Parthian Shot - Background to the Book
Parthian
Shot is the ninth Corvinus book. The starting point was a real
historical event, mentioned by Tacitus for AD35: the arrival in Rome of
an unofficial delegation from Parthia, the huge empire which stretched
from Rome’s eastern borders all the way to India. It was no more than a
starting point, because Tacitus says very little about the embassy and
my story is a complete invention; however, he goes on in his Annals for
the following year to provide details of an abortive attempt to replace
the Parthian king with a Roman-backed substitute, so I used the main
characters from that to take a sort of back-sighting which gave me the
plot of the book.
I really, really
enjoyed writing Parthian Shot because it let me go overboard with
plotting (a little too far overboard for my editor Sue Fletcher, who
had me take the one twist too many out) and be as Machiavellian as I
liked; and, for me in writing the Corvinus books, the puzzle - solving
it or making it up - has always been the important thing, far more
important than trying to squeeze in huge lumps of unnecessary
background detail. I reckoned this was fair enough, given the subject:
Parthians, in the eyes of the Romans, anyway, were devious buggers who
wore three faces and would steal your back teeth while shaking your
hand and still leave you smiling, and I wanted the complexity of the
plot to reflect this. As does the title: if you didn’t know (and I
apologise for deiving you if you did) a ‘Parthian shot’ was originally
a military manoeuvre by the Parthian mounted cavalry, who would pretend
to retreat in disorder at the gallop then turn simultaneously in the
saddle to fire a lethal volley at their now scattered pursuers. To the
Romans, this was just Not Playing the Game.
The Parthians were also - which is relevant to the story - alien: alien
almost to a Steven Spielberg degree. That was another strand I wanted
to introduce, because I wanted Corvinus (who’s a conservative at heart,
however much he may protest otherwise) to be very much a fish out of
water. As an example of the huge gulf between Roman and Parthian
society - and I use this in the book - the Romans habitually burned
their dead while the Parthians left the corpses for the birds to eat:
fire, to a Zoroastrian, was and is too sacred to pollute with a dead
body, and earth is only slightly less so. Given that ‘Go to the crows!’
was a curse both in Greek and Latin, while to refuse proper burial and
leave a person’s body above ground to be eaten by animals or birds was
the ultimate sanction and punishment, you can see what effect Parthian
burial customs had on the Romans, and vice versa. They weren’t by any
means the only point at issue, either.
The last sub-structure to the story was the diplomatic-cum-MI6 one.
I’d’ve loved to have done a John Le Carré on that but I’m not nearly
good enough, so I didn’t try: George Smiley would’ve made a great
Isidorus. I don’t know for certain if the Romans had the equivalent of
a full-scale secret service as such (although Isidorus certainly
existed, and gathering and processing information clandestinely got
must’ve been a large part of his job) but - especially where the
Parthians were concerned - I’d be very surprised if they didn’t. In any
case, the Roman diplomatic side fitted with everything else.
I quite liked the ending, too.
David Wishart (May 2006)
|
