The Normal Times

J.M. Roberts, 1996

This review may as well be the story of how I became better at any bar’s Trivia Night.

My former condition was likely a common one. I knew a chartered education’s worth of Western history and some saturated spots here and there when I was compelled to take odd college electives. I liked the idea of knowing history, I was, after all, an English major. It seemed like it would be helpful to know what kind of hell-brew might have been breaking the windows and ruining the newspapers with doom at the time something or other was written.

But I could never keep caring, and I blame Wikipedia for that entirely. I would have been more humble, and publicly disparaged myself even, before I read this book. Details of history and the impacts of man were just going to be another one of those things I was too birdbrained to get. Western history alone was too enormous, and what I knew was all bits and pieces. Every time I thought I knew who Louis in France was, who Henry in England was, who any Marie of anywhere was, I was always very wrong. The more I read about those once fabulous lunatics who used to own the world, the less I understood where it all came from. Kings and emperors, dukes and senators, courtiers and court conspirators.

I remember having similar questions as a child. Learning about emperors feeding people to lions, and kings forcing people to dance or give up their homes; these things instilled a lot of deep and irrational fears in smaller me concerning Europe and all this princess stuff I liked so much at the time. However disturbed I’d been, from here it hardened into a subconscious shrug. Never knowing better, I likely assumed that the people of the old world had overgrown family trees built of illiterate shit-shovelers who lived short lives. All this aristocracy was simply those who’d been able to learn reading and whose mothers hadn’t starved between a handful of potatoes during pregnancy. Probably something close to two decades later, I make the mistake of picking a really good Marie Antoinette book out of one of those cabinets people put up in their driveways and call something like “cutesy smutesy free little library”. And it all flooded back.

Where did kings start? How did people agree to live like this? I tried going to Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I wasn’t ready for it. I stumbled out mumbling, “Is it warlords then? Warlord grow strong? Warlord take land?” Ignorant of how murky my understanding still remained, I assumed the itch scratched and moved on to the next temporary manic interest.

Pass some years. Move to another city, again. Get a streaming service for the first time, because this city has free high-speed internet. The streaming service sucks, but it does have a lot of one thing I like; smutty pop history where the liberties taken are only slightly more abundant than the sudden sex reenactment theater. When the fun wore off a few days later I was once again bothered by my old question. Where did this all come from?

Fucking around in a used book store, I spot a title, A History of Europe. Really? All of it? Seemed so, I hurt my wrist pulling it up from the floor shelf. At nearly 600 pages it is certified Big, guaranteed to impress the other scrubs waiting around the bus mall. The consumer’s lust took me with a force like destiny. I flung my quarters at the register in the righteous belief that I had just bought the key to the world for four dollars.

It was more like I bought a really good outline of mostly western world history. A descriptive syllabus of all Europe, but I can’t immediately think of a single volume that is as ambitious as this. The entirety of Europe, and all its known secrets, from seed to twilight. I think I cried a little in a few places, not sure why, but there is something nauseating about the idea that a single person can ruin or destroy thousands of living people, without them even being aware of what’s happening, and never so much as face a bad dream about it. Such thoughts are the type that can stir the rational to violence. I hate almost every major republican figure of the French Revolution, but it’s this part of me that can understand why they got so heinous about it. 

But about the book. Having now read and read again in most places, there’s more value than I can poetically express in this book for anyone like me who is under-educated, yet interested, in matters of history. The informative value is well beyond Western Europe. Central and eastern are given equal attention, and well more than most high schools in America would ever give them outside of their most scandalous eras. Closely tracked history naturally leads from Europe east across the Urals, south of the Mediterranean, past Anatolia, and of course, west over the Atlantic. So again, for those like me, it’s a particularly comprehensive text that will introduce you to a litany of stranger than fiction snapshots. And if you’re like me, you’ll stay up late into the harsh hours chasing the tail of a dragon promised by a passing snippet about the intercontinental opium trade or why Marie Therese got to be such a chad in the long era of very quiet women.

Reading this book I learned to think better of my abilities. Almost everything that had made me stupid about dusty old Europe was the result of never having learned about the Dark Ages beyond some elementary school spooky hours about the bubonic plague or the manic false facts of witch burnings. The first lesson squared here was that agriculture is the precursor of civilization, just not how I thought. I’d been told that, and I could understand how not having to go scrape up tubers and berries when you were hungry inevitably leads to societies advancing. What I’d never considered was what it does for the mass mental state. It may not guarantee full safety, but it is clearly a big deal to not have to worry about a real and proven threat of starving for even just a single person, let alone a mass of thousands concentrated in one general area.

Next lesson; no one could have made those big megalithic structures (Stone Henge et al.) without large-scale organization. Even today if someone decided to cut another face across Mt. Rushmore it would cost barrels, and there’s a chance at least one person would get maimed or die. There’s no answer for the ugly question here, which is how do you get one or several people to drag a larger-than-life rock up a hill, stack it nicely, and then go back down and do it again? Another small lesson, one I would have resisted if I learned it badly, representative value is a wonder of humanity. Yes, people do shit things for money and always have. However, what can now be bought on consensual terms for currencies hard or theoretical, was once only gotten by haranguing people with a sense of duty or breaking their will in slavery.

Now the big question; specter of my childhood, plague of my fleeting youth. The answer was so obvious it was disappointing. Like I had a whole dress laid out in front of me and all that was missing was the stitches. These troublesome bastards were no more than the ascendent tribal leaders whose lifetimes fell in the right place at the right time, that is, the collapsing years of the western Roman Empire. But that’s what my whole a-ha consisted of after the Gibbons book, so I wasn’t about to settle again. Where did all the silly stuff come from? Those later lace-puffed royals whose appetites impoverished whole countries. The Dark Age hammerheads, whatever they called themselves, came off more like personnel manager-generals. Less the all-father, more anointed decision maker.

The question “Where do kings come from?” was the wrong way to walk in. If I’d known better it would have been “How do tribal war bands work?” This is easier to answer because it’s pretty much the same as any street gang anywhere works. To start, you’re a charismatic guy who’s gotten a few memorable kills, be they human or animal. People like you, or you’re strong enough that they pretend to. They want to stay near you, and they’ll fight with you while their wives stay home and cook food for all. The charming young warlord has already staked out a pretty cabbage patch with his own muscle, now it widens with the addition of other, loyal, muscles. Everyone gets fat and happier, but what happens when the charming leader dies? What if his son is a coward who prefers candlelit baths over bleeding the horizons? Apparently, it’s all in the loot. As king, you take the best share of the shinies, and when you die your son can sit on a mountain of shining things. Life is not difficult for the guy whose friendship gets you in front of more jewels, booze, and broads than anyone else you know. Claiming authority over an area or set of people that has rarely seen anything bright or clean isn’t too hard when you have the monopoly on good drag.

But the silly stuff, the glittering capes, and the coquettish posturing, that can all be blamed on the Roman power vacuum. Better yet, it can all be blamed on the Catholics, if we’re being so simple. Take the ambitious warlord from the previous paragraph. Say he’s been successful and spread beyond the backyard. His domain is no longer the one piddly village, it’s grown to four and each has a set of satellite outposts for agriculture and defense. Then some discontented assholes whose parents moved out to the boonies forty years ago show up and start ripping up the roses. The warlord rides out and tells them in no uncertain terms to cut it out. They say “Why should we?” Warlord says “Because I’m the king damnit”. They say “So what?”

Meanwhile, elsewhere easterly, Rome is little more than a city and a word. A large church worries that this is the end, maybe they even feel the shadow of the first Orthodox father who will claim their shiny white buildings for his own. A Vatican without the empire is something like a disease without a host. Then you hear that suddenly there are a couple of new names distinguishing themselves out in the ghetto borderlands. Some are called Franks, some are called Visigoths, and one of them just sang his heart out in a battlefield conversion uncannily similar in description to that of sacred Constantine. So the bishops fly and the Vatican lives to shoot another day while the kings get to say “Me and This army” while playing Weekend at Bernies with whatever monsters the primitives conjured up from Rome. Then it all tumbles down from there.

Borders were surveyed, and the right to violence was consolidated. The peacock feathers and sparkling jewels were just to cheer egos and strike awe. There’s a mountain more to this book. For instance, have you ever heard of the 1980s? I couldn’t believe it. In this review, I listed the questions I rode in with. What I didn’t list is how many questions and queries I carried out in a stuffed-to-bursting bag. I could realistically say that I might die still thinking about the curiosities I’ve filled my foggy head with. I draft on those yellow legal pads, those ones without a cover that you rip from the top, fifty thin pages in all. I filled the entirety of one with my moth thoughts. “What is that? Why was it like this? Who picked that name out? Why’s everyone so angry?”
It’s a good thing. As I’ve said countless times in my prestigious, masterful, award-breaking book series: I’m a very serious writer and I’d like to know everything.

Buy a copy here.