I have very little time to read, so it took me several months to finish this book. It was worth the long haul, and as historical fiction, I enjoyed it to some degree as much as Colleen McCullough's series. However, unlike McCullough, I was disappointed in Durham's omission of maps (one simply isn't enough), glossary and a lengthy afterword explaining his changes and motivations in fabricating certain things. I know this is fiction, not a history text, but including more facts and contexts can enrich the experience for the reader.
The battle scenes were brutal without being overly gory, and the descriptions of some of the injuries read as if they were from Homer. It is admirable and at the same time horrific that armies slaughtered each other so mercilessly for either courage, pride or greed - or equal parts of each. Durham explores these virtues and flaws in a well-written manner.
One gripe is that the characterization was uneven. Some characters received undue amounts of attention - Imco Vaca serves as an avatar for the everyman Carthaginian soldier (or so I assume), but his personality is so unremarkable that I was anxious for the story to turn back to the main players. Likewise the scavenger woman he intermittently lusts after. The cast was too large for the book to give each person his/her due, and I think the book would have benefitted if people had been cut out altogether, or if the book had been longer.
The female portion of the cast is held at arm's length, unfortunately. Stiff and regal, or pale and unsure, they did not capture the attention as much as I'd hoped. Sapanibal was the only interesting one (as another reviewer noted), but she wasn't given much face-time to develop. More scenes like the tongue-lashing she gives the politicians in the steam bath would have helped.
Overall, the characters didn't leap off the page as in McCullough's novels. I felt it lay in part to Durham's more formal style, whereas McCullough tends to make her characters personable, if not downright chatty. Anachronistic, perhaps, but they are more approachable to modern sensibilities.
Durham doesn't flinch from extended battle scenes and maneuvers, which is one aspect of McCullough's novels that bug me (her battles are brief or entirely absent). So the two complement each other in that regard.
Bottom line: It took me 5 months to finally get through this book with my spare minutes of free time, and I don't feel that my time would have been better spent reading another book.
The battle scenes were brutal without being overly gory, and the descriptions of some of the injuries read as if they were from Homer. It is admirable and at the same time horrific that armies slaughtered each other so mercilessly for either courage, pride or greed - or equal parts of each. Durham explores these virtues and flaws in a well-written manner.
One gripe is that the characterization was uneven. Some characters received undue amounts of attention - Imco Vaca serves as an avatar for the everyman Carthaginian soldier (or so I assume), but his personality is so unremarkable that I was anxious for the story to turn back to the main players. Likewise the scavenger woman he intermittently lusts after. The cast was too large for the book to give each person his/her due, and I think the book would have benefitted if people had been cut out altogether, or if the book had been longer.
The female portion of the cast is held at arm's length, unfortunately. Stiff and regal, or pale and unsure, they did not capture the attention as much as I'd hoped. Sapanibal was the only interesting one (as another reviewer noted), but she wasn't given much face-time to develop. More scenes like the tongue-lashing she gives the politicians in the steam bath would have helped.
Overall, the characters didn't leap off the page as in McCullough's novels. I felt it lay in part to Durham's more formal style, whereas McCullough tends to make her characters personable, if not downright chatty. Anachronistic, perhaps, but they are more approachable to modern sensibilities.
Durham doesn't flinch from extended battle scenes and maneuvers, which is one aspect of McCullough's novels that bug me (her battles are brief or entirely absent). So the two complement each other in that regard.
Bottom line: It took me 5 months to finally get through this book with my spare minutes of free time, and I don't feel that my time would have been better spent reading another book.
