Book Review: The Fall of Troy by Quintus of Smyrna

The Fall of Troy by Quintus Smyrnaeus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is a gap of epic happenings between Homer’s two masterworks, in Ancient Greece there were smaller epics that complete the story but were lost in time then one man rose to the challenge to bridge the gap. The Fall of Troy by Quintus of Smyrna is the rescued remnants of the lost epics between Homer that detail the end of the Trojan War constructed into a single work.

Writing a millennium after the probable date of the first time The Iliad was first written down, Quintus decided to fill in the gap between funeral for Hector and the fall of the Troy by salvaging what was left of the little epics to complete the coverage of the war. Quintus’ quality is nothing compared to Homer, but obviously he knows it and doesn’t try to be Homer just to complete the war. Quintus achieves his goal and frankly the rating of the book is based on his decision to even write the book, what could have improved the book is if the publishers of this edition would have had either footnotes or endnotes but just as a general reader it doesn’t really ruin things it just would have enhanced it.

The Fall of Troy finishes the war that ancient western world obsessed about for a millennium and gives readers today a view of how it ended how it ended.

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Book Review: Shogun by James Clavell

Shōgun: A Novel of Japan by James Clavell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first Englishman to visit Japan arrives just was the delicate socio-political balance left is at a tipping point between stability or never-ending war. Shogun by James Clavell follows the story of John Blackthorne who must adapt to an alien culture whilst his protector Yoshi Toranaga navigates the late Sengoku era of Japanese politics to survive.

Clavell’s fictionalized account of the first Englishman’s arrival just before the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate is a political thriller disguised behind a man in a foreign nation story. The 1200+ page novel is an engaging read though parts throughout are repetitive—Blackthorne’s internal thoughts obsessing about the Black Ship being the main culprit—that make me thankful that Clavell cut over a third of the original during the editing process. While I enjoyed the sight into Japanese culture and the political intrigue throughout the book, the history enthusiast in me disliked Clavell’s decision to renaming historical individuals because every time I saw Toranaga I kept thinking Tokugawa Ieyasu, Ishido was Ishida Mitsunari, the Taiko was Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Goroda was Oda Nobunaga, etc. to the point that I got a tad frustrated because I mixed the historical name with the fictionalized name. Yet Clavell’s overall writing was able to bring me back to the historical novel.

Shogun is a fantastic historical novel of an Englishman’s arrival in late Sengoku era Japan that brings the culture to the fore and the political intrigue twisted throughout a nice highlight.

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