The Road to Pompeii
In which Anthony Burgess explores the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity.
The kingdom of the wicked was the name given by the Jews to the Roman Empire. It is also the title of Anthony Burgess’s long novel about the ancient world, beginning with the resurrection of Jesus Christ and ending with the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD. The story is adapted from sources such as The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius and the Acts of the Apostles.
The starting point for Burgess’s novel was a commission to write Anno Domini, an epic television series consisting of five episodes, each with a running time of two hours, broadcast in Britain, the United States and Italy in 1985. The stellar cast included Ava Gardner, Susan Sarandon, James Mason, Ian McShane and Anthony Andrews as the Emperor Nero.
Burgess shared the writing credit for the TV series with Vincenzo Labella, a regular collaborator who had also produced two previous biblical adaptations, Moses the Lawgiver and Jesus of Nazareth.
Given the televisual origins of the material, sceptical readers have been inclined to dismiss The Kingdom of the Wicked as crowd-pleasing trash, intended for a mass readership. Yet the novel Burgess published in 1985 is strikingly different from its small-screen precursor. It is apparent from a close reading that this novel is a serious-minded examination of the ancient world, based on deep scholarship and careful re-ordering of the source material. In fact, it is one of Burgess’s most rewarding works of historical fiction, crammed with narrative complication and literary inventiveness.
The narrator of The Kingdom of the Wicked is Sadoc, who seems to be the son of Azor, the rationalist narrator of Burgess’s earlier novel, Man of Nazareth. Sadoc sifts through the legends of the Roman Empire and the early Christian church, presenting them to us in a way which feels distinctly ironic and modern. Speaking of the death of the Emperor Tiberius, for example, he gives multiple versions of the story and says that he does not know which one should be believed. The truth, if it exists outside the mind of God, is not readily accessible.
Sadoc brings his sceptical perspective to the miracles attributed to Christ’s disciples and Saul of Tarsus, otherwise known as Saint Paul. When Saul sees a blinding light and hears the voice of God on the road to Damascus, Sadoc suggests that he has experienced an epileptic seizure. There is also a strong impression that our narrator is unreliable. ‘I can only guess at Saul’s dreams,’ he writes, before describing one of them in great detail.
When Sadoc quotes anachronistically from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, we can be reasonably certain that Burgess, as the author behind the text, is simply enjoying himself, as well as drawing attention to the impossibility of writing ‘true’ historical fiction. These aspects of his writing about the past were much admired by Hilary Mantel, who had read and reviewed Burgess before she embarked on her celebrated trilogy of novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell.
There are many other elements to enjoy in Burgess’s energetic rewriting of historical events. He demonstrates a wide knowledge of classical literature when he quotes from the Roman poets — Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Petronius, Seneca and Virgil are all present in the text — and from Greek writers such as Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Plato. There are passages in Hebrew, Nazarene and Aramaic.
The Kingdom of the Wicked presents the Emperor Nero, who is normally thought to be a worthless fop, as a character of unexpected depth. In this telling, he is a thwarted artist and a failed scholar. He reads Ovid’s Ars Amatoria [The Art of Love] and writes a new version of the stage comedy Miles Gloriosus by Plautus for performance at court. If he is mad, he has been driven that way by his literary and musical ambitions.
As the novel builds towards its conclusion, it is clear that some spectacular writing is on its way. When two of the main characters decide to visit friends in Pompeii, we can foresee the inevitable outcome. Burgess’s account of the destruction of the city does not disappoint:
Smoke, fire and lava. Lungs filled, choked. A black pall began to be pulled over the day’s serenity. In the amphitheatre ten thousand Pompeians felt the ground heave, heard the thunder. They screamed, yelled, crushed each other. The mountains vomited endlessly. Air thick, defiled, a pale sun sometimes trying to shove through. The road of scorching lava down the mountainside spread to the streets and divided.
Readers of Earthly Powers will be pleased to know that Burgess’s trademark linguistic panache is fully on display in The Kingdom of the Wicked. The disciple James, encountered late in life, is ashamed of his ‘unbecoming adiposity’. Elsewhere, there is much talk of ephebes, catamites, and chthonian demons. No doubt some readers will find such writing annoying, but those who enjoy verbal extravagance will be cheerfully reaching for their dictionaries.
Although it received slightly frosty reviews on publication, The Kingdom of the Wicked is one of Burgess’s most remarkable pieces of historical fiction — different both in genre and ambition from Nothing Like the Sun, because it has a much larger cast of characters and a wider geographical range. The bloodthirsty lives and deaths of the emperors are contrasted with the more virtuous careers of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
Burgess was not over-selling his goods when he described The Kingdom of the Wicked as ‘a literary diversion’ which, he said, should be considered separately from the Anno Domini TV series. This is a substantial novel by a major novelist who was writing at the height of his powers. If only an enlightened publisher could be found to reprint it.
Find out more
Read other historical novels by Anthony Burgess.
Nothing Like the Sun (affiliate link)
A Dead Man in Deptford (affiliate link)
ABBA ABBA (affiliate link)
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Read a memory of Burgess by C.C. Humphreys, who played Caleb in AD: Anno Domini.
Listen to our podcast about fictional representations of Jesus Christ:
"This is a substantial novel by a major novelist who was writing at the height of his powers."
I no longer have the original Penguin paperback of Earthy Powers, but I seem to recall the blurb on the back included purple prose suggesting it was "cast down by a novelist at the height of his powers." I do remember for certain another part of the blurb did AB the honour of trying to imitate him with its reference to "garlicky, omnilingual puns." Odd what sticks in the mind.
I replaced that paperback with a hardback edition later on. With Kingdom of the Wicked, I was not willing to wait and bought it in hardback, only to lend it to my father-in-law, who never returned it. So I bought a paperback version (but reclaimed my hardback years later after his death.) Some books are too good not to have a copy ready to be re-read.