When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale
When We Were Romans
By Matthew Kneale
Lawrence is just your typical nine-year-old with a fondness for astronomy when his world is suddenly flipped upside-down. His mother, convinced that Lawrence’s father is stalking herself and their two children, bunkers down in her house and avoids the outside world. When even this doesn’t seem enough, she uproots Lawrence and his little sister Jemima from their home in England and takes them to Rome, the city she met her husband in while still a girl in college. In Italy they’ll start over, she thinks, and begin a new life free from worry and fear.
At first things seem to be going well. Many of her old friends are still in Rome and greet her warmly, even inviting the little family into their homes. She finds a job and the children start taking Italian lessons. Lawrence learns about Roman emperors and whenever there is time, they go sightseeing. Soon, they’re even able to move into a little flat of their own. Unfortunately, the troubles that drove them out of England follow them to Rome and son they are in hiding once more.
Did you like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? If so, you may enjoy this book. Both stories are told through the eyes of a child, involve a bit of a mystery, and tend to info-dump on the narrator’s favorite topics. Matthew Kneale and Mark Haddon both utilized the child’s voice, a stream-of-conscious, unpolished narrative. I did not care for Curious Incident, but I could appreciate that the book itself was solid, just not to my taste. When We Were Romans, however, is no Curious Incident, so no such allowances on my part can be made.
I think the main problem is that Lawrence’s story lacks certain grounding in reality. That is, this child doesn’t sound authentic. Kneale tries to copy the spelling style and grammar errors of a nine-year-old, but he overdoes it. Third graders, inexperienced as they are with writing, don’t spell the same word three different ways in a single paragraph, especially not with the frequency Laurence does. In fact, it doesn’t seem like he can spell any large or “difficult” word consistently. Once or twice this device might be effective and quaint - grossly misspelling the Italian Lawrence overhears was quite cute - but as a constant factor it’s distracting and annoying. Lawrence also never tells us why he’s writing it all this down. It’s written in the past tense, so it isn’t a diary. But the way the writing’s done, he can’t be much older than he was when the events take place. So what was the trigger?
Children are often self-centered so some selfishness can be forgiven, and a certain obliviousness to the rest of the world allowed, but Lawrence is a brat. His mother seems to be raising her children with the “be-good-and-I’ll-buy-you-a-treat” school of parenting, so I suppose he can’t be blamed completely. We only meet the adults superficially, and Lawrence does little to reveal their character in his memoirs, since adults aren’t important to him unless they provide him with food or gifts. As a result there’s a void of interesting people, and this added to the appalling spelling and run-on paragraphs put the story on rocky ground. With a superior plot we could overlook these problems as part of a flawed narrator experience, but the plot is so predictable that you’ll guess the “big twist” by the time you’re halfway through.
I really can’t think of anyone to whom I’d recommend this book. No matter how you look at it When We Were Romans just doesn’t stand out. There are better books about living in Italy, better books told by a child confronted by a mystery, and better books with unusual narration styles.
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