The Iron Hand of Mars

Falco, Book 4

By: Lindsey Davis

Narrated by: Gordon Griffin

"I’ve always wanted to see something of the Empire outside Rome."

AD 71. Germania Libera: dark, dripping forests inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians and legendary wild beasts, a furious prophetess who terrorises Rome, and the ghostly spirits of slaughtered Roman legionaries.

Enter Falco, an Imperial agent on a special mission: to find the absconding commander of a legion whose loyalty is suspect. Easier said than done, thinks Falco as he makes his uneasy way down the Rhenus, trying to forget that back in sunny Rome his girlfriend, Helena Justina, is being hotly pursued by Titus Caesar. His mood is not improved when he discovers his only allies are a woefully inadequate bunch of recruits, their embittered centurion, a rogue dog, and its innocent young master - just the right kind of support for an agent unwillingly trying to tame the Celtic hordes.

©1992 Lindsey Davis (P)2015 Audible, Ltd.

These are growing on me more and more

I don’t know if this episode - which I rated 5 stars for everything - is better than the earlier ones that did not get 5 starts from me across the board is really better, but I am definitely totally hooked and enjoyed every minute. I do speed up the narration to 1.25, as I find it a bit slow at the regular speed. The slightly sped up gives everything Falco says a certain urgency, and I think it fits the narrative totally. Why is there no TV series for these stories? It would be fun!

The female eye

This is an early Falco novell which I missed reading when it arrived. As as novell it is well written, well researched and as a story well crafted, but this novell has two major drawbacks:
The story is not a detective story in Roman clothing. Interesting at it was to read, the story did not deliver what I have come to expect and appreciate from Lindsey Davis.
The second drawback is the odd perspective, which I seen in many of Davis' books but which has vanished with the Alba subseries. Davis is writing in first person with Didius Falco doing all the interaction. But it is a modern, female, middle aged English woman doing the writting and it does not really work here. Didius Falco is some idealized contemporary man without any believable inner machinery. Had he been a true Roman he would have been the unchallanged and unrivalled master of his houselhold. His woman could hope for a respecful treatment, but the sexual mores was completely differentat during that time. Marcus can sexually use and abuse all his householders, slaves, freemen as well as animals. Without any missgivings about this from anyone. He legally could kill his own offspring or slaves (no need to hide a dead slave under the bedroom floor there, as it happens in the story. Nor would his teenage girls behave in such a modern manner) In this book, the distance to the Rome of antiquity is too large and the story suffers. In later books these things have become less obvious, but the sickening smell of a Roman man whipped by his woman remains all over the series in a blatantly gendered and ahistoric missconception of what a man is. A female Eye so to say has written this.