It must be a curse, cast at either the city of Bamberg, my parents' house or myself. For lo and behold, on Saturday there arrived another surprise parcel, this one by hmpf, also containing CDs, though with picture scans... and they're also unreadable on any of the computers in the house, of which there are several. Were it not for the fact that the CDs and DVDs I brought along from Munich work perfectly well, I'd be tempted to call a technician. As it is, I'm still baffled.

I went and saw The Island. Ho-hum. The first part and the basic concept were well done and intriguing, but then it degenerated into action set pieces. (If I never see another car chase again, I'll be happy. Ewan McGreggor was solidly good, Scarlett Johanssen was wasted as her role was severely underwritten and basically your standard late 70s action movie love interest but did what little was required, and Sean Bean was a competent villain. I've seen all three of them both giving more memorable performances and in better movies. What might have made the difference: script and direction like Gattaca, a film which manages to deliver a dystopia, suspense and an ending that doesn't feel too Hollywoodian.

Trying to avoid online spoilers for 2.04 of BSG, I also delved into an old favourite, a little-known novel set in ancient Rome which deserves a wider audience. It got published in the early 70s, and is called The Conspiracy, written by John Hersey. Like Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March (an obvious inspiration), it is a novel consisting of letters and reports. The historical background is the so-called Piso Conspiracy against Nero around 65 AD. Now Hersey, like Wilder, pulls off the trick of not only writing letters that read as if they could have been written by Romans but also to give the letter writers individual voices. As opposed to Wilder, he pulls off an additional tricky feat - one of the main characters of the novel is never presented by a single letter or direct message. He's quoted, talked about and debated incessantly, but we never hear his direct voice, and yet he comes across as vividly as the other main characters whom we "meet" via their letters - i.e. Tigellinus (Nero's right hand at the time) and his chief investigator Paenus on the one hand, the poet Lucan and the philosopher Seneca on the other. (Playing the ventriloquist for Seneca, btw, is no mean feat in itself since we actually have a lot of his letters intended for publication.) This powerful offstage presence is Nero himself, and here Hersey manages to present a credible alternative to the entertaining caricature found in Quo Vadis (or for that matter in the last episode of I, Claudius). His Nero is guilty of the usual offenses (murder of stepbrother, wife and mother; the question of the big fire is left open, as it is with most historians today) but is no madman or stupid tool. What makes him far more interesting and chilling is that he had the potential for being a good ruler but chose, and keeps choosing, the other way. (Considering that the first five years of Nero's reign, the "Quinquenium" under Seneca's and Burrus' influence get called five of the happiest in Roman history, you could say Hersey has an argument there.)

This must be one of the very few treatments of the period in which the Christians get hardly mentioned, again a refreshing difference. The period of the big fire is past, and the main characters just aren't interested. All of them are layered; Seneca, for example, is neither the stoic saint nor the greedy hypocrite he has at various times been painted at - that letter format comes in really handy to present pros and cons and leave the readers to make up their minds. Same for Tigellinus; Hersey gets far more effective by not making him a moustache-twirling villain but someone who is sincerely convinced that the ever increasing tyranny, deaths and degradations are all to the benefit of the state and the Emperor.

What probably makes the novel less accessible to some readers is that there isn't a "hero" in sight, nor a happy ending. (If you know your history, you know how the conspiracy ends anyway, and if you don't, you're not seriously expecting it to go differently, either; the very premise of the novel is that everyone has been under surveillance from the start.) But then, "what is the task of a writer in a dictatorship" (something which Lucan, the poet who used to be Nero's friend, and his uncle Seneca keep debating) is what interests Hersey, not "how to get rid of a tyrant in five practicable steps". So, Quo Vadis and The Gladiator, this is not. But if you want to read a novel which has lots of atmosphere, interesting characters and very topical questions, go for it.