Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century
by
Annette Ferran
I,
Claudius
Number
14 on the Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century is I, Claudius, by Robert
Graves, published in 1934. This novel purports to be the autobiography of
Tiberius Claudius, a member of the Roman ruling family in the time of Julius
Caesar. From this basis, Graves
gives us a historical novel with the intimacy of a first-person eye-witness
account.
Why
is I, Claudius a great novel? Let’s
start with the character Claudius.
In contrast with his family, friends, and rivals, he is a poor physical
specimen: he stutters and he is half-crippled. This means he is considered weak
and stupid, dismissible at best, abusable. But as we come to find out, Claudius is far from stupid and
far from weak. He uses these
perceptions as a cloak to hide his actions and manipulations, and he becomes a
great man in the context of his time.
More
than this, Claudius is a great literary character. His personality is so fully formed by this author, Graves,
that he is as if real—living, breathing, thinking, feeling. He is clever and funny, likeable,
sympathetic, and, finally, shockingly ruthless. Of course, he was
real; his life is a historical fact, after all. It took place approximately
2060 years ago, and in a language long dead, but in Graves’s hands, Claudius
and his contemporaries could be our contemporaries. He lives on the page and he continues to live after the back
cover of the book is reluctantly closed.
(In fact, Graves went on to write a sequel, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina.)
First-person
narration tends to do this: to create an indelible
character whose story has immediacy and intimacy. It conveys a different style
of truth than another attitudinal approach would. Certainly, it provides a more
visceral experience, a kind of juiciness, than a historical recitation does.
Next
what makes the novel great is the material Graves has to work with. Countless literary works have been
harvested from Roman history, rich as it is in drama. The intricacies of relationships, the political and social
rules dictating behaviors and fomenting rebellions right down to the very
personal; murder, mating, elevation and debasement, loyalty, remorse, betrayal,
grief; all of the most intense emotion-rousing, reaction-inciting aspects of
humanity bubble in the stew of this history. And we devour and nourish ourselves from that stew to this
day.
And
finally there is the artistry. The
Romans left behind a remarkable body of literature and primary-source history
themselves. But what imagination it
takes to construct fiction out of this ancient heritage! Other authors have done it before and
since, but of the 20th century novelists, Graves’s work merits its
place among the best of fiction.
Read I, Claudius and see if
you don’t yearn to know more about this man and the men and women around
him. (If you do, go to Edith
Hamilton, The Roman Way, and then see
if you can resist her previous work, The
Greek Way. These are not
fiction; they are very strictly nonfiction, history-teaching, scholarly works
but imbued with the novelist’s spirit.)
And consider that this novel was written and published during a
revolutionary time in the history of the English-language novel, when the
contemporary, the ordinary were the topics of choice.
Could
Claudius stand tall beside John Dowell (The
Good Soldier), Jake Barnes (The Sun
Also Rises), Charles Ryder (Brideshead
Revisited)? He could. Could he stand alone? He does.
Annette
Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also the Associate Editor
for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
