In no sense of the word is Michael Curtis Ford a bad writer. His characters, starting with his hero, a not-wholly-pleasant Germanic chieftain named Odoacer, are convincing enough. As for the action, the scenes of battle, pursuit, etc. are as gripping as any action novel reader could hope for - and then some.
The first problem with The Fall of Rome can be deduced from a description of the plot. The book starts at the death of Attila the Hun in 453AD and it ends at the overthrow of the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus in 476AD. Odoacer, as the history books tell us, was the man who overthrew this last emperor and the story is mostly told from his point of view.
On the face of it, this is fine. The problem is that it takes a remarkably capable writer to tell a story that spans twenty three years, several different rulers of several different nations, several different generals leading several different armies - and then fit such a mass of material into barely more than 300 pages. Mr. Ford is good but not that good. In trying to tell such a sprawling tale in such a short space he simply seems to have bit off more than he could chew. The result is a story that tends to be sort of choppy and episodic.
The other big problem with this book is the result of a problem that the author was not in a position to do much about.
In my reading I've been on a bit of a Roman Empire kick lately. One of the books I recently read was a history called, Caesar's Legion : The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins. The book's title tells you pretty much what it is about. As for when it was about, it focuses on a period of more than a century, from the Tenth Legion's foundation by Julius Caesar around 60BC, through it's capture of the fortress of Masada in 73AD.
Mr. Dando-Collins was able to write the history of a particular 5,000 man (give or take) unit of a particular ancient army because, for all the strife of the late Republic and early Empire, Rome remained the sort of settled and prosperous civilization that could create and preserve historical records that were, and still are, remarkably comprehensive.
After all, in order to ring true, historical fiction must rest very firmly upon historical fact. For the two centuries straddling the birth of Christ, enough material is available that authors can pretty easily place fictional characters and events against a very clear and convincing depiction of the era. So there are a lot of very good historical novels about this period.
The Late Empire is a different matter. It was not an era when people had much leisure to write about history. Nor was it a period which could guarantee that such written records as were produced would have a high probability of survival. It was a period of constant civil war, constant invasion and catastrophic economic decline.
The result is that that even an author who knows his history, as Mr. Ford clearly does, has to do a lot of guessing - using records from earlier or later periods to help fill in the blank spots that his novel's story line requires him to fill.
In some ways his guesses ring true. I don't know if there is documentation on why Odoacer led his troops to overthrow the last emperor. Assuming that there may not be, the reasons Mr. Ford gave for Odoacer's doing so might, to many, seem remarkably unlikely.
In a nutshell, upon hearing of the assumption of the imperial throne by the unworthy Romulus Augustulus, the legion Odoacer commanded rose in mutiny. Rather than attempt to suppress this mutiny, Odoacer regained control of his troops by joining it. Placing himself at the head of his troops, he marched on Italy.
Given the reputation for iron discipline still enjoyed by the legions of Rome, the idea of a general caving in to the desires of his troops and waging war on his superiors at their behest may not seem very plausible. As it happens, though, there are countless examples of exactly this happening throughout the history of Imperial Rome. In fact, Rome's inability to control it armies was one of the primary reasons for the empire's fall. So score one for the author.
Still, if you happen to know enough about the history of Rome, you may find that some of Mr. Ford's other guesses seem a bit off and result in some jarring anachronisms.
I am working from memory here and may be off a bit myself but let me lay out a few of these anachronisms.
In 378AD, the Roman Legions under the Emperor Valens were destroyed by the cavalry of the Goths near the city of Adrianople, in Thrace. If it hadn't happened even before this catastrophic defeat, certainly after it the Roman army began to shake its age old reliance on heavy infantry. More and more it seems to have become an army of horsemen. Yet, The Fall of Rome, writing about a period a hundred years later, features numerous legions of heavy infantry, as if little had changed in the intervening century.
Moreover the legions it features are the old five or six thousand man formations of the late Republic or the early Empire. I remember reading, though, that at about the time of Constantine (who died around 330AD, well over 100 years before the period Mr. Ford writes about) the infantry legions of the Empire had been drastically reduced in size, down to perhaps 2,000 men (give or take).
Then there's the placement of the legions.
During the reign of Augustus (the first Roman Emperor) the army was professionalized. This professional army, in which soldiers were enlisted for a period of, first, fourteen and, then, twenty years (yes - this does seem to be where the idea of retirement after twenty years of service originated) was permanently stationed on the frontiers. In Europe it was deployed along the Rhine and Danube rivers in three or four armies, each of which was built around a core of two or three legions of infantry.
For 400 years these Roman armies held the Rhine and Danubian frontiers. The river lines were occasionally breached, particularly after the civil wars that began in earnest after the death of the emperor Commodus at the end of the second century. (PS: Commodus was the evil emperor in the movie Gladiator) The borders were always restored, though, till the beginning of the fifth century.
Again, I'm working from memory here but, as I remember the story, the line of the Rhine was finally breached once and for all by the Franks on Christmas night in, I believe, the year 405AD. This was a major event in the history of Western Europe because it signaled the beginning of the complete loss of Roman control over Gaul (France).
More than Gaul, in fact. For instance, in 410AD, the need for troops to defend Italy, Gaul and other imperial lands, caused the Romans to withdraw the forces they had stationed for some 350 years in the Roman province of Britain. Left to their own devices the British population (including a certain war leader known as Arthur) was unable to mount a successful defense of the island against later incursions by barbarian Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. I don't know what happened to the Jutes, but I think we all know where the Anglo Saxons live these days.
So anyway, after the line of the Rhine was breached, the floodgates burst open for good. The Vandals sacked Rome itself in 410AD and then moved on to found a kingdom in North Africa. The Visigoths also crossed the borders and headed as far west as they could go, with the result that the provinces in Iberia were forever lost to Rome - replaced by the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain.
Even the Huns, a tribe of steppe people originating in Central Asia, crossed into what had once been Roman Gaul - though they were also defeated there in 452 by what was left of the Roman army, together with its barbarian allies.
What all of the above adds up to is another likely anachronism that sort of bothers me about The Fall of Rome. I read once that, after about 450AD, Rome had effectively lost control of most, or even all, of the Western Empire outside of Italy. Looking at what had happened since 405AD, how could it have been otherwise?
In The Fall of Rome, though, full sized 5,000 man legions still seem to man the Rhine and Danubian frontiers late in 475AD. How could that be? Probably there were still were Roman troops in the old provinces but the old river line deployments of infantry legions must, almost certainly, have gone by the boards by that time.
The author wrote of the late fifth century population of Rome itself as still being around a million people. That may very well be true. I've read that Italy actually wasn't driven into Dark Ages levels of poverty, depopulation and backwardness till the Eastern Emperor Justinian's attempt to regain the west triggered the mid-sixth century Gothic Wars.
Still, even if Rome's population remained quite large, as described in The Fall of Rome the Roman world of 476AD simply seems way too orderly to be (as it was) on the verge of utter collapse. That's not to say that the The Fall of Rome doesn't portray a civilization under serious stress. Rather it is to say that conditions must actually have been much much worse.
This must have been particularly true in the military and it is very hard to believe that, in 476, there were still organized legions under arms, led by experienced centurions, tribunes and legates. Representing as they did, a Roman state on the verge of collapse, the Roman armies of the day could not have been much better led, trained, organized or equipped than the barbarian hordes that provided them with most of their manpower.
The collapse of nations is fairly common in human history. The collapse of an entire civilization, though, into centuries of barbarism is actually quite uncommon. As a result the total collapse of the Roman west in the fifth century makes this a fascinating period in human history. It's most unfair, then, that having chosen a fascinating period of human history in which to set a story, the success of Mr. Ford's effort should be so seriously compromised by a scarcity of historical records on the period - a scarcity caused by the very civilizational collapse that makes the setting of his novel so fascinating.
That's the way it is, though.
No author's work has to be perfect before it can be worth reading. I read another book by Mr. Ford a year or two ago and, despite the flaws in this one, I'll be quite willing to read anything else he writes in the future. You have to wish that The Fall of Rome was better than it is but I still did enjoy reading it.
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