Review: When We Were Romans

When We Were Romans
Matthew Kneale
(Picador)

Hannah's estranged husband is giving her trouble, so she packs the car and heads off to hide out in Rome, where she lived as a young woman. Lawrence is the wilful nine-year old narrator and caretaker for his mother, sister, and his hamster, Hermann. In Rome there are at first boisterous dinner parties and happy reunions as they shuffle between the small apartments of Hannah's various friends there, but when they get their own quarters, the storm clouds roll in.
Lawrence develops a fascination with the most demented Roman emperors and most deluded Popes, intrigued by their paranoia . This fascination grows in tandem with his mother's worry that their father has followed them to Rome and is renting an apartment with a view into their own. A suspicious substance is found on the icing of a cake, knives appear in Lawrence's bed, and there is a mysterious white powder in the water.

Kneale has set himself some challenging tasks. Rome is a difficult place for fiction, writers often rely too heavily on it, burying plot and character in unnecessary image-noise. The child narrator, too, is frequently troublesome. When it's wrong, it's impossible to overcome, leaving otherwise good stories trapped inside unreadable novels. Finally, the stalker-ex-husband saga almost always reeks of Midweek Movie. The three in combination could have been lethal, but Kneale resists the temptation to dwell on the beauty of Rome, not reflecting an adult vision of the city, but a child's geography of it, as well as a child's perception of familial breakdown. The Piazza Navona is not notable for its fountain, but for the toy shop that sells the miniature Roman soldiers Lawrence covets. He never asks why their father would do this to them, but feels the effect when he learns there isn't enough money for him to have an army of Roman soldiers.

Lawrence defines his mother's friends and acquaintances by the animals they resemble, based on appearance and on how nice they are to him and Jemima. We meet her old friend 'Franseen nice cat', new acquaintance 'Janiss pretty pig' and the barrel-chested and bearded poet, 'Freddy Christmas bear'. The descriptive silhouette makes Lawrence's Roman landscape all the more colourful. A number of questions are left unanswered out of necessity: a nine-year old boy like Lawrence might not ask where his mother's money comes from, or why their father might do this to them, or successfully differentiate between imagination and reality. The narrative can become irritating (especially in the use of phonetic spellings), but rather than assign Lawrence a maturity that would undermine his voice, Kneale just lets it be, and it remains believable. I don't know how Matthew Kneale made this work, but he did, and it does.

(From Totally Dublin, July 2007)