Agrippa, by Robert Harris | Free Audiobook
The memoirs of the man who built an emperor
Agrippa is fifty, ailing, alone in a house on the Bay of Naples, and he has decided to write it all down. His wife has betrayed him, his health is going, and the friend he spent his life serving now rules the world as Augustus. Stirring up the past is a dangerous thing to do, and he does it anyway, which is where this novel begins.
He was born feet first, and his mother did not survive it. The nickname he carried out of childhood meant mother killer, and the boys who used it taught him early that a name can be a weapon if you refuse to flinch. He was a plebeian, the son of a Stoic with no fortune to hand him, and his life turned on a decision he made as a boy: stepping in for a slight, overlooked nephew of Julius Caesar named Octavius.
What he remembers is the rest of it. The legions and the forced marches, Caesar murdered in the Senate, an empire inherited on paper only, and twenty years in which the two of them fought Mark Antony and Cleopatra, built a fleet, won at Actium and turned a republic into something else entirely. Agrippa does the work and Octavius takes the credit. Robert Harris tells it from the side of the man who was never meant to matter, and lets the cost of that loyalty come out slowly.
Any new Robert Harris set in the late Republic arrives with an unfair advantage: he has done this before, better than almost anyone, and the pleasure of watching him work the machinery of Roman politics is real. For a good long stretch, Agrippa delivers it. He has chosen the right narrator, a soldier and a builder rather than an orator, close enough to Octavius to watch power being assembled by hand.
The campaigning is where the book is most alive. Harris understands that the Roman army was an engineering corps as much as a fighting force, and his Agrippa is happiest with a problem of logistics and a deadline. The political passages have the same quality his readers will recognise from the Cicero novels and from Conclave: rooms where nothing is said directly, and where the arrangement of a marriage or a province does more damage than a legion.
Simon Russell Beale reads it, and that is close to ideal casting for a novel about a man who conceals more than he shows. His Agrippa is patient, dry and faintly dangerous, and he keeps an enormous cast legible without pushing a single voice into caricature. Robert Harris reads the closing author's note himself, which is worth staying for if you want to know where the history stops and the invention starts.
My reservation is the one a lot of readers are landing on, and it is structural rather than a matter of taste. Covering the whole of Agrippa's life means the novel has to keep moving, so years pass in a sentence, campaigns are summarised rather than fought, and a very large cast files past without much room to land. For a book with his name on the cover, Agrippa stays oddly at arm's length, and a good part of the middle is really the story of Octavius becoming Augustus, which is a different and more familiar book.
None of that makes it a bad novel, and if you came for the period and the politics it is a satisfying one. If you want Harris at his most concentrated, Conclave is still the tighter book and the better place to start, and it is a case where a narrower canvas would have suited this subject better than the years he insisted on covering.
Agrippa is fifty, ailing, and writing his memoirs in a house on the Bay of Naples: a plebeian soldier looking back over the campaigns, alliances and betrayals that ended the Roman Republic and made an emperor of his oldest friend. Robert Harris writes it from inside the machine, from the point of view of the man who did the work rather than the man who took the credit.
It runs 9 hours and 55 minutes, read by Simon Russell Beale, who gives Agrippa a patience and a faint menace that suit him exactly. You can start it on a free trial, cancellable whenever you like.
Once you claim it through the trial the book stays yours to keep even after you cancel, and the trial opens the rest of the catalogue at the same time. If Harris sends you back to Rome, there is a great deal more of it to get through.
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