A historical fiction novel featuring a vampire, this book takes place in second century Rome and stars a 2500-year old vampire. He has had plenty of time to build a secure business to support his lifestyle and unfortunately attract the attention of an ambitious bureaucrat. His talent as a physician (knowledge picked up in Egypt) lets him help an ailing old woman, mother to a dedicated and abused daughter and a younger son who is more interested in participating in sharing his new-found Christian religion than seeing to his mother.

The story is full of Latin terms for dress, rooms, and other terms related to daily life but all are explained in a helpful glossary. There is also a list of all locations mentioned with indications of which ones were fabricated and which were real. The description of the games held during the 4 years of Heliogabalus (Elagabalus) are not to be believed. Days of celebration fueled by wine and food provided by the emperor created scenes of debauchery which were protested by growing groups of Christians by setting fires to home and establishments. Amidst all this, our vampire appears to be a paragon of charity as he treats his slaves with compassion and even interferes with the arrest of an accused thief, caring for his wounds and eventually hiring him.

This is the first book of this large collection of stories about Ragoczy Germainus Sanct-Franciscus that I have read. It appears that they are not published in a chronological order and what back history is given does not aggravate the reader that they haven't read all the previous stories, but reads excellently as a stand-alone.

Warning to other readers, there are tasteful erotic scenes (this vampire is a VERY considerate feeder) and Christians are not portrayed in a good light. ( )

Roman Dusk (2006) is the 19th book in order of publication (and the second book chronologically) in the Count Saint-Germain series, the saga of the millennia-old "compelling" vampire who, in Yarbro's telling, was impersonated in the 18th century by a figure whom the English occult and crime researcher Colin Wilson called a charlatan. (Interestingly enough, Yarbro most fully explores the plastic nature of the Saint-Germain identity in a novel set some six years before the birth of the courtier, inventor, and alchemist -- and darling of Theosophists and various conspiracy theorists -- in her 19th Saint-Germain novel, the 2008 A Dangerous Climate, set during Peter I's building of St. Petersburg; however, the very first Saint-Germain novel, 1978's Hôtel Transylvania, is set in the early 1740s, which is when the historical figure apparently began styling himself as the Count of Saint Germain.) It is also a more-or-less immediate sequel ("immediate" here meaning "occurring some 150 years afterwards"; given that Saint-Germain has been walking the earth for at least three millennia at the time of Roman Dusk, a century-and-a-half of elapsed time would look rather different to him than it would to the average person) to the second published/second chronological book in the series, Blood Games (1979).

Roman Dusk is set during the brief reign of the purportedly highly sexed and debauched (and possibly transsexual) Syrian teenager who ruled the Roman Empire for just under four years, from 8 June 218 A.D. to 11 March 222 A.D., as Elegabalus (styled here Heliogabalus), in honor of the Syrian solar deity El Gabal or Ilāh hag-Gabal, whose cult was later assimilated to that of the Roman sun god Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). Heliogabalus was the penultimate ruler of the Severan dynasty, which would end with the death of his successor, Alexander Severus, in 235; Alexander Severus's assassination would usher in the decades-long Crisis of the Third Century. Heliogablus's importance to history is largely symbolic: he exemplifies the period of Roman history known as the Decadence, characterized by the near collapse of traditional Roman (read: Western) values and their near eclipse by the looser and more servile (Gibbon would say "effeminate," doubtless with Heliogabalus firmly in mind) morals of the Roman East; however, owing to his extreme youth (he was just eighteen when he and his mother, Julia Soaemias, were slain by the Praetorian Guard), he had far less sway on governance than did his grandmother, the formidable Julia Maesa (who had another grandson succeed to the purple after Heliogabalus was murdered). Heliogabalus's very public misbehavior finally turned the stomach of old guard Romans, whose own conduct fell a very long way off from even the most liberal standards of today; however, one should reasonably question exactly how many of the tales of his riotous carousing and cavorting actually reflect reality, particularly given the example of the diverting calumnies of Suetonius.

Ragoczy Germainus Sanct-Franciscus (as he is called here) returns to Roma after an absence of one-and-a-half centuries, to take up residence in the mansion of his dear friend, former lover, and fellow vampire, Atta Olivia Clemens (whose coming to the undead existence of Saint-Germain was detailed in Blood Games, and is featured as at least a correspondent in much of the subsequent books), near the temple of Hercules. Although he is styled as an "honestiorus" (upper-class person), he is also very much a foreigner in exile; given the tenor of the times, this makes him an object of suspicion and, owing to his occupation as a prosperous merchant, cupidity. While he has a certain amount of well-wishing, well-to-do associates -- as well as a patient for his sideline as a physician, the widowed and bed-ridden Domina Laelius, whom he treats free of charge -- they prove to be very much fair weather friends when an ambitious civil servant seeks to mulct him and threatens to scrutinize their own business affairs if they fail to tell him all they know of the mysterious foreigner. Domina Laelius's symptoms come off at first as indicative of cancer, though subsequently they seem to point to Alzheimer's; given that Sanct-Franciscus resolutely ignores her sexual overtures to him, and evinces concern -- and, eventually, something more than concern -- for the domina's hated elder daughter (who is the only one of her three children who takes care of her), the spinster (at the unmarriageable age of twenty-six...) Pax Ignatia Laelius, Domina Laelius's good graces also prove to be something less than sound. Then too there is the religious zealotry of the youngest member of the Laelius household, the fifteen-year-old Octavian, a millenarian Paulist Christian much given over to condemning "sin" wherever he finds it, and who holds prayers to the Christ to be more efficacious than all of the foreigner's medicaments in the treatment of his mother.

Sanct-Franciscus gets caught in the coils of five of the overarching trends of Rome in the second and third decades of the 3rd century A.D.: the pervasive corruption of the legal system, chiefly in the persons of the decuriae (mid-level civil servants: primarily officers of the court, or Curia, they are at once the equivalent of paralegals, tax assessors, customs officials, notaries public, and special investigators; since the Senate stopped paying their salaries, they are dependent upon commodae, or bribes, from the various parties that they deal with; given that they can direct the unwelcome attentions of the full weight of Roman jurisprudence upon one, they usually are paid far more than they were when they received a salary); the systematic debasing of the silver coinage of the realm, the denarii (which was especially bad during Heliogabalus's reign: Yarbro notes, in her glossary, that a denarius had "about $2.00 buying power in 218, reduced to about $.25 in 220 due to debasement of the coins" [p. 349]; it's never explained why the gold coins, or aurei, weren't likewise debased); the effects of lead poisoning upon the upper and middle classes of Roman society, given the "generations of cooking in lead-lined pots" (p. 7; this is never made explicit in the narrative itself, only in the author's note at the beginning of the book); the loss of status of women in Roman society; and the increasing popularity and militancy of Christian groups, particularly the Pauline groups. (In her author's note, Yarbro writes: "Christianity itself was sharply divided between the Peterine groups -- who maintained most Jewish traditions but held their wives in common, in a kind of group marriage, and celebrated communal suppers -- and Paulists -- who did not practice strict Judaism, organized their followers hierarchically, exhorted nonbelievers in the streets, and physically attacked those they considered to be sinners, including Peterine Christians" [p. 8]. It's unclear why Yarbro calls the former "Peterine" instead of the more commonly accepted "Petrine" -- or, for that matter, the more accurate Ebionite, who may have been absorbed into early Muslim groups.)

As is usual with the Saint-Germain books, there are not a surfeit of supernatural elements: readers looking to revel in the quotidian vicissitudes of vampiric life, or in a series of violent clashes between different supernatural entities, should look elsewhere; the details of Saint-Germain's undead existence are alluded to, but often seem less burdensome than, say, someone in a first world nation of today taking a series of prescription drugs to combat AIDS, or undergoing chemotherapy to combat cancer; and it's quite possible for an inattentive reader of Roman Dusk to fail to notice that Saint-Germain practices alchemy -- another skill that he picked up, along with the medical arts, in his centuries of service in the temple of Imhotep in Egypt. Then too, readers looking for a vicarious thrill as yet another lonely human woman finds sexual fulfillment, if not actual love, in the embraces of yet another "bad boy" bloodsucker, should also move on; while Saint-Germain often comes across as a "doctor of love" -- his condition requires that he achieves intimacy (which may, but does not necessarily, include sexual gratification; in Yarbro's telling, male vampires are all impotent, and female vampires are what used to be called "frigid," at least in the physical sense) with a human to thrive, moreso than that he drink her (it's usually a her; but, again, one does wonder about the provenance of his undead bondsman Roger, called here Rugeri...) blood. (Saint-Germain gives what amounts to a mission statement halfway through the book: "'I hold intimacy to be the highest expression of life one person may share with another"; p. 173].) Yarbro is clearly uninterested in writing about a vampire as a bloodthirsty revenant, or even about a vampire as a conventional sort of anti-hero: Saint-Germain is cultured, erudite, suave, gracious, graceful, highly adaptive, sensitive, compassionate, fiercely loyal, and, when crossed, a cold, implacable and highly dangerous enemy; nonetheless, in most of the books that I've read, including this one, the real monsters of cruelty and deviltry are wholly human, and are quite sufficient to imperil Saint-Germain with the True Death.

It's telling that Saint-Germain here, as elsewhere, evinces most of what would become the ostensible virtues of Christianity, namely compassion for one's fellow man, even the least among them, and the willingness to grant a second (or, in some cases, a third or fourth) chance at something like redemption. (It's also interesting that the worship of the sun -- from Heliogabalus to Hercules to Jesus Christ -- is such an inescapable motif in the life of a vampire. One wonders if Heliogabalus or El Gabal was, like the other two figures [and like the Persian/Zoroastrian original of the tutelary deity of the Roman military of the time, Mithra, Mihryazd], a savior figure. It's tempting to stretch a point.) While I can't imagine that a rigidly doctrinaire Christian would willingly read, for entertainment, a historical novel whose main character is a vampire, I should probably issue a caveat lector: Saint-Germain's debate with some violent Paulist Christians here will likely cause greater offense to such readers than even his activities will.

If Roman Dusk mostly reads like barely fictionalized historical research (and barely fictionalized authorial editorializing on such contemporary matters as the privatization of government services, the stridency of far-right Christian groups in the U.S. [especially their attack on women's rights and perhaps also including their opposition to the legalization of gay marriage], the decline in educational standards, the decline in civility, and the encroachment of pornography into mainstream culture), it's still diverting enough, if one is interested in the time and place; happily, Yarbro has toned down the use of the word "compelling" here to describe Saint-Germain, and if the erotic scenes are still eye-rolling, at least they're not groan-inducing or risible, as is sometimes the case. The book finally picks up in the last fifty or so pages, leading to one of the more satisfying conclusions that I've read in the series -- at least as bittersweet as that of A Feast in Exile, though not as jaw-dropping as that of Darker Jewels. ( )