Will the Real Mr. Bronner Please Stand Up?

There are reasons why a reader trusts one critic’s word over another, be it professional credentials, venue, a history of reviews that meshed with their ultimate conclusions on literature, or that most elusive thing of all: voice and style.

I know that for many readers of the _ Heinessen Register _ , I am that trusted critic. This makes it hard for me to turn down the offer of very generous page space in this Sunday’s issue to review Nat Rome’s latest work, _ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ , despite doing so going against my usual code of professional ethics. In general, I do not review books whose authors I know, and I have never before had the pleasure— or pain— of reviewing a novel in which I feature as a character. But I can’t disappoint the _ Register _ ’s readers, and I can’t turn down page space.

Let’s begin with the facts.

_ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ is the latest entry in Nat Rome’s sprawling alternate history series, _ A Wheel Inside a Wheel _ , which covers the lives of Kaiser Reinhard von Lohengramm and Marshal Yang Wen-li at the tail end of the Alliance-Imperial war, inviting the reader to consider the amusing, if implausible, conceit that the two famous leaders were both expatriates in their youths. The early books in the series describe Kaiser Reinhard growing up in the tenements of Heinessen as Reinhard von Müsel, while Marshal Yang flees to Odin as a teenager under the false name “Hank von Leigh” to escape debts accrued on Phezzan.

_ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ is the fifth mainline novel in the series, and the third which focus on the Imperial half of the story, with Yang Wen-li as the protagonist. I say “mainline” because the story has sprawled beyond any reasonable expectation, and includes several novellas, short stories, and retellings. _ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ covers many of the events of last year’s Alliance entry, _ Lighting Out for the Territories _ , from the opposite side, and follows directly from the novella _ Keep the Home Fires (Burning) _ . The events of this book span the months immediately before the Imperial Civil War to the first confrontation between Reinhard von Müsel and Yang Wen-li, in the skies above Phezzan. It suffices to say that this is not a book that newcomers to the series will find an easy starting point.

There has been plenty of critical and audience praise heaped onto the previous entries in _ A Wheel Inside a Wheel _ , and plenty of controversy to follow. I am sure that this book will be no exception.

Controversy aside, _ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ is a messy, badly structured novel. Though the series had its beginnings in the tightly paced romance of _ Speaking In Tongues _ , Rome has let his imagination eclipse his talent, and certainly his self-restraint. The series is a several thousand page gargantuan, and this latest work does not deviate from the trend of each successive book growing more bloated than the last. _ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ alone is well over eight hundred pages. I’m told that the next two books— intended to be simultaneously published— will be the last in the series, and I shudder to think of how dense they will be, especially next to each other on my desk to review.

_ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ does not justify its length. It’s unevenly paced, and only partly due to the author’s obvious struggle to cleanly include every relevant historical event and their consequences. The other part is Rome’s inability to pare down and make the pages worth his readers’ time.

Rome’s approach to narrative is claimed by some to be an accurate representation of the incoherency of history. But let us not fool ourselves: history is not literature, as Rome himself has heard me say many times. If Rome wished to write a history, he should have done so. As it stands, he has given himself the liberties of fiction in determining the course of events, and thus far has chosen to only exercise those liberties sparingly. It often seems, while reading _ A Wheel Inside a Wheel _ , that Rome does not understand what genre he is writing. Each book has been completely different in tone— from the romance of the first book, to a coming of age in the second, a court drama in the third, a spy thriller in the fourth, and this latest entry as the most egregious of the bunch.

Rome spends the first half of the novel setting up a courtly tragedy, then, at almost exactly the midway point, makes a jarring and abrupt turn into military fiction. In that second half, having abandoned glittering parties and backrooms gossip, Rome dedicates far too much page space to waxing about the grace and beauty of warships. Did you know that Rome worked as an engineer? You won’t be ignorant of that fact by the time you’ve finished _ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ .

While the book is tonally incoherent between its two halves, the characters themselves tread the same ground over and over, acting out a doom spiral that they seem collectively incapable of breaking. While they may be deeply human— and, indeed, Rome’s well realized central cast is one the work’s greatest strengths— it will likely frustrate readers to watch. There is only so much pity the average person has for a man who feels guilty about cheating on his wife, and Rome asks the reader to extend that pity in abundance.

Rome is not a lyrical writer. The few occasions in which he deigns to be poetic have a dull tendency to err on the side of triteness. His strengths as an author are fully in the concrete: Rome’s imagery and the situations in which he places his cast create a web of association in the reader’s mind, on which he can draw to invoke new emotions or recontextualize old ones. This repetition is almost choral, and it strengthens the mytho-historical tragedy which Rome is attempting to convey. The danger lies in letting it slip into melodrama, which Rome is guilty of on more than one occasion. Rome must believe that characters taking two steps forward and one step back are dancing, rather than than shuffling awkwardly around the page.

All of that being said, it begs the question: why has _ A Wheel Inside a Wheel _ garnered the critical reception that it has? Even the naysayers, myself perhaps included, must admit that it is not just because of Rome’s constant courting of controversy, though the work is challenging to many people’s sensibilities and the vision of history that they learned in grammar school. Heroes who, in a textbook, seem to move through the world puppeted by strings of fate, now are flawed men, driven by personal emotions: love and anger; powerlessness and a hunger for power; and confused, self-contradictory desires to abandon their own wants and to chase them down at the same time. In a way, Rome makes the great men of history feel like bit players in their own narrative, shoved around by forces outside of their control. These are not the forces of destiny, but merely the impersonal whims of society that we all are subject to. These are desperate men and women, who, through their own sense of inadequacy, struggle to understand their places in the world.

Rome has set out to write a novel which challenges our conception of history— how history is constructed, and what of our humanity is lost when we mythologize fallible men. It’s an admirable goal. It’s unfortunate that he has completely failed to achieve it.

I met Rome during his final semester at Mittermeyer Polytechnic Institute on Phezzan. I had been invited there for a year as an artist-in-residence and a guest lecturer for their graduate program, and took up the offer in search of a change of scenery. Rome begged and pled his way into my class, despite being an undergraduate in an unrelated field. I don’t know what compelled him to do so— he admitted the first time that we spoke that he had never read a single one of my works— but I suspect he was just looking for any kind of diversion that he could find, and my class had an interesting course description and fit neatly into his schedule. I won’t dwell on the nature of our relationship, but it suffices to say that Rome and I ended up knowing each other quite well. I like to believe that I have been something of a guide to him, but based on my portrayal in _ A Wheel Inside a Wheel _ , I don’t know if he would say the same.

It was a great surprise when I was reading the last full Imperial side novel in the series, _ Servants of the Pharaoh, _ and saw my name appear on the page. A person doesn’t often get to see themselves on the other side of the two-way mirror that is another man’s perspective. Is the figure in these books— the critic who knows how the story ends, the grudgingly supportive but always suspicious mentor, the perpetual bachelor who vents his frustrations and insecurities as accusations about people around him— a true reflection of myself? I don’t know. How could I be the judge of that?

Rome doesn’t believe it’s an unkind portrayal. He sent me a copy of that book with a thank-you letter. Yang Wen-li does the same thing in this one— he gives his Bronner a copy of the book of history he’s written, and thanks him in the acknowledgements.

(I must say, for a series where the most surface level audience controversy revolves around depictions of the sexuality of historical figures, I find it darkly funny that Rome would choose to put the most accusatory words in my mouth, rather than his own.)

Rome wants to tell you a story about history, and the men and women who inhabited it. For every choice he makes on the page, he could offer you a thousand reasons from the primary sources about why each one of the characters in his narrative act the way they do. But this is post hoc justification, nothing more. Rome is a skilled character writer, but he is not writing about Kaiser Lohengramm and Marshal Yang Wen-li. He’s not even writing about Reinhard von Müsel and Hank von Leigh. He’s writing about himself.

I could tell you about Rome’s childhood in poverty. I could tell you about his parents’ acrimonious divorce, his mother’s religious obsession, his father’s suicide. I could tell you about his career as an engineer, his struggles in relationships, his deepest anxieties. There are a hundred thousand things I know about Rome, and I can pick them out from _ A Wheel Inside a Wheel _ with tweezers.

_ A Wheel Inside a Wheel _ is not a story about history. It’s a story about the impossibility of seeing people as they are— both those who we remember as great heroes of the past, and the people in front of us, in our daily lives, who cause us the most pain when they fail to understand us, and we fail to understand them. For all that Rome writes himself into his characters and their world, it’s a warped looking glass, a radio signal crowded out by static, a code that only the transmission station can understand. No matter how much his characters try to speak to each other in something approaching the truth, they’re never able to do so. This is what makes them human, and this is what makes their fates so compelling to witness.

I said that there are reasons a reader chooses to listen to or ignore a critic. Certainly the same is true of authors, and even moreso. Rome, for all his faults, has a vision that only he could have, and way of telling a story that only he would want to tell. It’s one that readers have latched onto, and for good reason. Rome is a man worth listening to, even if his signal doesn’t come through clearly, and you have to press your ear to the speaker and decipher the static.

_ Serpent’s Mouth, Serpent’s Teeth _ will be released in the Imperial language on Heinessen by Iron Dreams Press on Thursday, December 2nd at a price of 35 dinars. A translation into Heinessen Standard is expected by the middle of next year. 3.5/5 stars.