This book should work better than it does, given its conceit. An epistolary novel telling the life of Augustus only through the correspondence of other people—until at the very end the man himself is allowed to pen a res gestae (which partly overlaps with the real one). Self-disclosure after a book's worth of surmise; big pay-off for long build-up.

The problem is that a lot of the voices in this massive polyphony just aren't very interesting. Livia and Ovid especially are gigantic missed opportunities. Livia is ambitious 'just because'. I get not trying to go toe-to-toe with Robert Graves' Machiavel Livia but give us something. Ovid is a complete cypher, a mere hanger-on within the narrative. Williams doesn't even try to give him the louche charm the author of the Ars Amatoria ought to have. But most unforgivably, he is brought in to kickstart the downfall-of-Julia narrative and his carmen et error never even comes up. What the fuck, Williams? Imagine writing a novel where Lord Lucan shows up and not telling the reader what happened to him. It's perverse is what it is.

Williams' prose in general is much more flat-footed than I expected, given the massive hype around Stoner (which I haven't read). Several of his letters subject their recipients to descriptions of mise-en-scène that are not only insipid but (far worse)writerly. By far the most successful bits are when he's just trying to be entertaining. The Mark Antony of HBO's Rome clearly had his origin here:*

That whey-faced little bastard Octavius came around to see me yesterday morning. He has been in Rome for the past week or so, acting like a bereaved widow, calling himself Caesar, all manner of nonsense.

That final asyndeton... Tell me you can't hear James Purefoy's voice in your head.

His snobby, orotund Cicero is similarly delightful:

Marcus Agrippa, a huge bumpkin who would appear more at ease tramping a furrow, either before or after the plough, than walking in a drawing room...

Even Julia, who is a frightful bore for the first two-thirds of her arc (I don't care how justified her complaints are) becomes very readable when she's telling us matter-of-factly what a slag she is.

But these are exceptions to the polite, period drama respectability of most of the book, and that left me cold.

*Compare Mark Antony's first lines in the novel and the show: ''Sentius, you gamesome old cock'; 'Brutus, me old cock.'