Why do we read historical fiction? Is it because we love the brutal simplicity of our past? If so, the opening chapter of Tim Pears’s novel is all you could want – a bravura set piece built around a tense encounter between a Roman legion and a posse of warriors in what is now south Wales. The tribe leader hands over his daughter Olwen to the Roman governor as a kind of hostage bride before thundering off with his warriors. If you were going to film it, you’d call Ridley Scott. But that night Olwen runs away with the governor’s translator – an Ephesian slave called Quintus – and Pears ditches the legions and horses to focus entirely on these two and their attempt to make it to the coast. It’s a handbrake turn from epic into something intense and intimate. If you were going to film it, you’d ask Richard Linklater.
When the couple encounter a Roman patrol, its leader tells them that every last trace of Olwen, her family and her world “will be obliterated … The governor will write his account with no mention of them.” So there’s another raison d’être for historical fiction: we can use it to write back into the story those whom the victors have written out. Quintus, a slave, and Olwen, a young woman from a people who are about to be obliterated, could not be more marginal, but in Pears’s hands each comes to represent the culture that created them.
