Salambo by Gustave Flaubert
World Distributor’s LIbrary, 1959; 253 pages
Whew! Blood, guts (literally), human sacrifice, battle upon battle, feast upon feast, betrayal upon betrayal, you get the idea. This would make a movie in the tradition of 300 and suchlike, except there is really no-one to root for. Maybe Matho, the besotted mercenary general and his cowardly lieutenant Spendius? Maybe the titular priestess? Maybe Hamilcar Barca, the brilliant, ruthless, wealthy general of the Carthaginian forces? Certainly not the Carthaginians themselves. This is a story of brutal times, when life was not valued (unless it was that of a rich person) and people felt their lives controlled by incomprehensible, brutal gods who had to be bribed and sated.
Despite the effective description and deft characterisation (albeit of ‘bigger than life’ characters), the death does get wearying. Another torture. Another death. Another …
Flaubert is most famous for Madame Bovary, a very different story from this. What’s the Bovary body count? I suspect it’s a little less than the hundred thousand odd mercenaries, citizens, slaves and soldiers who get burned, gutted, impaled, starved, crucified, trampled, crushed, gored, bitten and stabbed here. Pretty much any form of death that the technology of the time allowed occurs here. Well, except natural and accidental — nobody dies of old age or even disease, not even the ancient leprous suffete Hanno, whose face is rotting off his bloated, diseased body such that the back of his throat is visible and he wears a veil.
The copy I have is a cheap, old paperback; the colour cover is badly printed, the paper is yellow. It’s the perfect format for a (despite the author) pulpy story. The cover tries to suggest the story is sexy, but there’s little sex. Some infatuation, yes.
Pulpy story? Classic writer? Yes. OK. It’s not entirely pulp. Flaubert does not dwell lasciviously on breasts and blood and suchlike. Given the brutality of the incidents, he retains a distance. One suspects he is working to accurately describe a way of life alien to us, and in a voice that refrains from judgement and seeks to describe. And he basically succeeds, and in that it is not a pulp story.
It could well be worth a read if you like the TV Game of Thrones (though I did not watch beyond episode 1, so I am guessing about that).
Blood. Barbarians. Battles. Swords and pikes and axes. Exotic names and weapons. Sieges, fights to the death. If that’s your thing, it’s a winner.
DSPACE 