Julian

Review of Gore Vidal's Julian: 

A novel presented as the Emperor Julian's unfinished memoir. For some reason I thought this would be about a libertine Roman emperor and involve a lot of satire at the expense of uptight Christian morality. Well, not just some reason--I knew Julian was the last pagan emperor of a now Christian Rome and would (1600 year old spoiler alert!) come to a bad end in a pointless, ego-driven war with the Persians. Well, I shouldn't indulge in ignorant stereotypes about late pagan vainglorious Roman emperors.

In point of fact Julian himself was a competent general and administrator, plus a fairly strict moralist and earnest, humane philosopher and ruler himself. The writing and characters are on par with Vidal's American historical novels--he's interested in characters and motivations more than unsubtle jabs. (There are some, but mostly in a running commentary by two scholars who have scribbled notes in the margins of the manuscript, often quite funny.) Julian is drawn as someone who wants to be an intellectual and philosopher, is really by temperament a monarch and general, and is just self-aware enough to realize the gap and regret it. There are some ideas that seem monumentally bad, though, which he's told are monumentally bad, which turn out to be monumentally bad--something in between tragedy and farce.

Not a quite a four star book because, while overall quite good, I'm not invested in Julian as a historical figure, and the supporting characters I know only from this novel, so it never engaged me the way Lincoln or Burr did.