Silence Among The Weapons
John ArdenJohn Arden recounts the extraordinary adventures of an ordinary man who gets embroiled in the expansionist activities of the Republic of Rome.
In the first century BC, a more or less ordinary central character - an actor’s agent - gets caught up in a series of more or less extraordinary events. Following his hero’s adventures across half the known world - from Asia Minor to the very heart of Rome - Arden allows us vivid glimpses of a world in turmoil under the heel of colonial ambition, and of the furious resistance this arouses amongst the subject peoples.
"I found portions of Silence Among the Weapons difficult: for one thing I would have expected a playwright to be able to present dialogue more clearly, but much seemed buried in long paragraphs. But the book is well worth persevering with. It is often funny, occasionally horrific, and the characters appealing. One hopes against hope that they can somehow escape the random carnage that is engulfing their world." - Siobhan McElduff
John Arden has been widely lauded as one of the most significant British playwrights of the 1950s and 60s. He wrote the highly regarded 1959 play, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, and his 1978 radio play Pearl was considered in a Guardian survey to be one of the best plays in that medium. He also wrote several novels, including Silence Among the Weapons, which was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and Books of Bale, about the Protestant apologist John Bale. Arden was a member of the Royal Society of Literature.