self-made man as hero, The

Spectator, The, Sep 2, 2006 by Leckie, Ross

IMPERIUM by Robert Harris Hutchinson, £17.99, pp. 403, ISBN 0091800951

Robert Harris is not an obvious enigma. The former Newsnight reporter and political journalist is candid in his Guardian columns about, for example, his fondness for Peter Mandelson. Despite that, in selling over four million copies he did well, and rightly, with his first novel, Fatherland. His subsequent fiction, including Enigma, maintained his positioning as an intelligent popular novelist.

Some find his work lacks soul, but he has been steady and sure.

For his fifth novel, Harris has gone back a bit in time from his last, Pompeii, to a subject that is, prima facie, surprising for a novelist of Harris's hue, the Roman orator and politician Cicero, who was born talking in 106 BC and shut up only in 43 BC when an exasperated Mark Antony had him murdered.

Though recent biographers have tried to rehabilitate him, Cicero was a political toady and trimmer, and at his worst a self-important windbag of over-stylised prose. Some of his verse also survived the Dark Ages. His 'O fortunatam natam me consule Romam', which one might render as 'Rome was born a lucky city, when I as consul wrote this ditty, ' will take further centuries to live down.

He was no soldier, no Caesar, no wooer of women, no iconoclast. Those of us who have heard of Cicero at all probably remember his interminable speeches, letters and diatribes, mostly regurgitating the Greeks. Though some will recall the pleasure, most will prefer to forget the pain of having to translate them, or trying to. This all may explain why, with only two poor exceptions in Taylor Caldwell's 1965 A Pillar of Iron and Benita Kane Jaro's 2002 The Lock, no prior novelists have seen Cicero as fertile fictional material.

Still, we're talking Harris here. Even without a Vesuvius, surely he can do it? Read on.

Imperium, power, is apparently what Cicero was all about. The novel's purported point is to tell how its subject did, 'at the youngest age allowable, achieve the supreme imperium of the Roman consulship - and achieve it, amazingly - as a "new man", without family, fortune or force of arms'.

Harris's narrative device is Cicero's secretary, Tiro, who among other things (and just as well) perfected shorthand. The novel is Tiro's retrospective account of Cicero's climb. With the potential advantages of objectivity and range, that could work well. It doesn't, largely because Harris's Tiro is almost as much of a wimp as his master.

Plebeian generalities, like 'the quickest way to the top in politics is to get yourself close to the man at the top', are Tiro's stock in trade.

And Harris exploits him shamelessly as a deus ex machina: 'I sense that I am dawdling in this narrative', or 'I can sense your eagerness for me to get on to the climax of my story.'

But is there one? The first half of the novel is for some reason about Cicero's prosecution of the rapacious governor of Sicily, Verres. The second half is about, well, nothing, really. The rebel Catiline appears and so, bonking Pompey's pregnant wife, does Julius Caesar. Our hopes revive. They disappear. This novel is a hill with several hazy peaks, but no summit. Just after Harris's regulation 400 pages, it doesn't end. It stops.

Meanwhile, there are unsettling infelicities on almost every page. Archaisms and anachronisms are an inherent difficulty of historical fiction. Harris doesn't seem to care. There are casks of Chianti drunk by a 'grand country seigneur'. One moment Cicero's in a wagon, but next he's in a 'smart carpetum'. Harris likes the Ides of almost any month, but the first of the month replaces the poor Kalends when consistency in such things is key.

And the prose? Like a Hyundai car, it works, and will not need servicing for years.

But Harris's favoured automobile is allegedly an Aston Martin DB7 convertible. More of its spirit would do. Verb. sap. , as Cicero liked to say eventually, this is not a bad book.

It is, though, an altogether unsatisfactory one. Bring on Alfred Duggan, Allan Massie or even Stephen Saylor any day.

Ross Leckie's novel, Hannibal, is published in paperback by Canongate.