Book Review: Ross Leckie’s Hannibal

Hannibal was among the greats of ancient military history, the equal of Caesar and surpassed only by Scipio and Alexander. It is a tragedy that a novel as poor as this bears his name.

Ross Leckie’s first mistake is to try and compress Hannibal’s expansive career into a work of less than 300 pages. This novel is one part of a trilogy of historical fiction about the Punic Wars, but Hannibal alone is worthy of a trilogy. The attempt to deal with so much material in a single novel was pure folly.

By compressing the history so ruthlessly, Leckie makes austere prose a detriment to his storytelling. Ordinarily I enjoy an austere writing style. There is almost no character development in the novel, with the singular exception of explaining Hannibal’s hatred of Rome. However, this lone effort at character development is stillborn: we never actually feel any of Hannibal’s hated, because it is never adequately described or conveyed. Hannibal himself is reduced to a one-dimensional character, which does the reader a great disservice. None of the supporting characters receive any development whatsoever: they are ciphers, used to advance what is essentially. This is what makes the novel so terribly dull – I could not find myself remotely interested in or caring for any of the characters.

It is also painfully obvious that Leckie’s research is lacking, and he probably plagiarized Mary Renault’s “Fire From Heaven” for one of his chapters.

I am thrilled with only one aspect of this novel: I bought it for only $1 at a used bookshop on a whim. It is atrocious historical fiction, and I only finished it so I could write this review in good conscience. So beware of the forthcoming film about Hannibal, because the screenplay is based on this wretched novel.