Book Review

The Sword of Attila, by David Gibbins

David Gibbins is a New York Times bestselling author with several historical novels already under his belt as well as a Ph.D from Cambridge University. The Sword of Attila is a collaboration with SEGA and The Creative Assembly, meant as a complement to their best-selling video game Total War: Attila. Whether the novel is able to stand on its own two legs or not is an interesting question. Collaborations across the artistic spectrum, especially those involving video games, have met with varied success in the past. Indeed, when Ataris E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial flopped catastrophically, the game based on Steven Spielberg´s iconic film, the entire video game industry almost collapsed. Atari was forced to ignominiously dump 700 000 unsold cartridges of their game in a landfill in the badlands of New Mexico. Clearly then, the stakes are high for Gibbin´s The Sword of Attila, and if the book is a dud I might have to grab my shovel and head for the desert.

By the time of the fifth century, the Roman Empire in the west was beginning to collapse. Historians typically separate the Caesars of the early Roman Empire, great warrior kings like Trajan and Marcus Antonius, with the feeble emperors who ruled mostly without distinction during their short reigns. After decades of corruption and barbarian incursions, Rome was weak and the good times were well and truly over. Climate change meant that migrating tribes of barbarians poured into roman lands to plunderer and pillage.  

It was against this backdrop of steadily mounting darkness and despair that Attila the Hun swept in for the kill. A man whose very name caused corrupt roman senators to flop off their couches and run for the hills in abject terror. Our brave protagonist and Rome´s last hope is the young Tribune Flavius, a fictional character who is the nephew of Flavius Aetius, commander-in-chief of the western roman army. If you are confused by the similarities in name you are not alone, I myself initially thought the book was about Flavius Aetius, but recovered from this mildly confusing conundrum and soldiered on for your sake.

After a brave last stand in front of the walls of Carthage, Flavius flees the city before the teeming Vandal hordes. Back in Rome, Flavius is given a dangerous and presumably top secret mission by his famous uncle and namesake, to travel into barbarian lands with a ragtag band of friends and capture the relic known as the sword of Attila. This will give Rome and her reluctant Visigoth allies the morale boost they need for the upcoming showdown with Attila.

At the battle of Chalôns, the aforementioned showdown, a roman army together with a loose collection of barbarian allies fought Attila to a bloody stalemate. Although the battle was not a decisive victory for Rome, Attila was forced to withdraw. The Huns nomadic lifestyle proved to be ill-suited for prolonged campaigns, and The Scourge of God never again marched on Rome.

Gibbins covers these momentous historical events with a deft grasp of what it was like to live in the fifth century, and fact-wise he ticks all the boxes. The action is delivered convincingly enough, the terror of a charging Hunnic horde rendered in stark detail. I will definitely not head out into the desert to bury The Sword of Attila alongside Atari´s ET cartridges. Yet if I am honest I am not entirely satisfied. It leaves me feeling slightly unfulfilled, wanting more. I usually never deign to comment if a book is two, three, or four hundred pages long. It´s more often than not a poor indicator of whether it´s good literature or not, and Attila’s 250 odd pages is certainly longer than The Old Man and the Sea. The feeling I get, however, is that there were more drops of excitement to be wrung out of the material available to the author. I never really started to care deeply for any of the characters and the promised showdown with Attila didn´t quite manage to make me tick like it should have. Bernard Cornwell´s eminently readable prose about the viking warrior Uhtred takes place during a period of British history that seems rather dull at a casual glance. Yet Cornwell manages to skillfully weave together a series of novels where you are always on the edge of your seat, too engrossed in the story to find it cheesy that Uhtred has named his longsword Serpent´s Breath. A kind of unpopular king fighting a drawn out and succesfull-ish conflict against the Danish sounds far less dramatic than the Scourge of God rampaging towards Rome and the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Which is exactly why I am struck by how the story in The Sword of Attila could have been so much more epic, intriguing and involving. Maybe some of the steam is lost when the plot sometimes skips several years ahead between chapters, maybe this was just a necessity to make the story go together, but in the end it doesn´t matter. The Sword of Attila is certainly an entertaining read, but not a future classic by any stretch of the imagination.