Splitters...

Anyone who read The King of Terror won't be surprised by the expansive ensemble of characters in Byzantium! But given that each little clutch of characters serves as the story's representative grouping of one ethnic subset within the fragmented Roman empire, this time it remains easy to keep track of who's who, what they want to achieve and - most significantly - who they are scared of.

Almost exactly contemporaneous with the tv adventure The Romans - both historically and in terms of the TARDIS crew - Byzantium! seeks to pose the question: "what if that story had taken itself seriously?" The detailed, unromaticised and, indeed, somewhat graphic descriptions of the brutal methods of resolving conflict back in the days of the Roman Empire are duly convincing and gripping. Where the book loses focus a little is in splitting up the four regular characters to allow each to pursue his or her own path back to the TARDIS. What follows is a series of vignettes, where each new encounter with one of the locals emphasises one of a range of related themes - privilege versus the proletariat being especially dominant.

For the most part, these are pretty engrossing, but given that the book consists of little else it's a bit surprising that these meetings seem like mere diversions from a central, driving plot that isn't really there - although this is, admittedly, not unlike the era of the tv show which the author is striving to evoke. Where he lets himself down a little, as well, is in undercutting the drama through glib asides and pop-cultural references - especially in the chapter titles and intermittent allusions to Monty Python's Life of Brian. Maybe he's striving for black humour to starkly emphasise the horror, but it's a pretty mix'n'match tone which results, almost as if the writer didn't quite have enough confidence in what might have otherwise have been a more cohesive and laudable work.

The exclamation mark in the title remains mysteriously unexplained. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. Answers on a postcard?