Salammbô

The second novel by Gustave Flaubert, author of the infamous Madame Bovary. Rarely, if ever, have two successive novels been so different.

Whereas Madame Bovary charted the agonisingly mediocre tragedy of a bored housewife and her hapless husband in early 19th-century France, Salammbo is a richly exotic war epic set in ancient Carthage. The scale is vast, the imagery opulent and intense, and the battle scenes brutal enough to make Leonidas and his boys look like...well...a bunch of fairies.

After an exhausting war with Rome, the city of Carthage finds itself incapable of paying its vast mercenary army. Increasingly desperate attempts to fob them off spark a full-on rebellion, and eventually a destructive total war between the powerful but self-destructively disorganised mercenaries and a Carthage at but a shadow of its former strength.

In the midst of all this, the mercenary leader Matho falls obsessively in love with the beautiful Salammbo, daughter of Carthage's most fearsome general. His maniacal desire for her drives him to unprecedented lengths to obtain her, unleashing a conflict like no other upon the Carthaginian empire.

While just as popular as Flaubert's works in most of the world, Salammbo has never really caught on in the Anglosphere. (In fact, the only exposure most Americans have had to the name is through the film Citizen Kane - an opera based on the book is the one Kane's wife badly performs during the course of the movie.) Nevertheless, it is a one-of-a-kind novel and well worth a read.

This book provides examples of:

 * Army of Thieves and Whores: The Mercenaries, whose ranks are eventually expanded with tribes from all over Africa.
 * Bad Boss: Hamilcar Barca is this to his domestic staff. He notably has his chief steward drowned in manure after hearing about the Mercenaries' trashing of his house, even though he couldn't have done anything to stop them.
 * Badass Bookworm: Spendius can speak every language in the mercenary army, snipe a man with a longbow from an enormous distance, infiltrate Carthage not once, but twice, and operate (and build) siege engines like a pro.
 * Black and Grey Morality / Evil vs. Evil
 * Body Horror: The ravages of Hanno's leprosy are chronicled in truly sickening detail.
 * Contemptible Cover: Publishers tend to like putting topless Belly Dancer types on the front.
 * Crap Saccharine World: Carthage is a grand city, filled with beautiful public buildings, magnificent temples and gorgeous artefacts, all described in loving detail...and the site of a hideous all-out war with unbelievable cruelty on both sides.
 * Deliberate Values Dissonance: Possibly one of the best-done examples ever, because it doesn't contain a word of allegory, moralising or the slightest nod from the narrator - who, for all that the reader knows, might as well have been from the time period. Nobody bats an eyelid at the most horrible cruelties or the most fantastical beliefs.
 * Fat Bastard: Hanno is not a nice person at all.
 * Fat Idiot: He's also not much of a military leader.
 * Future Badass: Hannibal Barca, although such is the deliberate absence of any Lemony Narrator that you'd have to have heard of him to realise it.
 * From Nobody to Nightmare: Matho used to just be an ordinary soldier in the mercenary army (even lower than most, set to carry the other's luggage and firewood) before he saw Salammbo and basically seized control of it by sheer force of willpower. Spendius was a slave for years, but pretty much the first things he did upon being freed were grab the Dragon in Chief spot and incite the war.
 * Gorn: Tons of it. A faithful adaptation of the book would almost certainly be unfilmable even now. In fact, it might not even make it into a graphic novel. Even more shocking when you remember that this was published in 1862.
 * Historical Villain Upgrade
 * Innocent Fanservice Girl: Salammbo.
 * Kill Em All: Very few named characters are left by the end.
 * Leeroy Jenkins: The Mercenaries are almost a whole army of them, which loses them a lot of battles.
 * Morality Pet: Hannibal is one to Hamilcar, although horrifically subverted. To save his life,
 * Pyrrhic Victory: Several.
 * Serial Escalation: The scale, and bodycount, of the war just keeps going up and up.
 * Slobs Versus Snobs
 * Submissive Badass: Matho, to a tee. Despite being an unstoppably powerful fighter, he was pretty much a human pack-horse before he Jumped At the Call. Even as the leader of the Mercenaries, he almost always does exactly what Spendius tells him to.