BOOK REVIEW / Fruits of ancient history: 'Caesar' - Allan Massie: Hodder, 14.99 pounds

THE LOVE of high-class gossip and jubilant self-contradiction that fills the pages of Caesar is something in which Allan Massie has successfully indulged in two previous novels. Both Augustus and Tiberius were disguised as the lost autobiographies of Roman emperors, with long stretches of murky uneventfulness punctuated by sharp moments of extraordinary grisliness. It is a curious technique, as delicate and arduous as truffle-hunting, and the result can seem matchlessly uninviting.

Julius Caesar, however, is a more robust and tantalising hero than either Augustus, his adopted son, or Tiberius, his step-grandson. Caesar is cast in the form of a memoir - the narrator is a lesser Roman general, Decimus Albinus, who participated in the assassination of Caesar, although he had once been his protege. The novel is concerned with the friendship of these two soldiers, a friendship that began in the Gallic Wars and ended on the Capitol.

The plot creaks from time to time as Albinus describes the crossing of the Rubicon, the war between Pompey and Caesar, the sojourn in Egypt and the final showdown between Brutus, Octavian and Anthony, a lustful debauchee who talks, unaccountably, like an early Patrick Hamilton thug.

The narrator refers to Caesar's sexual incontinence, out of the ordinary even by Greek and Roman standards. He describes his own illicit love-affairs (with Cleopatra, with Clodia) and his disappointed hopes. It is not a cheerful view of the human predicament, and not necessarily the view of the author himself, who takes care, in a fashion as much Shavian as Shakespearian, to give the devil the best lines.

Much of Caesar consists of conversations ('Pish and tush, old fruit]') but the conversations are contests as well. While there is nothing here quite as mischievous as the emperor in Tiberius quoting Nietzsche, it is apparent that Massie is trying to graft on to Albinus Enlightenment sensibilities which would have astonished the narrator. The problem is that the first-person narrative has a congealing effect. Its modern parallels are within reach of most of us, but the way Massie tells it makes it feel like ancient history.