Patrick Tooban’s Encountering Empire, the second volume in the Calgach Scéla, is a generous, deeply researched historical adventure set in AD 69. At its center is eighteen-year-old Calgach, a gifted Irish leader whose voyage from Ériu to Hispania forms part of a larger strategy for surviving Rome’s expansion. While Calgach navigates pirates, Roman officers, merchants, storms, and unfamiliar customs, a parallel story follows Trad and a politically important wedding party bound for Tara. An older Calgach recounts these events to the young monk Padar, giving the novel the warmth and gravity of a life remembered near its end.

The book’s most distinctive feature is its chorus of storytellers. Calgach, Trad, Aithne, Maor, Róin, Searna, Mergus, and others each contribute a different angle, allowing public events and private emotions to rub against one another. Tooban uses these overlapping accounts to create something close to an oral archive, complete with disagreements, omissions, family legends, and details preserved by chance. The framing conversations between Calgach and Padar can be leisurely, but that measured rhythm suits a novel fascinated by the way memory becomes history.

Tooban’s world feels especially vivid when people are working. Ships need water, food, rope, experienced hands, and favorable tides. Gold must be reshaped into objects that Romans will recognize as legitimate trade goods. Hospitality creates obligations, gift-giving establishes authority, and a commercial agreement can matter as much as a military victory. The book’s attention to law, ritual, navigation, medicine, language, and household life gives the setting real weight. Rome emerges through warehouses, taxes, contracts, military rivalries, villas, and ports, while the Celtic world is presented as sophisticated, politically complex, and connected by the sea.

Calgach himself has the bright force of a saga hero. He commands weather, faces a bear, wins the loyalty of crews, and disarms suspicious Romans with impeccable Latin. His near-mythic competence gives the story much of its pleasure, while his recurring visions of the black crow reveal the strain beneath that confidence. The people around him supply the novel’s richest emotional textures: Mamek’s fussy brilliance, Trad’s subtle statecraft, Aithne’s fierce spiritual authority, and Róin’s devastating grief after Bith’s death. Even the book’s humor grows from character, whether it’s a pompous Roman, a quarrel over beer, or a gull settling a rigged athletic contest.

Encountering Empire is an expansive story about power taking forms beyond conquest. Calgach’s journey accumulates relationships, information, property, trade routes, and obligations, each encounter widening both his influence and the reader’s sense of the ancient world. The closing meeting with the young Trajan lands beautifully because the novel has spent hundreds of pages showing how history can turn on hospitality, curiosity, and a well-timed introduction. Rich with salt air, political cunning, and living memory, Encountering Empire makes the ancient world feel vast, intimate, and thrillingly alive.

Pages: 410 | ISBN: 978-1066798414