Richard Blake’s novel Ghosts of Athens was published as historical fiction. In a sense, it is historical fiction. It is set in the early 7^th century, when Athens was an out of the way provincial town in the Byzantine Empire. You have post-Classical decadence, ruins, barbarians, and a Church Council involving a hundred ranting bishops. It makes a good read as historical fiction, not least because almost no one else is writing about that period, and because it’s by Richard Blake.

It is, even so, the most bizarrely inventive piece of historical fiction – bizarre even by the standards of Richard Blake. Imagine Spartacus, remade by Hammer Films, scripted by H. Rider Haggard on acid, and co-directed by Ken Russell and Federico Fellini. Add Voltaire and Agatha Christie as consultants. Imagine all that, and you get half-way to Ghosts of Athens.

In short, this is a gothic vampire novel. It’s a very good one too. But, rather than go into lengthy analysis, let me prove this by some longish quotes from Chapter 12. We have all the usual characters – Aelric, the vain and beautiful Englishman on the make; Martin, his cowardly secretary; Priscus, the vile Byzantine nobleman. They are joined by Nicephorus, a dodgy city governor. For reasons too long to explain, Aelric has been diverted on their return to Constantinople from the accidental bloodbath he supervised in Egypt to some unspecified mission in Athens. On the road up from Piraeus, he stumbles across a corpse.

Here goes:

“What, My Lord Count, is the meaning of this?” I asked firmly. I wanted to know. I also wanted of keep Martin from looking stupid in front of everyone else with a return to wailing about the barbarians. Correction – I just wanted to know. “Why do you suppose there is a fresh and headless body hidden just off the road?”

….

I swallowed and made my own inspection. “She was from the better classes,” I said. I’d established from one touch of the hand that she hadn’t been of the free poor, or from the lower class of slave. “Free, or” – I looked at the whole body: it had been finely-proportioned – “some rich man’s concubine.” I’d have put money on the first of these possibilities – most of the slaves I’d seen had the fairish hair of Slav prisoners, and this girl’s hair had been a dark and perhaps a glossy brown. I swallowed again and thought of the flask of perfume I had in my satchel. Without any breeze to carry away the miasma, the smell of corruption was turning unbearable.

….

“No point asking if it was murder,” I said with an attempted smile. It was a failure and I gave up on the effort. “With live beheading, you expect a cataract of blood. Even after death, you’d expect to see more than we can. The hair shows no evidence of wetting. But the body itself may have been washed after live or dead beheading. I’d say, however, she was hung upside down and bled to death, and only then beheaded.” I made myself step closer to the severed head and willed my finger not to shake, as I pointed at the two punctures, about an inch and a half apart, on the right side of the throat.

….

[A]s I cleared my throat for a reply, Priscus moved out of the way, and the slaves could now see the whole body. “Lemmy! Lemmy!” one of them moaned, pointing at the puncture wounds. “Lemmy! Lemmy!” he repeated, now louder, as he dashed through the brambles to get back to the road.

….

A few yards to my left, Martin was on his knees, praying desperately in a high, sibilant Celtic.

“He says that it’s a lamia,” he finally managed to say without choking, though still in Celtic. “This is the work of a demon that feasts on human blood.”

“They can say what they like,” I hissed at him. “But I hope you still have enough sense to recognise murder by some person or persons unknown.” It was a waste of breath, though, to try reasoning with Martin once he’d screwed himself up to this pitch of superstitious terror. Even persuading him it was all the work of barbarians, and that they were hiding behind the other tombs, would have brought him closer to his senses. I left him sobbing and shaking and picked my way carefully through the brambles to where Nicephorus was lounging, now with restored ease, among the trash of Athens.

“We’ll need to get the body back to Athens,” I said. “Unless you can identify it, we’ll publish an announcement tomorrow morning.” I looked up at the sky. It was hard to see anything through a mist that was undeniably increasing. But the chill and general darkening about us indicated more rain. My clothes were already in a state that would never have been tolerated in Constantinople. But, if we could avoid a regular soaking, I might enter Athens with some semblance of pomp.

“And who will carry the body, My Lord?” came the half-mocking reply. He looked at the grinning crowd about him. “Will any of you carry this thing within the walls?” he asked of them in slow and simple Greek. His answer was a cheerful shaking of heads. He walked out of the crowd and looked at the body from the edge of the read. “No one will touch it,” he said. “Surely you can accept that no one will allow it within the city walls.”

The whole chapter is a combination of shockfest and black humour. So is the whole novel. If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself.

Tags: Historical Fiction