Julian: A Novel by Gore Vidal Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Julian: A Novel
Book Review: A Wonderful Illusion
Summary: 5 Stars
As grand and germane a historical treat as ever. Julian comes alive, jumps off the page-here's an enthusiastic, precocious boy who becomes a hard-edged warrior; a would-be philosopher who ends up ruling half the world; a sweet innocent who causes countless deaths, including his own, by starting yet another ghastly war. You feel like shaking him and telling him not to do it, so vividly does Gore Vidal orchestrate the ominous campaign to Persia. What a character, and what great art. It makes you think you can communicate across 1,600 years.
But we can't, of course. It's all a wonderful illusion. The cantankerous, aging but still sharp witted philosophers Libanius and Priscus are as brilliantly drawn as Julian. They're bawdy, funny and deeply sad. The great student-emperor was their only hope, but he's long dead and they can't even publish his memoirs. There's no going back-except through the accomplishment of a novelist like Vidal.
Book Review: A fine Roman novel
Summary: 5 Stars
Before reading Julian, my only experience with Gore Vidal was his book Creation. Although that book was interesting, it ultimately failed to satisfy me, and so I delayed reading Julian for some time, despite my fascination with the topic of Roman history.
Julian is a much better book. The mood of the Empire, so late in its day, is neatly captured, with it's encumbered bureacracy, rigid ceremony, political strife, and growing religious fervor. Into this strangely recognizable world enters Julian, a second-born son with an interest in philosophy and the old religious rites, and a latent flair for leadership. Vidal evokes Julian's ambitions and fascinations concerning the "old gods" and the "new cult" of Christianity. Julian champions the former on the road to the throne, scorning the Galilean's followers while maneuvering in a world where the new religion was politically charged and dangerously assertive. The book centers on this debate, but digresses into more immediate problems such as the problem of imperial succession and barbarian incursions into the Empire. Julian is forced into the role of secular leader and military commander, where he displays repressed talents in war and at court. Although his ultimate ambitions are cut tragically short, Julian is consistently portrayed as a gifted leader with sympathetic goals. He is a hero of a world that was passing away, and his valiant attempt to bring the Golden Age of pagan Rome back is a vain yet noble struggle in the face of a changing world.
Vidal's personal touch is the commentary written "in the margins" by two philosophers, comparing their own experiences to Julian's first-person testimony. Their vanity, sarcasm, and selfish reflections on the apostate emperor lend levity and humanity to the novel, as well as filling in several controversial gaps that history leaves to us. Vidal's conjectures in these places are convincing and a little bone-chilling, and deftly expressed in the remarks between these two men.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with Julian and recommend it to anyone curious about the later Roman Empire and one of its most fascinating -- and most often misunderstood -- characters.
Book Review: A great read...A man's book!
Summary: 4 Stars
This is my second helping of Gore Vidal. I read "Creation" some years ago. This is a great novel. Gore Vidal has a tremendous way with words. He maintains tension in dialogue and drama so easily. This work concerns the emperor, Julian, who was unlike the post-Constantine emperors in that he favored a return to old-time religion, not the religion of the Galileans, which had become "official" after Constantine. The story traces his life based on a shared manuscript between two philosophy teachers. The plot thickens throughout the novel with conspiracy and political shenanigans. I only offer four stars because it is unreal that the Church has NO redeeming value, and comes across way too evil. Obviously, the ending is a tad predictable.
Pick it up! A great choice for Men's Book study groups! What a way to get boys to read. It is quite a fantastic way to begin a study of the Roman Empire in its last days.
Book Review: A new Augustus?
Summary: 4 Stars
I read and reviewed this novel forty-six years ago when it was newly published. After re-reading both novel and callow review (it was for a college literary magazine!) I find a glimpse of myself as a younger, more certain man and of Julian as a man of whom much was expected. At the time, I thought of Julian as a late Roman John Kennedy, a carrier of hope cut off before his dreams could be realized (it was that kind of moment). On reflection, I'm less generous of both Vidal's snippy interpretation and Julian's failures both of promise and of delivery, a man who discovered too soon that his dreams were hallucinations.
The Rome described bears little resemblance to Rome as it was in its days of greatness; in fact the name appears as an adjective to describe a world order rather than to describe a by-then backwater city, more Old Detroit than the Imperial City of the Augustan Age. The concepts that made brought Rome grandeur even when their promise was violated had long passed, devastated by plagues, bankruptcy, internal strife and civil war, and a general exhaustion. To be Roman meant to have a pulse; to dream of greatness meant to pine for a stronger Euro. Instead of dominating the world, "with war the proud to overbear", Rome bribes the tribes and struggles even to deal with Persia as an equal.
I've come to believe that Julian's quest for a return to Paganism was misdirection, though Vidal clearly disagrees. The spread of Christianity or any revolutionary order reflects, as always, the failure of the old order to provide hope and optimism. The fact that Rome embraced an obscure Eastern mystery cult that at its core excluded them indicates how spiritually bankrupt that order had become.
The text is presented and critiqued, appropriately, by two aging Pagan philosophers, last of a dying breed: the stuffy, conservative Priscus and the more accepting Libanius. This is quite appropriate. Vidal lets the multiheaded spirit of the East, from the charlatan Maximus to the Academe of Athens set Julian's journey. But Julian is ultimately a child of the West -- still vigorous and able to trade blow for blow with enemies. When he follows Paganism instead of the genius of Rome he sets off on the road to ruin.
Vidal is acutely aware of this tension, but I've never been quite sure where it leads him any more than it does Julian. My impression nearly five decades ago is, comfortingly, unchanged. I still don't quite understand Julian, and I'm not alrogether certain Vidal did; or if he understood Julian, he preferred to keep the mystery to himself, in Eleusis.
Book Review: A refreshing and envigorating read
Summary: 5 Stars
In this world which remains steeped in fundamentalism & superstition, it is satisfying to indulge yourself with a book like "Julian", the story of Rome's Apostate Emperor who was pagan at a time when a virulent strain of Christianity had attached itself like a virus to the dying cell of the Roman Empire.
As absolute monarch, Julian had the power to enforce his will upon the State, and that is where the entertainment factor (id/wish fulfillment) comes in. Instead of the fundies crafting laws that persecute anyone different from them, now the tables are turned, and they receive a dose of their own medicine, and find it is not to their liking.
The best world would be one in which people make a mighty, valiant effort not to interfere with one another. It is when people try to force others to believe as they do, that trouble begins. But when you are firmly persuaded that your beliefs are sanctioned by almighty God, then the copious spilling of the blood of non-believers becomes entirely justifiable; and a cycle of vendetta arises, for violence begets violence.
Of course, Gore Vidal was just borrowing ideas from Voltaire and other French atheists who also wrote of Julian. Whether Gore's effort is better than theirs, I don't know.
Edward Gibbon points out that Julian went to the same extreme as the Christians did, rather than exercising commendable pagan tolerance. Gore tends to paint Julian in highly complimentary colors, but I would defer to Gibbon on the subject of historical accuracy.
Gore depicts the Emperor Julian as a mild, yet firm, philosopher-king, highly reactionary and conservative, reacting in this case to the upstart radical Christian cult which had by this time attained acceptance in the Roman establishment. Julian espoused the ancient virtues and ancient beliefs, and worked to restore the old pagan temples. During the Enlightenment his legend became something of a cause celebre among French atheists.
After his death, of course, the Christians destroyed much of what he had wrought, and showed themselves less tolerant than any other religion that had come before them; a policy which resulted in the eventual demise of tolerant, social paganism.
I very much enjoyed this book and wholeheartedly recommend it to others.