Month: June 2024

by

71. The House of the Red Balconies by A.J. Demas

In a lightly alternate Greek antiquity, will love triumph over obstacles? (Jump to review.)

Plus a brief round-up of interesting links. (Jump to round up.)

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Cover for The House of the Red Balconies. Illustration: a house evoking archaic Mediterranean style, with red balconies. On a balcony above the main door, two figures are seated facing each other, drinking from large cups.

A.J. Demas has a track record of writing m/m romance novels set in a lightly alternate version of Classical Greek antiquity. By lightly alternate, I mean that the names and some political details are changed, but the polities are still in broad strokes recognisable, and no outright fantastical elements have been included. Demas’s world is, additionally, less awful in some respects than real antiquity, though it’s far from completely sanitised.

The House of the Red Balconies is the latest such romance. The forty-year-old engineer Hylas has come to the island of Tykanos (an island caught between two polities, and outside the cultural mainstream of either; a political backwater) on the understanding that he is to be employed by the governor to build an aqueduct. He has not come to enjoy the attractions for which the island is most famed, the tea houses (six of great note) where “companions” (who may eventually enter into sexual relations with the best-favoured of their clientele) offer refreshment, witty conversation, and elegant entertainment. Hylas, awkward with people, inexperienced with both high culture and sexual matters, feels out of place in this milieu, especially as it appears that the governor is more interested in having Hylas tour the tea-houses with him as a friend than in working on getting the aqueduct built. But Hylas can’t escape Tykanos’s tea-houses, either: the room he rented in advance is on the property of the House of the Red Balconies, once of great repute but now in something of a decline.

Zo is a companion in the House of the Red Balconies. Young, beautiful, accomplished, and suffering from chronic pain and fatigue, he is somewhat at odds with the sharp-tongued mistress of the house, and under significant pressure to find an exclusive patron in order to help reverse the house’s decline. At first wary of each other, he and Hylas slowly find themselves developing a friendship — largely over breakfasts in the garden that Zo only sometimes has the energy to maintain — that gives both of them a sense of connection in lives that otherwise feel lonely. But between the bureaucratic and administrative problems that may bring an end to Hylas’s aqueduct project before it’s even properly started, and the pressure on Zo to find a wealthy patron, the slow and sweetly blossoming romance that’s started to grow between them may not have a chance to come into full bloom.

(But this is a romance novel, so of course it does.)

Demas is as deft with evoking a sense of place (and a fully realised social world) as she is with bringing her characters to life. The slow unfolding of the relationship between Hylas and Zo is measured, touching, and at its heart very sweet. The cast of characters surrounding the central pair are well-drawn and interesting in their own rights. This is a quieter and more domestic novel than some of her other work (One Night in Boukos comes to mind) but no less compelling for all that. Enjoyable: I recommend it.

  • I’ve had The Conversation‘s article “Records of Pompeii’s survivors have been found – and archaeologists are starting to understand how they rebuilt their lives” in my tabs for at least two weeks now. I could wish it went into more detail about Tuck’s research on the survivors, but what it is offers an interesting glimpse into how the people who succeeded in leaving Pompeii resettled into other communities.
  • Over at Youtube, popular historian of Roman antiquity Adrian Goldsworthy has begun a series of videos examining the relationship of HBO’s Rome (2005-2007) to real history, episode by episode. The first video is here: I haven’t had time to watch the whole thing, but it looks like an interesting treatment.
  • And over at Reactor Magazine, my review of James Logan’s The Silverblood Promise went live in early June.

You may notice I haven’t posted anything in over a month. In early May, I was hit with a bout of Covid, and while the acute symptoms were never worse than a bad cold or flu, ongoing fatigue and brain-fuzz has bedevilled me ever since. (Add in another summer cold on top of that, plus a couple of other issues… I don’t know why we don’t have a political consensus in favour of air filtration in public places in Ireland yet, if we’re going to completely abandon masks. Surely no one enjoys avoidable illnesses?) So things have not been in tippy-top condition for talking about books around here.

But matters have improved at least a little, and I hope to soon get, if not caught up, then at least some way in the direction of feeling less like drowning. *waves*