I, Claudius

"This is one of the great works of historical fiction. It’s the story from the early Roman empire, the Julio-Claudian dynasty, told from the perspective of Claudius. I believe he was the grand-nephew of Augustus. And this is an interesting choice, because, again, he’s part of that inner circle and yet he’s also an outsider due to his disability. He has a stutter. People consistently underestimate him, and so he observes. He’s very perceptive, constantly noticing things that others don’t. The novel can be funny, it can be shocking. There are plenty of plots and counter-plots, betrayals and murders. Claudius somehow keeps surviving, almost because no one sees him as worth assassinating. And a wonderful layer of dramatic irony hovers over the whole piece, because we know that this completely ignored, marginalised figure in the Roman court is going to become the emperor. That runs like a vein of dynamite through the novel. Also, like all these books, the novel manages to create a compelling narrative in which you actually learn about the period, in this case about Roman history. It’s very well researched. You can tell Graves was a scholar. He knew his material very well. Yes. It’s interesting, this is true of some of my favourite works of historical fiction. There’s also Maurice Druon, who wrote The Iron King series of medieval historical novels . He wrote that for the money, but it was his most famous work by far. And Robert Graves apparently wrote I, Claudius after a land deal went bad; he had to make up the capital very quickly. So he banged out I, Claudius and it became his most famous, beloved work. Sometimes good things happen when you are mercenary! I am working on a new novel, but it’s very different to Glorious Exploits . It’s also a work of historical fiction, but it’s set in 14th-century France, in the aftermath of the Black Death and in the midst of the Hundred Years War. Very jolly material. In a sense it’s a blend a of noir and the Gothic. I’ve described it as a sort of ‘medieval True Detective. ’ So: well-researched historical fiction but also at a bit of a slant."

"I’m a child of the 1970s and watching my parents avidly following the I, Claudius, BBC series on Masterpiece Theatre was a formative childhood memory. I thought it was incredibly boring at the time, but when I was in grad school, and my father living in Rome again, I picked up the book in a bookstore one day. From the opening lines, I was completely hooked. It’s very funny in that way of English writers of a certain generation (to the extent that, inexcusably perhaps, I tend to get the author confused with Roald Dahl ). I once saw an interview with Robert Graves and apparently he just wrote I, Claudius to make a bit of money, he didn’t take it seriously at all. But he was a great classical scholar and so the book feels real. It’s written in the first person, pretending to be an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and although I know, deep down, it’s only Robert Graves pretending to be Claudius, I came away feeling I really knew Clau-Clau (as my husband and I affectionately refer to him as). If you enjoy it, I strongly recommend the sequel, Claudius the God , too."

"I, Claudius is dazzling. It gives voice to one of Imperial Rome’s most unlikely chroniclers. Claudius is crippled, he stammers and he’s dismissed by his family as an idiot. It’s precisely because he’s overlooked in a murderous world of power-hungry elites that he survives and eventually becomes emperor. Though none of Claudius’ real-life writings remain, Graves creates a compelling voice for him: garrulous, vital, and very funny. Graves’ Claudius is more than a witness — he’s a historian. Through his eyes, we experience Rome’s descent into dynastic madness, from Augustus’ smooth propaganda to Caligula’s divine delusions and Livia’s ruthless ambition. Livia is Augustus’ wife and Claudius’ grandmother, and she’s portrayed as the manipulative power behind the throne. Graves brilliantly blends brutal political intrigue and grotesque comedy. A great example is the assassination of Caligula and the discovery of Claudius cowering behind a curtain. The tone shifts fluidly from statesmanship to scandal, satire to grief. So it’s almost like the narrative voice enacts the chaos of this crumbling empire. Claudius claims he is objective, and yet his account is riddled with gaps, bias and speculation — fitting for a book that revels in the uncertain boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. I, Claudius is a vivid exploration of power and survival, told by an unreliable narrator in a world where nothing is as it seems. I didn’t read it until I had already published some novels, and I need to read the sequel, Claudius the God . Graves apparently wrote these books to make a bit of money, and they became bestsellers and classics. I can’t recommend I, Claudius highly enough. That’s a very interesting question. The furthest I’ve personally gone is the late 19th century — not so far back. It was with Madwoman , my third novel, about Nellie Bly, America’s first female investigative journalist. She faked madness to get committed to an asylum, and when she came out she exposed the terrible conditions. That was her first big scoop, but the drama is, she could have lost her life in the asylum, or her sanity. It took me a while to get into the period and the voice, because most of my novels are set in the twentieth century. But there were so many issues still relevant today — mental illness , and how we see women who don’t fit society’s mould — that I became immersed, and the writing flowed. I can’t speak about setting a novel in Ancient Rome but, as I said, feelings are feelings, and these characters are so vital and so human."