Sparrow
Ratings6
Average rating3.6
Told from the perspective of an enslaved boy being raised in a Roman brothel, a stunning literary historical novel of identity, family, suffering, and freedom In a brothel on the Spanish coast during the waning years of the Roman Empire, a young enslaved boy of unknown parentage is growing up. His world is a kitchen, then an herb-scented garden, followed by a loud and dangerous tavern, and finally, the mysterious upstairs where the "wolves" do their business. The wolves, named after the muses and coming from across the vast empire, are Sparrow's surrogate family. They are his mothers and his sisters, his guides in a rough life, his solace from it. When he is not being told stories by his beloved Euterpe, he runs errands for her lover, the cook, while trying to avoid the blows of their brutal overseer or the machinations of the chief wolf, Melpomene. But a hard fate awaits Sparrow, one that involves suffering, murder, mayhem, and the scattering of the little community that has been his whole world. Through meticulous research and bold imagination, James Hynes brings the entirety of a Roman city to vivid life, recreating old Pagan Rome as its codes and morals give way before the new religion of Christianity, and introduces readers to one of the most powerfully affecting and memorable characters of recent fiction. Sparrow is an enthralling, heartbreaking novel of identity, endurance, and love in a dangerous and changing time.
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Prostitution in the later part of the Roman Empire in the southern part of modern day Spain. This is an area/part of history that I am completely unfamiliar with so the setting is an intriguing one. As might be expected of subject matter the book is brutal and unflinching on the topics of slavery and the sex trade.
We follow the story of a young male slave who was bought by a brothel owner by mistake (they thought they were buying a girl). It follows his experiences first as kitchen helper but eventually in the seedier parts of the establishment. With the spread of Christianity during this period, this type of trade was beginning to move more underground, and that is reflected in the very insular nature of the story. All of the workers are largely confined to the brothel and various euphemisms and attempts at public modesty are adopted. This creates a somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere that definitely aids the plotting and scheming at the center of the story.
This is a hard subject and it is mostly dealt with well. The real problem for me is the last couple of pages, which ruined all the good work put in before. A very forced ending that felt completely detached from what was put in place before and jarred horribly with the flow of the story. I absolutely hate it when a story does that to me! I would rather a sad ending than a jarring and forced happy ending any day. This knocked it down from a 4 star to a moderate 3.
In terms of prose, this book is a little dodgy– first person present rarely works, and here it's occasionally grating, and often distracting. But don't let that stop you from reading the work.
I think it's impossible for this book not to be compared to Elodie Harper's Wolf Den series, and while each have their strong and weak points, I think this book comes out stronger in terms of literary worth and political analysis. The story is short and to the point, about power, about hierarchy, about colonialism. Rome is an animal that feeds on the weak, and so to be strong is to eventually be corrupted by this influence– not because of capitalism, or because of inequality, or because of any one abstract principle; the book posits that injustice is inevitable in a system that is built on injustice. The tools this system uses– colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, slavery, classism, sexism– are systematic and important and innate, but they are legs of a spider.
And yet, is life worth living? Yes. Is it worthwhile to try? Yes. Is collective action, friendship, love, honor and hope, worthwhile? Yes, always.
Despite having an explicit rape scene (something Elodie Harper occludes rather than reveal with her prose) I find the book much more hopeful than The Wolf Den. The use of a first person narrator telling us the end of his story (similar to Graves' I, Claudius) serves not as a clever narrative device, but as a balm. We know he'll make it out. Does it really matter how?
