Silk Road Centurion by Scott Forbes Crawford

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Silk Road Centurion is a flawed but very engaging historical novel, centered around the clash of two great ancient cultures.

Manius Titinius is a Roman centurion in the army of Marcus Licinius Crassus, in the mid-first century BCE. At the beginning of our story, he is on detached duty, scouting for the army and trying to discover the whereabouts and intentions of the Parthian army. Unfortunately, he learns too late that Crassus is marching into a trap. He is captured by the enemy before he can make a warning, and it’s implied that the result is the disastrous Battle of Carrhae, in which Crassus was decisively defeated and his legions lost.

Manius himself becomes a slave. He is taken far to the east, changing hands several times, until he comes into the possession of a tribe of steppe barbarians. These people call themselves the Kets, but they are known to history as the Xiongnu, a people of deep Central Asia. Along the way, Manius comes into contact with Chinese people, at first captives like himself, later free Chinese living on the frontier of the Han Dynasty empire. He learns to speak Chinese, learns something of Chinese customs, and is (grudgingly) accepted among them. Eventually he is forced to fight to defend his new friends against the Xiongnu.

As with any historical novel, the quality of the author’s research is important. I certainly had no concerns regarding that element of Silk Road Centurion. The very premise of the novel is drawn from well-grounded historical speculation. It’s long been suspected (although never proven) that some survivors of the disaster at Carrhae may have been sold into slavery, living out their lives somewhere along the Silk Road routes as far east as China. Manius is very plausible as an educated, skilled Roman officer of the late Republic; his beliefs and behaviors all fit what I’ve learned of the period. I’m less of an expert in Han Dynasty society, but the details of the people who take Manius in all seem very plausible too.

I much appreciated that Manius has realistic limits and flaws. Too many stories involving a protagonist accepted into an alien culture fall into the trap of making him almost superhuman. Manius does have one heroic trait – he is stubborn and determined to an astonishing degree – but otherwise he is all too human. He isn’t better at being Chinese than the Chinese who take him in, he isn’t a more effective warrior, he doesn’t convince them to make him their leader, and he doesn’t win the affections of the leading lady. His collision with Chinese culture is entirely believable.

Overall, the story was very engaging and I had no difficulty finishing the novel. Viewpoint discipline was very good, with the story told almost entirely in third-person close from Manius’s perspective.

The one quarrel I had with Silk Road Centurion is that it really needed at least one more copy- and line-editing pass. There were typos and editing gaps, and in particular Mr. Crawford tends to drop into very modern slang now and then. It was enough to distract me from the narrative more than once. If the overall story hadn’t been so interesting, I might not have been able to finish it.

Even so, this is a very good and readable novel about a little-visited corner of human history. I enjoyed it, and I’m intrigued to see what Mr. Crawford works on next. Highly recommended.