Making History

Citizen Gyges has a chat with his city’s foremost scholars. He has a small request. A tiny one, really.

A quintessentially K. J. Parker novella. Wanting a far too clever for his own good narrator, who is a bit shifty but deep-down basically decent? Check. In need of a complicated scheme involving many moving parts? Parker has got your back.

If you generally enjoy Parker’s books, you’ll like this. I was vaguely disappointed by the denouement, but all in all, found it a delight.

The idea of history being used as political propaganda is fascinating. The prose was well constructed and the narrator had plenty of character. But nothing really happened, at least nothing compelling or properly fleshed out. This could have been more interesting with a deeper dive into the linguistics, architecture, art history, literature, and geography that the professors were experts in.