When We Were Romans
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All roads lead to Rome
REVIEW BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL Matthew Kneale's disarming novel, When We Were Romans, tracks the disintegration of a family and a mother's descent into madness from the unguarded, naïve perspective of a young boy. Kneale, who has won his native Britain's Whitbread Book of the Year Award and has been short-listed for the Booker Prize for earlier work, does an impressive job getting inside the head of nine-year-old Lawrence, as the boy chronicles the journey he takes with his mother and baby sister from London to Rome as they flee his allegedly abusive father. Lawrence proves an unreliable narrator, not because of an ulterior motive or surplus of guile, but because he is a child, who sees the world through solipsistic eyes. So when his mother, Hannah, abruptly announces that the trio needs to leave immediately to get away from Dad, Lawrence is more concerned with the quantity of toys he will need to leave behind than with any menacing fear. As the family zooms through France, he is struck by the different food ("crussons"), funny money ("yuros") and the fact that people are speaking differently, but he is most often concerned that his little sister, Jemima, is getting preferential treatment. Yet, when Hannah shows the first signs of a mental breakdown en route, the boy bravely takes charge of the family's fortunes, though he has no clear idea what his mother's periods of "sadness" mean. Arriving in Rome, where Hannah lived for a time before her marriage, the family relies on the kindness of an assortment of friends, camping out in spare bedrooms and on sofabeds in already over-inhabited apartments. When misunderstandings or friction erupts, as it inevitably does in such tight quarters, the family moves on to the next place. Lawrence, who assigns everyone an animal persona upon first meeting, likes some of his mother's friends, but not others—he has a child's uncanny ability to cut to the chase and assess a person's true nature, although he occasionally missteps when he fails to discern the subtlety of adult relationships. Hannah is short on cash, and one by one credit cards and ATM cards stop working. Lawrence, with little comprehension of the economics of day-to-day life, reports on this financial peril, but remains unattuned to the anxiety it engenders (at one point he demands that his mother buy him a 100-euro battery-operated car as recompense for good behavior). Hannah meanwhile searches for an apartment of their own, eventually finding one through a shady friend whom all of her other friends seem to dislike. Once the family is settled into this flat, the story takes a darker turn, as Hannah's erratic behavior turns into full-fledged paranoia. Now the reader, if not Lawrence, recognizes the full extent of Hannah's madness, as she elicits the help of her uncomprehending son in an extreme act of revenge. Lawrence has two larger interests that shape his narrative. Fascinated by outer space, he contemplates astronomical mysteries, particularly the fearsome enveloping attraction of black holes. It is not difficult to spot the metaphor here, as Lawrence and Jemima must helplessly yield to the dangerous gravitational pull of their mother's psychological black hole. He also becomes enraptured by the lives of some of Rome's more notorious emperors—thanks to a book, Calamitous Caesars, which he receives as a gift from one of Hannah's friends—perhaps because the insanity of Caligula and Nero makes his mother's instability pale by comparison. Although there are times when Lawrence's observations seem a bit callow for an intelligent nine-year-old in our media age (and the intentional misspellings, obviously there to remind us that a child is telling the story, get distracting), Kneale does an admirable job of keeping the boy's narrative voice consistent and arresting. As the reality of his family's plight first evades him, then slowly dawns—and even as his loyalties eventually shift—Lawrence remains emotionally grounded in the only domestic reality he has been allowed. There have been plenty of coming-of-age stories that pit a child's innocence against the inexorable force of a parent's insanity, but perhaps none that has captured the tension, confusion and ultimate loss of that innocence any better than When We Were Romans.
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