk-ons from historical personages (Titus, Berenice, even Jewish historian Josephus), and, of course, a mention or two of "the Nazarenes." Thankfully these Christians aren't the main focus of the novel; they only appear in a few places, yet Saul gives them loathsome dialog, baiting Marcius and his fellow "sinners" and promising that Pompeii will soon suffer for its "sinfulness." Makes me want to go back in time and HELP the Romans shove them into a lion-packed arena. But luckily neither Marcius nor any of the other characters are swayed by their preaching, which makes me wonder if perhaps Saul is taking a swing at the Christians. (Though I couldn't help but notice more than a little anti-Semitism in the vitriol Titus spews about his former adversaries in the Jewish war.)

The novel is very much of its time: the women are either virginal innocents (like Selene) or manipulative schemers (like Berenice). There's a huge dose of misogyny in a too-long subplot in which Marcius's pal Claudius gains a new slave: a beautiful patrician woman who's been cast into slavery for having an affair with her husband's slave. Claudius gains control of her and, despite his lust for her beauty, proceeds to treat her like garbage, threatening her with whippings, assigning her humiliating chores, and refusing to so much as even look at her. And guess what? She eventually falls in love with him. Take THAT, Women's Lib!

And yes, Vesuvius's eruption is the climax of the book. We all knew it was heading there, anyway. Saul rushes through the disaster, getting some details wrong - he has the city covered in lava moments after the eruption, but archeologists now know that the townspeople had a long time to escape the city between the first blast and the eventual destruction. In fact, it now seems that the majority of the citizens safely escaped; those who did die in the catastrophe only did so because they stayed behind, thinking it was safe. (Saul makes another mistake when he has Marcius mention stirrups, something which wasn't invented for another 500 years.)

So, at times poorly written, with a plot based on a ridiculous prophecy, and with characters who are a bit too wooden, The Last Nights of Pompeii isn't a great novel, but it's at least some good and trashy fun.

Rogue Roman, by Lance Horner


Rogue Roman, by Lance Horner
Fawcett Books, 1965

Published in 1965 and in print for several years thereafter, Lance Horner's Rogue Roman is now long out of circulation and mostly forgotten. It is worth seeking out - a sterling example of the exploitative historical fiction churned out for the popular market in the sixties and seventies. Books that tread the line between pulp fiction and genuine literature, filled with sex and carnage, but which also took the time to plumb the depths of their characters' psychology.

The novel spans the years 55 - 62 CE, during the reign of Nero. Cleon is our hero, a blonde-haired youth who has grown up in Syria, surrounded by a ragamuffin family of mixed races; seems his actual parentage is questionable, and he certainly does not consider his Syrian father to be his true parent. (Later it turns out Cleon is right.) Cleon escapes his miserly roots to become a mime for a travelling group of artists from Antioch; here he is introduced to the slave Mannax, a gay youth who once served men as a temple slave in the Grove of Daphne in Antioch. Cleon grows accustomed to his more exciting life, entertaining audiences in Antioch, when disaster strikes and he and Mannax become slaves. The pair are trained as gladiators, both growing more solid and well-built during their years of training. Eventually Cleon, Mannax, and the rest of their new friends in the gladiator school are taken to Rome, where Cleon's spotted by the Chief Vestal Julia Livilla, who happens to be the sister of Agrippina the Younger - the mother of Nero.

Cleon turns out to be a dead ringer for a man both Julia and Agrippina loved, long ago; in fact, they are certain he is the man's son. This seems true to Cleon; his mother often mentioned to him that his true father was a Roman dignitary. But there's more to it: Agrippina reveals that this same blonde-haired Roman dignitary was the true father of Nero. This means that Cleon and Nero are half-brothers. And the two look so similar that Cleon could easily pass for Nero, using his mime skills to complete the picture.

Nero has gone mad with power, and Agrippina and Julia conspire to oust him. Their plan: Cleon will step in and "become" Nero, and no one will be the wiser. This intrigue guides the final half of the novel, with many double-crosses and reversals and surprises - the most significant being for Cleon that he falls in love with Nero's ignored and virginal wife Octavia.

So that's the plot. Horner complements it by bringing the ancient world into full Technicolor life. There are set pieces aplenty here, especially a fantastic scene set in the Grove of Daphne where Cleon attempts to satiate his rampaging desires. The prerequisite gladiator material isn't as prevalent as one would inspect; indeed, Cleon is mostly kept from harm due to Julia's protection. Cleon is, at least: there is a long setpiece in the arena in which Horner piles on the graphic descriptions of death, rape, and torture which took place before the eager eyes of onlookers, all of it straight out of Daniel Mannix's Those About To Die. Horner also plays up the opulent decadence of the Roman court, with appearances from Nero, Petronius (author of the Satyricon, which goes unmentioned), and Nero's mistress Poppaea Sabina. There's a great discussion between Nero and Petronius on if it would be wise for an emperor to kiss his wife in public.

Again, this is an enjoyable novel, but it does have a pulp fiction undercurrent. The first half of the novel comes off like a series of short stories connected arbitrarily; Horner spends time developing characters and plots (the young actress Cleon falls in love with while he's a mime, the older pair who have hired him on and who own Mannax), only to cast them aside without warning. The dialog also comes off a bit too "Hollywood historical film," with characters talking like they've just stepped out of a Shakespeare play. There's also a puzzling homoerotic tenor; Mannax falls in love with Cleon, and often insists that he prefers boys, yet once he becomes a gladiator Mannax is forced to sleep with a woman. Calling Dr. Freud! There's also a very disturbing scene involving a group of guys sitting in a circle, a clump of dirt before them, and, well, their "anointing" of it for the goddess Fortune. A scene I'd prefer to forget.

Horner wrote several novels with Kyle Onstott, but here he works solo; Onstott provides an introduction to Rogue Roman, where he says he hopes the book will one day become a movie. Unfortunately that never happened. Onstott and Horner returned to the ancient world on their own, however; in 1966 they collaborated on Child of the Sun, about the "depraved" 3rd Century CE emperor Elagabalus.

Rogue Roman had the same cover throughout all its printings: a superb Frank Frazetta painting of a muscled blonde man reclining in opulence as a Nubian slave presents to him a busty and nude redhead. Ah yes, that old Frazetta misogyny in full effect; there are even two more semi-nude slave girls who sit obediently at the blonde man's feet. It doesn't have much to do with the novel, but it's effective.

The Gladiators, by Martin Saul


The Gladiators, by Martin Saul
Signet, 1967

In 1966 Martin Saul published The Last Nights of Pompeii, which I reviewed here, a slim book set in the post-Nero era of ancient Rome. In 1967 he followed that up with this novel, just as slim, a tale about a Roman citizen turned gladiator during the era of Nero's rule. I'm guessing Saul was Australian, as the book is copyrighted by some publishing house based in Australia - this Signet paperback was the first and only US edition.

Much like the previous novel, The Gladiators is basically a love story. Scaurius is the main character and narrator, Scandinavian-born but raised Roman. Just returned from warring with Vespasian in the East, Scaurius notes how decadent Rome has become under Nero. Already feeling like an outsider, he gets in more trouble when he comes across a beautiful young woman who happens to be Christian. She's on the run from the Emperor's men; Scaurius of course falls in love with her, and after various mishaps he ends up in prison with a bunch of Christians, awaiting execution in the arena.

Scaurius convinces his captors - including Nero - that he is not a Christian. At length they concede he might be telling the truth, but they keep him locked up. Only now, rather than just becoming lion-bait, he will battle as a gladiator. The second half of the novel is a series of repetitive gladiatorial matches, Scaurius usually up against a lion or three, until the last event, in which he faces off against professional gladiators. It's all very underwhelming, despite the setup.

And again much like the previous novel, The Gladiators is just underdeveloped. Scenes aren't played out to their full potential, and the narrative rushes to the conclusion. Characters as well are underdeveloped; I had a hard time buying Scaurius's sudden love for the Christian girl. And speaking of which, whereas The Last Nights of Pompeii at least strayed clear of the Christian glurge which permeates most historical fiction set in this era, The Gladiators at times revels in it, with Christians blathering ad naseum about the wonders of their faith and the sinfulness of the Romans. Saul tries to skirt this, with Scaurius not wholly buying into it all, instead coming to a New Age understanding of "one god" who stands behind all religions. I did appreciate how despite all of that, Scaurius still has no qualms with butchering his opponents in the arena and ridicules the Christians for their pacifism.

What's funny is that the novel wraps up with a three page denouement, told in summary, in which Scaurius leaves Rome and ends up in his homeland of Scandinavia, where he eventually founds a royal line. It turns out he's the son of a king, of course, and he names his son Beowulf - the idea being that he is the Beowulf of the saga. This three page denouement is more interesting than the story told in the novel itself! Yet Saul brushes over it as an afterthought; further proof that this novel was underdeveloped.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Toga Porn Mania

I love ancient history, and I love trashy fiction...so you can imagine how I feel about trashy historical fiction.


Sadly, this is a genre which has become forgotten over time, though it proliferated in the '60s and '70s. Rather than the preachy Christian tone employed by most fiction set in the ancient world -- or, worse yet, the psuedo-Shakespearian dreck of the 19th Century (Wallace's Ben-Hur, anyone?) -- these novels dove straight into the good stuff. Trashy reads set in a technicolor Rome; they were everything you wanted to see in the films but couldn't, thanks to the censors.


I've created two Amazon lists of this genre. I'm sure there are more titles out there -- I'm always scanning the racks at second-hand bookstores, which is how I've discovered many of these -- so if you know of any I should add, please drop me a line!


Swords, Sandals, Sex and Sin - Part 1:


http://www.amazon.com/lm/R1M8H7FLA6HSJD/ref=cm_pdp_lm_title_2


Swords, Sandals, Sex and Sin - Part 2:


http://www.amazon.com/lm/R10B0L99HPW7Q4/ref=cm_pdp_lm_title_1