The Far Arena

[Gleeful mini-review from a couple of years ago ...]

It’s been such a long time since I’ve read as long a book as this in such a short time. I read the first hundred pages the first day I started reading. Awed. Surprised.

I never heard of the author before, but apparently he had a fairly successful collaboration in the seventies with a Bruce Lee-secret agent type series. Wrote a few other books I think worth checking out, such as The Quest, about the search for the Holy Grail. But I get ahead of myself.

The plot’s simple enough. (Ignoring some medicine and science) a Roman gladiator is found embedded twelve meters down in the ice by a Texas oil company crew doing some exploratory drilling. Man’s cut out, sent to state-of-the-art cryonics unit at the closest Norwegian hospital, revived. It’s soon determined that he’s speaking classical Latin in his comatose state, and a nun who specializes in said language (who’s beautiful, of course) is brought in to assist when the gladiator gains consciousness.

Now, my summary so far may sound derogatory, and indeed I found the “modern” characters a bit one-dimensional. But Sapir does something wonderful with the story. We have first-person experiences of what the gladiator is thinking in his dreaming state, reliving the last weeks up to his being left for dead at the German Sea. And I found that to be the most gripping, the most suspenseful part of the novel.

About half-way through he’s revived, and the culture shock (and not just the Roman adjusting to our world – our three protagonists adjusting to him) is fascinating. And towards the end of the novel where our time traveler faces a modern-day Olympic fencer … well, the horror of that scene thoroughly overwhelmed me, brought me into contact with that shock of culture separated not only by distance but by time. Sapir should be thoroughly commended for pulling out such strong emotions in the reader.

I found myself trying to second-guess the author towards the end of the book – I do that a lot, and tend to gauge the caliber of a novel on whether or not the ending fakes me out. In this case, it did. This book is a prime example of why I love reading these cheap cheesy science fiction paperbacks. Like a gambler putting his last quarter in the one-armed bandit, I keep reading and reading them until, against all odds, maybe, just maybe, it will pay off. The Far Arena was sheer entertainment and I couldn’t put it down!