Sparrow by James Hynes (2023) is set in ancient times at the end of the Roman Empire.
Jacob is the last survivor of an abandoned British-run Roman fishing town, Carthago Nova, on the Spanish coast. He wants to set down his history before he dies along with the dying empire. He promises the reader that he won’t lie, but because he is ‘just another author no one will ever remember’, and this is just another book that changes nothing’ he creates his own identity: the Sparrow.
He begins as a child in his mother Euterpe’s kitchen and herb-garden, before he moves into the tavern and the rooms upstairs. His life is of poverty in a town of rich markets, temples, taverns, and mansions. But life is changing – the city’s religion is changing. The city is transforming from pagan rituals to new moral codes and the basis of Christianity. The emporers of the city are twin boys Romulus ad Remus. Romulus had big plans for a city called Rome but Remus made fun of him and was killed for it. Romulus rules the city.
The Sparrow’s life is not an easy. It is a life of suffering, beating, begging, and murder. The city is brutal and lawless. The one thing he is grateful for is his mother’s stories about the world beyond the garden wall. He, the Sparrow, hopes that some day he will fly away from this life.
Sparrow as a boy is a slave, fetching water and shopping, but he can read. His father, before he was killed, tried to teach Sparrow everything: reading, poetry, and philosophy.
As a man, Sparrow now calls himself Jacob – longing to be a free man. ‘I have the freedom of the unremarkable, the powerless, and the insignifcant … I am the last Roman, the emperor of junk,’ he says. Is he doomed forever to be a slave?
This is not a work of history – it is a work of fiction. It is about power, loss of power, freedom and loss of freedom. It is a long and unpleasant read where mythology and fiction are indistinguishable.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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