Nearly 2,000 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, historians are still puzzling over what happened afterward. Little documentation remains from the period we know as the Dark Ages.

Unfortunately, Chris Wickham's 564-page effort sheds little light on the murk.

The book has intriguing cover art and enticing chapter titles, but the chapters themselves, full of long, colorless sentences and short on detail, deflate all expectations. Wickham never paints a tangible picture of the period.

Most of "The Inheritance of Rome" reads like a lengthy academic paper that assumes the reader already knows a great deal about the period.

It's particularly weak in describing Western Europe after Rome's fall. Wickham goes to great lengths to deny that the barbarians were, well, barbarians. They were, he asserts, indistinguishable culturally from Romans. What either culture was, though, he does not address. In any case, he argues that barbarian culture changed drastically in the hundreds of years between 400 and 1000 and is, therefore, impossible to pin down.

The book's structure also presents problems. Wickham organizes his chapters around the points he wants to make rather than around coherent narratives. In some cases, the reader must pick through successive chapters to gather information about a single dynasty.

Wickham skims or omits lively details about the period. A typically vague passage might be found in the chapter "The Power of the Visual," which is remarkably short of sharp visual descriptions. Things do not improve as the author's attention moves east, where more documentation exists. His accounts of the Byzantine Empire, and especially the Muslim caliphate, boil down to recitations of names, events and dates.

It is a dry, drab march through a time that with all its sex and violence should have made fascinating reading.

Wickham's thesis was that the reader must "look square at each past in terms of its own social reality." That is, the reader must learn about each period of history without reference to how it affected the time and place of the reader.

While this premise sounds valid, it actually provides an excuse -- at least in this book -- for the historian to avoid the question of why things happened. In rare instances, Wickham addresses why a particular trend came to be, but for the larger questions, he presents events without examining motivations.

Things just happen to happen, and their significance to subsequent generations is deemed unworthy of exploration.

At best, this is a book best left to professors of the early Middle Ages who want to quibble about historical details. For the rest of us, some other book will have to do.

First Published: November 29, 2009, 5:00 a.m.