Agrippa, Robert Harris, Doubleday, New York, 2026

I’ve seen reviews of Agrippa somewhere other than the NYT, which I can’t read, being subscriptionless – which declare the straightforward, one thing after another narrative, along with the military details of his battles, which accomplished Octavian’s widening grip on power, to be boring. Boring also, they say, Agrippa’s lack of an inner life, submission to being told who to marry, divorce and marry instead, and the many details of his engineering achievements. I think it all this misses the point.

One of the reviewers remarked that the novel comes alive when Agrippa’s late-life engineering projects are described. This is true, and it’s the key to the book.

The descriptions of projects are full of warmth and affection for the character type of his chief engineer. They’re full of enthusiasm for innovation and getting it right. The walls of the tunnels for a hypocaust are made of cement mixed with pumice – a new discovery –which gives them a manipulability beyond ordinary cement. They’re three layers thick, each layer polished to mirror finish – the first two even though they will be covered by the third and only visible one.

Agrippa builds the brickwork of the central passage, which slaves would use to add material to the water-heating fires, five feet tall so the slave, who might well be a child, could walk upright. Those passages were usually built as genuine tunnels: the slave would have to crawl to deliver fresh fuel.

Agrippa’s aqueducts and bathhouses are designed to take water to all parts of Rome, including to the poor; the bathhouses are open to all, free one day a week – which meant to poor could enter once a week. He later changed that to four days a week for political reasons. He is generous throughout the book, repeatedly giving a house he has come to own to friends, relatives or dependents who needed a home of their own or would have become homeless otherwise.

But the greatest emotional warmth in the narrative is for the social, joyful results of Agrippa’s engineering. As he surveys his work Agrippa relates his pleasure – his projects have made life easier and more joyful for ordinary people.

Agrippa loves his children. Octavian is pointedly described throughout as only and always transactional. Octavian would have been a sociopath anywhere. Agrippa’s close and lifelong and perilous association with him, the choicelessness of the continued climb to complete power, is a grim military slog he cannot refuse if he wants to stay alive – it’s the visible carapace of Octavian’s method of reducing and confining him.

The warm descriptions of engineering projects are descriptions of the man Agrippa would have been had he never met Octavian.

The novel reverses the usual dynamic of novelistic representation. Agrippa’s Shadow, the obedient architect of mass military slaughter, lives in daylight. Though his true self, warm sunny, good-natured, genial, tender and generous, is reduced and confined and lives in shadow, we still see it clearly, even though not a minute of that alternate youth and becoming is on display.