John Gardiner

Adaptations John Gardiner

Forgotten in 2020 is the devastating moral/amoral/immoral portraiture of the Roman scene lavishly drawn by the remarkable Poet, Juvenal, who lived c. AD 55 - 140, writing during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. Adaptations, the novel, set in 2020, finds many echoes/parallels from that Classical Period, the outstanding transformation and advancement in cultured civilisation, haunted by debauched moral and ethical behaviour excused by the vox populi. Juvenal's intelligence was outraged by what he was witnessing and experiencing, the apathy and self-indulgence of the autocratic Roman leadership sowing the seeds for an irreversible moral decay soon to infect and advance the bringing down of the Empire itself. Adaptations addresses itself to a comparable moral emergency today, following fifteen-centuries of struggle to achieve an unimaginable level of advancement, socially, technologically, educationally, financially and economically, only to discover that the Roman debaucheries so flagrantly portraited by Juvenal, have assumed an anti-spiritual revival, utilising a carnival-like atmosphere where anything-goes. Tensions are rife today, and communicatively, the novel's traditional Battle of the Sexes theme has transitioned into unsavoury variations Juvenal too identified in Classical Rome, with humour being repressively sucked out of the narrative form. The Roman Empire succumbed to the infiltration of Barbarian Races, militarily, antithetical to the Classical Spirit, the civilising colonisation of space which opened up the World itself to humanity's greater understanding thwarted: the brutal precipitation of a centuries-long Dark Age, a retreat into recidivism, because the vox populi succumbed through weakness to the amoral allurements of the aggressive minorities, has been swept aside today as if it were an aberration concocted by Historians. Adaptations, the novel, is itself a literary palimpsest where can be read how humanity has cycled back to repeat the tragedies of knowable History, concentrated within the experiential consciousness of the central character, who, like Juvenal, has been Cancelled.