03-22-2006, 07:14 PM
Quote:Volker, would you care to expand on your "albeit a bit dated" remark?
Well, it clearly was written at a time when someone who is intimately familiar with Roman history and archeology could still believe that Principate-era Roman troops wore flexible leather corselets, and that the segmentata was created by riveting metal hoops onto those. Today, I would expect this from a third-rate hack, but the author obviously did his research, so he must have done it at a time before the Corbridge and Newtstead finds were common knowledge. Ante Connolly, so to speak
Also, it is fairly clear from the way the book on the one hand readily deals with all kinds of sex, yet at the same time uses rather stilted, refined language for it ("a mangificent sheath for male tumescence") that it dates to an earlier period - one in which outright sex scenes in literature were not yet common, nor was sex routinely written about, but the taboo was being loosened.
Thirdly, the way the author uses military parlance and unit designations ('Indus' Horse' and 'Petra's Horse' for ala Indiana and Petrana, a 'cutter', the 'first flight') says that he was exposed at one point (I'm guessing during his youth or military service) to the pre-1945 military culture of the British forces. He sounds to all the world like a regimental officer of the Raj.
Fourthly, it is rare today to find any author, military background or not, to speak so plainly and honestly about the dark side of Empire, the brutal choices of war, and the suffering it entails without getting preachy. It sounds to me like he has been there, as it were.
Hence mny guess - Britain in the 50s or 60s.
Der Kessel ist voll Bärks!
Volker Bach
Volker Bach
