The slave in the next room

‘Being Roman,’ declares Catullus, the poet protagonist of Counting the Stars, ‘is a state of mind’. As in earlier novels — The Siege, House of Orphans — Helen Dunmore allows the reader to enter the ‘state of mind’ of a specific moment in history. Here, Julius Caesar’s Rome, in all its squalor and grandeur, brutality and sophistication, is made available to us in a way that is almost wholly convincing.

Dunmore constructs her narrative from Catullus’ poetry. In less skilful hands this would seem laboured, but Dunmore is a poet herself and the joins don’t show. Catullus is obsessed with Clodia, the ‘Lesbia’ of his poems. Clodia is ten years older, married and a mother. She is cruel, voracious and spoiled and she has plenty of lovers besides Catullus, including her own brother, the sadistic and ambitious ‘Pretty Boy Clodius’. None of this deters Catullus, who chooses to believe that a core of innocence and true feeling lies within Clodia to which only he, with his poet’s sensibility, has access.