When you read the blurb, it does sound as if it’s going to be somewhat sensational - bastard sons usually are a pretty dramatic complication, after all. There are some really powerful scenes, and while there’s a constraint and dryness to it in a way - it doesn’t step severely away from what we do know of the period - it still caught me up in a spell while I was reading. Theodora, of course, and this version of Justinian, worked very well for me.
I got really involved in this, gradually, drawn into the world of Constantinople and of the people Bradshaw gives us - I loved Narses and Anastasios, and though I didn’t think I would come to love her, Euphemia as well. Her books are aimed more at adults, I think, but there’s still that same flavour to them from the ones I’ve read so far, and they touch on similar periods and topics. The story is more about her son, though, based on a rumour about Theodora from Procopius’ Secret History - a very Rosemary Sutcliff-like touch, to take a half-known story and expand it and develop it into something that could have been, like The Eagle of the Ninth. I liked the way she was portrayed: her drives and ambitions made sense, came out of the real history we know Theodora had. This version is a somewhat ambivalent one, seen through the eyes of her bastard son whom she cannot acknowledge but nonetheless loves and schemes for. Even in other fiction I’ve come across Theodora, both as a great and powerful woman and as a scheming whore. I was really interested to read this, since it’s set in Constantinople, and I think in the same period as Guy Gavriel Kay’s Constantinople-analogue, Sarantium, in the Sarantine Mosaic books.
The Bearkeeper’s Daughter, Gillian Bradshaw
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