It’s been a long time coming for György Spiró. However much Hungarian writers complain about the isolation forced upon them by their non-Indo-European agglutinative language, the big names have always got through, maybe to a global shrug from the reading public, but they have made it out. And in fact, recently, the Magyar dead have done particularly well: Bánffy, Szabó, Szerb, Márai and Karinthy have found many British fans.
Though he’s better known as a dramatist in Hungary, Spiró’s massive novel Captivity was published there in 2005 to great acclaim. Now published in English (it has probably taken Tim Wilkinson this long to translate it), it follows the wanderings of Uri (a Jew, but a Roman citizen) across the Roman empire, with cameos for Christ, Pontius Pilate and Caligula.
Two major obstacles face a writer wanting to ferret into the Caesars and the start of Christianity: Robert Graves and Life of Brian (oh, and maybe Ben Hur too). Spiró works harder than Graves and seems to have amassed every fact and archaeological detail about the Roman empire from Augustus to Vespasian, but Graves got there first and if you’ve read I, Claudius and Suetonius, Spiró’s portrait of Roman society doesn’t offer much that’s new, apart from being harsher on Claudius.
There are some moments of black humour with slave drivers and others, but perhaps because of the memory of Monty Python, Spiró backs away from full contact with comedy, apart from possibly a line, almost at the end, on page 854: ‘There was no necessity to write a bulky historical work replete with facts.’ This is either a joke or a staggering lack of self-awareness.
For me, the Jewish element of the novel was the most successful. Having a bookish, short-sighted shlemiel as your central character isn’t a bad move with the reading public, and Uri in his travels to Alexandria and Jerusalem gets to see all aspects of the Jews of his era.
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