The Gladiator series continues with Kenneth Bulmer penning this
entry. Laurence James wrote the first one, which I read and posted about a
while back. As THE LAND OF MIST opens, our protagonist, half-Roman, half-Briton
Marcus Julius Britannicus, has become a charioteer as well as a gladiator, and
after an opening chapter in which he participates in an action-packed chariot
race at the Circus Maximus, the story flashes back to Marcus’s days as a
soldier in the Roman legions.
He’s sent to Britain, his mother’s homeland, to help subdue a rebellion there,
and at the same time, he’s on a quest of his own to locate and kill several
Roman officers responsible for an atrocity that touched Marcus personally. This
storyline plays out on a rather episodic basis, although not as much as the
first book did. There are bloody battles galore, a little romance, and a touch
of angst here and there, as Bulmer spins his usual fast-paced yarn packed with
historical detail.
In fact, I’ve read enough of Bulmer’s novels by now to realize that can be a
bit of a shortcoming in his work. He uses a lot of jargon and obscure details
without ever explaining them, so that the reader runs the risk of becoming
mired down in all that. Also, there are a ton of characters in a Bulmer novel,
and they tend to run together, especially when they have long Roman names such
as in this book.
Despite all that, however, the pace and action and well-done protagonists
always make me get caught up in a Bulmer novel, and THE LAND OF MIST is no
exception. The second half is especially good and really had me turning the
pages toward the end to find out what was going to happen. I don’t think this
one is quite as good as Laurence James’s opening volume in the series, but I
still enjoyed it quite a bit. Some things in the on-going plotline are left
unresolved, and I wonder if they’ll be picked up in the next book, which was
written by Angus Wells under the Andrew Quiller house-name. I suspect I’ll find
out soon.
One side note: This series was published originally in England under the
overall title The Eagles, which is really much more fitting than The Gladiator,
since (so far, at least) the stories have been much more concerned with Marcus’s
experiences as a soldier, rather than a gladiator. But I guess when the books
were reprinted in the U.S. by Pinnacle, someone there decided that American
readers wouldn’t know what The Eagles referred to and changed the title to
something more recognizable. Under either title, so far it’s a pretty
entertaining series.
