the work

There is a music to Homo Eroica—a dissonant and often excruciating counterpoint that binds its chapters together like movements in a requiem. The title itself, derived from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, announces both its subject and its irony: man the heroic—or more accurately, man under the delusion of heroism.

For in this novel Robert Bon Serra has orchestrated a funerary symphony—a requiem mass—for the heroic impulse itself. Homo Eroica marks the last evolution of a species once noble in its ambitions yet now stranded in a world where grandeur has been stripped of its metaphysical scaffolding. What remains is the naked will to transcend—shorn of gods, bereft of virtue—still reaching upward in full knowledge of its futility. 

Bertrand Mercer, the novel’s tragicomic protagonist, is the last knight of this fallen order. His battles are fought not against dragons or armies but against boredom, mortality, and the intolerable flatness of modern life. His weapons are irony, intellect, and eroticism—those tattered relics of the Romantic soul. But as the reader soon perceives, each gesture of transcendence leads to abasement; each act of creation, to destruction. Like Beethoven’s original hero, Napoleon, Bertrand begins as a dream of greatness and ends as a parody of power. 

The irony of Serra’s title is therefore not cynicism but elegy. The heroic man persists—stripped of illusion, bereft of gods, yet still striving. His courage lies in his knowledge that all will perish and that he must strive nonetheless. In this, Homo Eroica restores to heroism its ancient dignity, but under the sign of tragedy.

The modern hero is no longer the conqueror but the sufferer—the one who faces the void without recourse to faith or myth. His greatness is measured not by his victories but by his refusal to abdicate meaning to the absurd. Bertrand Mercer fails utterly, but his failure is the mirror in which our own age must contemplate itself.

In the end, Homo Eroica is not a novel of depravity but of yearning. Its eroticism is metaphysical, its horror devotional. It is the story of a man who mistakes appetite for transcendence, but whose very mistake illuminates the nobility of human futility.

Beethoven’s Eroica was written “to celebrate the memory of a great man.” Serra’s Homo Eroica does the same—only the “great man” is not Napoleon but mankind itself, mourned in his final, hollow hour. The reader closes the book to the echo of the last, vanishing chord—the one Beethoven marked morendo: dying away.