Gore Vidal (1925–2012)

A thoroughly nasty, but very enjoyable, memoir, in which Gore Vidal shamelessly and wittily takes the opportunity to settle scores with numerous well-known people who aren't around any more to answer back, whilst at the same time doing his best to impress us with how many of the great and famous he has rubbed shoulders with at one time or another. I frequently felt uncomfortable about laughing out loud at this book, but it was hard not to.

Lots of vitriol is directed at his mother; at the show more Kennedys (he shared a stepfather with Jackie); at the US literary establishment, which he accuses of blacklisting him after the publication of The city and the pillar with its explicit same-sex love story; at Truman Capote (accused of being short); at President Truman's "national security state" (fair enough); at European cinema for its deluded notion that directors are more important than writers; at Charlton Heston; at Hillary Clinton (insufficiently impressed at meeting him); at the English royal family (dim); and at just about everyone else who appears in the book, with the minor exceptions of Tennessee Williams, who is only mildly teased, and Vidal's grandfather Senator T P Gore, who can do no wrong. show less

Well, I thank Julian Barnes for this one. While many people were flummoxed by the lengthy central section of Barnes's recent Elizabeth Finch, I quite enjoyed that curious venture into the life of Julian, later known as "the Apostate." I didn't know about this Roman emperor who decided to push back against the inroads of what he called "the Galileans," and the Christianity imposed by Constantine as the official faith of the empire. Julian's goal was the restoration of the old Roman pantheon show more and the Mithraic cult (from which the Galileans appropriated a number of practices, holidays, and folklore), while still permitting freedom of worship for everyone.

Vidal's Julian is a bookish, nerdy kid who wants only to be left alone to study and read and talk philosophy. Alas, as the nephew of Constantine and cousin to Constantius, Constantine's son and heir to the imperial purple, he could not avoid the deadly pressures - as one in line for the throne, he would always be watched and suspected as conniving to take it for himself. He lived his youth striving to be inconspicuous, unobjectionable, and alive. His older brother, ambitious, scheming, but not too bright, serves as an object lesson when he gets on someone's bad side and is murdered. Julian just wants to live.

And live he does. Structured as excerpts from Julian's purported memoir and diary, Vidal leads him from his scholarly pursuits into the temptations of power and adulation, through mystical religious epiphany, to an obsessive reliance on omens and auguries (he was known as the Bull Burner for the numbers of animals he slaughtered in sacrifice), to a thundering ambition to exceed Alexander's conquests of, well, every place he can get to. And - of course - it ends badly. The memoir sections are leavened by marginal commentary made by two scholars and erstwhile friends of Julian, often with acerbic, sharply funny observations on Julian's own reliability.

Vidal is hard on the Galileans - there is plenty to complain of and discuss, and as a seasoned philosopher, Julian is an able disputant in the theological strife. He is likable, ebullient, quite smart about managing men and what will persuade or coerce them into doing what he wants. But for all his dismissal of Christian beliefs, his own beliefs lead him astray and let him down... with bloody consequences for thousands, and himself. Some criticize this novel as excessively anti-Christian, and so it is to some extent, but the Roman gods ain't much better, and all the worse when you start mixing religion with affairs of state. This book was published in 1964... we should still be paying careful attention today!

Talky, busy... don't even try to keep straight who all those other Romans are who people the pages. Just roll with it, and watch this basically decent, intelligent, ambitious, courageous young fellow on his progress through the messy, violent, foolish, unpredictable, dangerous world of the Roman empire in the 4th century. show less

That was a lot more fun that I expected. A pulp mix of 1950's political drama meets Casablanca meets jewel of the Nile, with the emphasis on intrigue over adventure. There's a few gritty action moments, but it's mostly petty villains and femme fatales trying to orchestrate a jewel theft against the backdrop of rebellion in Egypt.

Snappy dialogue, fast paced and lots of colourful characters. Loved it

A stunning novel, in which Vidal uses the cannily chosen Aaron Burr as a hatchet to take apart the founding fathers and our various myths about them and show how all their human frailties are embedded in the nation and its direction. Burr, and his Boswell, Charles Schuyler, are an impeccably drawn pair of unreliable narrators who take us down the river of the creation of the United States and show us nooks and crannies in it we never even suspected.