likely to continue to return to it every few years. As a historical novel it is among
the best I have read, and as a novel dealing with contemporary issues, it seems
that it becomes more up-to-date every time I read it. The book’s conceit is quite
simple; it puts you in someone else’s shoes and makes you reason along with
them, only to come to the conclusion that in your everyday reasoning, you are
perhaps going by assumptions that are not to be taken for granted so easily.
De Carvalho’s novel is set during the reign of the enlightened Roman
emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the second century. The story focuses on Lucius
Valerius Quintius, one of the two ruling duumvirs of the (fictive) city of Tarcisis
in the province of Lusitania (“Portugal”). As the city’s prefects, the duumvirs are
jointly responsible for the protection of the city, the criminal court and the
general good order. With the prosperity and calm of the Pax Romana going
back for generations, there is a general laid-back attitude towards governing,
and when the other duumvir dies, the city council invests Lucius Valerius with
the deceased man’s powers as well. The Pax Romana is about to come to an
end, however, with the news of the arrival of bands of Moorish marauders on
Lusitania’s shores and the simultaneous spread of a new religious cult that is
defiant in the face of Roman peace, justice and order: the Christians. It falls on
Lucius to protect the city from the Moors attacking them from the outside, and
from the cult to spread amongst the city’s Roman citizens and slaves within the
city's confines. Things become complicated when a girl, Iunia Cantaber, the
daughter of a respected citizen and old friend of Lucius’, becomes one of the
Christians’ most fierce and fearless defenders. The city seems doomed to fall
to either outside forces, inside disturbances and religious fervour or a
combination of both. Lucius must uphold the law as he sees fit and protect the
city as he sees necessary. His position is not one to be envied.
The novel is presented as the autobiography of Lucius Valerius Quintius and
as such is biased by his own standing as a Roman official. Since he tells the
story himself, he can defend all his decisions and actions with the benefit of
hindsight, and though he seems sincere, it nevertheless is an interesting
choice as a narrator. The effect of the narration is of course to ‘prejudice’ the
reader towards the Moors and the Christians and this works wonderfully. Lucius
Valerius is presented as a reasonable, intelligent man who likes to follow
Marcus Aurelius’ ideals of governing but who has to deal with the overwhelming
forces of history as it threatens to swamp him and the city for which he is
responsible. It is both refreshing and somehow eerie to be looking at Christians
from another perspective; after all, it has been the dominant force in European
culture for the last eighteen hundred years.
‘The sect of the fish’, as the Christians are referred to in the novel, are still a
relatively unknown group in the 180s AD, especially in the provinces further
away from Rome, such as Lusitania. They rivalled many other religious cults for
attention, though they were singular in proclaiming the existence of only one
God that could not exist besides the Roman pantheon of Gods. The Jews,
relatively well integrated into Roman Society, kept their religion to themselves,
often performing the duties of sacrifice to the Roman Gods in public (if they
were citizens) in order to maintain the societal status quo. Iunia Cantaber and
the other Christians in Tarcisis refuse to do so, and thus become a
destabilizing force in Roman Society that will have to be punished and
exterminated to regain stability and social order.
The writer is a master of evocation. The reader will have the impression that
he or she will be able to walk around Tarcisis without any help, should it have
existed. De Carvalho pays equal attention to the characters and many of them
are fully drawn, whilst even the minor characters have their moments to
sparkle. The entire novel much have been well-researched, as I, as a student
of Roman antiquity, could not detect any anachronistic details nor any wholly
anachronistic thoughts coming from the characters, though it must be
mentioned that it is obviously always difficult to establish what a person who
lived 19 centuries ago could and could not have thought.
‘A god strolling in the cool of the evening’ is a historical novel that says as
much about the time in which it is situated as it says about our times, issues
and outlook on life. It even bestows upon the White European-Christian reader
a sense of what it must be like to be part of small (albeit or not religious)
minority in a climate in which such minorities are hardly, if at all, tolerated.
Lastly, it presents a violent (though probably accurate) picture of the early days
of a religious cult striving for dominance for mainly human reasons, rather than
dominance through intervention of a higher being.
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