Book review: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

The fifty-fourth book I read in 2015 was The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.  Another serendipitous find on the clearance shelves of Half Price Books, it's an old-fashioned (1954) historical adventure novel of the kind that used to be in vogue for boys.  I'd heard of the book and didn't see a reason not to take a chance on it for a dollar, and now I'm quite glad I did.

Marcus Flavius Aquila is a Roman centurion in his first command on the British frontier.  He contemplates a long and successful military career and hopes, in the course of it, to uncover the mystery of his father's disappearance.  He led a legion into the north of Britain on a mission from which no one ever returned.

Marcus's chance to recover the lost eagle from the standard of his father's legion comes sooner than he expected and under circumstances he doesn't expect.  With a native gladiator he purchased from the ring, he goes undercover past Hadrian's wall into territory hostile to Rome to discover the fate of the lost Ninth Legion.

The characters of this book are very well-drawn, particularly Marcus's Uncle Aquila, and it's utterly fascinating to my American mind to keep reading the Romans as settlers and the native tribes as Indians and then get drawn up short by the realization that these "savages" are blond and red-headed British and Scots.  Marcus and Esca form an old-fashioned bromance to rival Frodo and Samwise.  This book is the first in a sequence about Old Britain, and I intend to seek out the rest of the series.

The book was recently (2011) made into a movie called "The Eagle," and I shudder to think what a mess it must be, with modern racial resentments read back into it.  It may well be more historically accurate, but it's no longer an adaptation of this book.  Make your own movie about how the Romans mistreated the British tribes, but don't twist someone else's narrative into something it's not and use a familiar title to gain an audience.