Book Review: Babylonia by Costanza Casati
A lyrical historical fiction novel for the ages
Hi friends,
When I found out that Costanza Casati, bestselling author of Clytemnestra, was telling the tale of the ancient Assyrian queen Semiramis in her new novel, I was intrigued to see her treatment of this ancient woman whose tale is so shrouded in mystery many claim it isn't true. Back in 2022, I covered Semiramis on the podcast, under the name Shammurammat. (The two names are used to refer to her somewhat interchangeably--I get into it a little more in the episode.) I picked up Casati's novel as soon as it was released in the US and it did not disappoint.
Casati deftly weaves together the shimmering myths about Semiramis and the brilliant history of Assyria to recapture this ancient queen's voice. There is a thread of the mythological to Semiramis's story--she is supposedly the daughter of a goddess, Derceto--and Casati handles this with an almost sly wink, turning the myth into what it probably began as: disdainful rumors based in jealousy.
The novel charts Semiramis's rise to the throne. Casati's Semiramis is strategic and flexible, and her path is both logical and lucky, which is an accomplishment all its own. In other hands, the rise from 'unknown orphan taken in by a sheep herder' to 'queen of an empire' would be murderous or saccharine or ridiculous, but not here. Here it just makes sense.
While it's a story about one historical queen's rise, the other characters are textured and nuanced. The story is told from a few different points of view, and through all those eyes each character becomes textured, nuanced, and deep. When I read history I often notice the "side characters"--assistants, soldiers, servants--and wonder what they were thinking as events unfolded. Casati brings some of those people from Semiramis's story to life. We get to see them clearly, their motivations, their worries, their hopes. They are side characters, but they're as richly inhabited as the main characters.
I'm a big fan of the love story here, beautifully drawn and exquisitely painful. It's familiar in ways--the jealousy, the hope, the lust--and unfamiliar in others. It is a love story for a very different time.
There's also brutality here, quite a bit of it. It's a harsh world that Semiramis inhabits, from everyday violence all the way up to siege warfare, and Casati doesn't shy away from any of it. Instead, she gives the brutality a symmetry in beauty, something even the characters call out. Not only is the world both harsh and harmonious, but her writing is lyrical; even when I wanted to flinch away from the violence, I kept reading for each new sentence's unspooling.
While the story is gripping, what impressed me is how subtly Casati paints the Assyrian empire. Historical fiction can easily devolve into the author proving how much they know about a place and time, drowning us in details. It might as well be non-fiction. But the world of Babylonia is precise without being didactic. While reading it, I knew exactly where I was, but I couldn't draw a map based on her descriptions, or easily chart their sources in a textbook. To me, that's the perfect balance of the author's description and the reader's imagination.
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