A Review: The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

3/5 stars.
I don't remember how I learned Mark Twain covered a visit to Pompeii in this travelogue. I generally enjoy reading old travelogues because they describe a world which doesn't quite exist anymore. To me, it is akin reading about a fantasy world. There is also an historical interest because the author inevitably talks much about his or her own sentiments and ideas. Thus the modern reader learns something not only about the place the writer visited, but also something about where the author is from. All that being said; “Mark Twain goes to Pompeii” seemed like something I should read in my series of books about Pompeii.

First off, there is very little about Pompeii in this book. The book covers a five month cruise all around the Mediterranean, so the buried city only forms part of one chapter (XXXI). About the only thing of note he mentions (revealing something of what was commonly known at the time) is when he thought about visiting a buried city, he imagined it as still buried and exploring it by torchlight after climbing down into the mine-like excavation. He was surprised to see it was all uncovered and open to they sky. I find this odd. Twain makes frequent mention of the guidebooks to European and Near Eastern travel the “Innocents” he traveled with had to hand for their journey. How had he missed the fact the city had been completely uncovered even though he knows of the upright soldier mentioned by Gell? Twain writes:

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves.

Apparently, we still cannot.

Beyond the single chapter for which I read it, the book was just alright. The pleasure cruise Twain went on took place in 1867 and many of the chapters were sent home as newspaper reports. The book is a reworked version of these newspaper pieces together with many illustrations and Twain's fuller reflection upon the events of the trip. There are many incidents which strain credulity, but this is hardly surprising from a man who is remembered as a satirist. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of Venice (XXII), his night time visit to the Acropolis of Athens (XXXII), his luncheon with Tsar Alexander II in Yalta (XXXVII) and I liked the perspective he brought to his horseback ride through Syria and the Holy Land (XLII - LVI). There were also moments, most strikingly in Chapter XVIII, where Twain wonders off into memories of his childhood and youth. I want to know more about the person he describes in those fleeting moments. I have added Twain's autobiography to my reading list.

These enjoyable moments are scattered throughout a large book full of a lot of bad-mouthing of everything. He lampoons his American shipmates and himself, but he gives his worst to just about every else. He goes on about how the Old Masters weren't so great. He points out how nation after nation is run down and reliving old glories. He describes the French and insufferable, the Italians as beggars, the Turks as barely human, the Syrians as dirty and on and on. The American newspaper audience of the late 1860s seems to have had quite the taste for this sort of ruthless dismissal of the Old World, but I do not.

I am at a loss to guess how much of what is in this book is the real Mark Twain and how much was what he felt he needed to say for the papers. (I am aware there is some irony in asking what is real when talking about a man who created a fictional persona for himself.) This book was written early in his career when he showed promise as a writer, but before he became famous. Hints of the biting social criticism he later became known for are evident in this book, but he doesn't yet seem to know how he wants to wield his voice. Again, I want to read more of Twain to see how that development occurred.
In his conclusion, Twain says this:

It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every year and the system regularly inaugurated. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

I couldn't agree more.

AMPed Up!

Another project of mine has come to fruition. Third Eye Games has just published United Human Front: Affiliation Guide for AMP Year Two for its AMP: Year One game line. In the game, AMP stands for Accelerated Mutant Potential. When the game first came out I wasn't too interested because I'm not a huge superhero fan. I miss-understood things. AMP is not a superhero game, it's a super-powers game. Maybe it's not that big a difference, but it's an important one. AMP has plenty of “faster than a speeding bullet” without a lot of spandex costumes. When Eloy asked me to write for the game and I actually read the book I liked how dark it was. AMP is full of 1990s-era Marvel-style angst; “they hate us, yet we are dedicated to saving them from themselves.” It's also full of government distrust, secret machinations and downright nastiness which seem to have been pulled from the headlines of recent years. A good setting for a game.

I was asked to write a guidebook for members of the United Human Front. These are the people doing the hating of the AMPs. Explicitly. At first I was not excited. No one wants to be stuck writing about the one-dimensional “bad guys.” Well, I didn't anyway. I took it as a writing challenge, how can I make the anti-mutant faction in a mutation-based super-powers game into something which seems positive? How can I make the UHF a viable option for players picking their character's affiliation? How can I make this faction into something more than a stereotype?

I decided to focus on two things. Conspiracy theories and the kind of anti-government domestic terrorism America saw in the 1990s. McVeigh, Kaczynski, Koresh; they all came from within American culture. That part of the culture hasn't gone away, either. There are even more conspiracies afoot than ever these days. I tried to present the UHF members as thinking people (maybe thinking too much). They have looked at all the evidence and come to their own conclusions. Two members don't have to agree on what AMPs really are, or who created them in the first place to agree they are a potential threat to decent folk everywhere. AMPs are people who can turn into fire or smash rocks with their hands and who are drawn to fight with each other whenever they meet. That's dangerous! The United Human Front is circling the wagons and defending what they know. It's a noble position, in a way. I've also put out the idea not everyone who looks down their nose at an AMP is actually a member of the official UHF organization. This lets GMs use human antagonists claiming UHF affiliation who aren't actually acting by the more careful and deliberate means of the UHF hierarchy. Since the game establishes the UHF was founded by a geneticist, I played up that element too. The UHF top tier people know AMPs are different on a genetic level. It's not technically wrong to say they aren't human. Maybe the man on the street uses it as a cover for racism and fearmongering, but not all members of UHF take the same lessons from the founder's genetic tests.

I've tried to weave the idea of conflicting views of reality into the adventure which forms part of the Affiliation Guide. I have crafted stories as a GM for my weekly game group and I tried to write part of a choose-your-own adventure one time, so I didn't think an RPG adventure would be hard to write. I was wrong. I've not written an RPG adventure for publication before and I found it difficult to present a story where the players were forced to question their own definitions of human and mutant. My first attempt was roughly twice as long as it was supposed to be! I had trouble creating characters players were supposed to care about. I had trouble accounting for everything a group of players might do. I wanted to have multiple paths so different UHF groups with different visions of what it means to be “defenders of humanity” could enjoy the adventure. Ultimately a lot of the branching pathways had to come out to bring the thing down to size. The manuscript I delivered has been polished to a nice gleam by Eloy and the rest of his team. It can only improve when the creators of the game give it a once-over, right? I love seeing ideas I labored on over my keyboard turn into pages with proper layouts and illustrations. Well done, Third Eye Games!

If you want to check it out, the United Human Front Affiliation Guide is available now.
If you want to get started with the AMP game, check out AMP: Year One.
You can also back the Kickstarter for the latest book in the series; AMP: Year Three.

A Review: The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

4/5 stars.
The next in my series of books about Pompeii is my first work of fiction on the subject, and possibly the first ever fictionalized account of Pompeii. The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1835, and coming so close in time to Pompeiana, I expected it to pull liberally from Gell's descriptions. It did. In fact, Gell and the etchings from Pompeiana are explicitly mentioned. Bulwer-Lytton was clearly not bothered by inserting his authorial presence into his narrative nor by breaking into the ancient events with comparisons to the modern day. Asides such as “and you can see this same room when you visit the city today” or “they had a meal much like our own afternoon tea” stand out in sharp contract to the tale Bulwer-Lytton has crafted. He goes so far as to mention he can see the Bay of Naples he is describing from the desk where he writes the book! The mansion on the street of tombs just outside the city, the gladiators, the stalwart soldier whose skeleton was found still erect at his post and numerous other things mentioned by Gell are all folded right into the novel. Instead of being a real distraction from the novel I found I got used to Bulwer-Lytton's style and came to enjoy the specificity of his writing. “You can see the spot I'm describing. You know the type I'm talking about.”

I also enjoyed the actual story of the book. Not so much for the main story, which is what I would call a novel of manors, but for the numerous side stories which are woven together. The main action of the story is a tale of young love between Glaucus, a young Athenian nobleman, and Ione, an Italian-born woman of Greek heritage. Around these two are a constellation of other characters. Ione is the ward of the Egyptian priest Arbaces, who fancies Ione for himself. Ione's brother is Apaecides, who serves Isis with Arbaces but converts to Christianity. The blind slave girl Nydia sells flowers and fancies herself beloved of Glaucus. The rich and spoiled Julia also wants Glaucus for herself. Further from the center of action are the other Christians of the city, the gladiators, Glaucus' vapid friends and a Witch of Vesuvius, living in a cleft on the mountain. I don't generally care for stories where nothing “happens.” There is little which happens in this book. Most of the text is about the way people feel and how the scene looks and the history of Roman culture which explains why people are doing what they are doing. Taken all together, the story becomes more than the sum of its parts. Pompeii, as preserved in ashes in 79 C.E. is a crystallized moment in time and Bulwer-Lytton has taken pains to explore every facet of this chunk of Pompeiian amber from every angle. He has woven his tale into a vivid portrayal of the life of the city itself. I like the approach.

The novel explores many different point of view, but I found two perspectives particularly interesting. The first is the way the Egyptian and Greek characters feel about the Romans. Arbaces the Egyptian is an astrologer and rumored sorcerer. His contempt of everyone around him comes from his feeling of superiority as he views Egypt as the Mother Race and all these Mediterranean usurpers as mere children to do with as he pleases. His hates the Romans and mocks their accomplishments, yet he lives in a Roman city, enjoying the finer things. His views seem to mirror more the ideas of the Nineteenth Century than the facts of the First, but that isn't really a surprise. Through Glaucus, the feelings of the surpassed Greeks are also explored. He is also described as living a life a pleasure, always seeking to forget the fallen cities of Greece. From reading Mommsen, I have a general sense of how the Romans interacted with and treated both the Greeks and Egyptians so I find it fascinating to explore some of how those people may have felt in their day-to-day lives.

The other perspective Bulwer-Lytton explores at length is the nature of early Christianity. Apaecides, who rejects Isis for Jesus, is led in his conversion by Olinthus, who is presented as a passionate preacher and something of a zealot for his young faith. Olinthus is, perhaps too stereotypically, sentenced to face a lion in the arena after he is arrested as an atheist for denying the existence of the Roman pantheon. Other Christians are presented as a bit more calm and contemplative, but all of them conduct themselves with restless energy and powerful certainty. Bulwer-Lytton points out this fresh fire has been somewhat diminished in the present. He doesn't seem to be opposed to Christianity in principle, but he is critical of the methods of the early believers.

As the novel goes along the cast gets more and more intertwined. Their fates all march forward to an ending in ashes. Even if you didn't know about the Vesuvius eruption and the way the city was buried, the title The LAST Days of Pompeii should clue you in something is going to happen. Bulwer-Lytton has done a great job a working in hints of the coming destruction which the reader can hardly fail to miss but which the characters consistently mistake. They laugh off omens or produce talismans against the evil eye as if they can be saved. For instance, early on Arbaces reads in the stars he is in danger from a falling rock and he is indeed smote by a falling statue during a scuffle with Glaucus, but lives. He thinks all danger is past, but from then on I expected him to be killed by a falling chunk of rock from the volcano. It's these little touches which make this book more engaging than its conventional tale of young lovers would otherwise be. The threat of doom looms over the story and as a reader nearly 20 centuries later you know it doesn't end well. Early on, I hoped the book would come to an end before the story was told. I hoped the author would leave his story unfinished to mirror the sudden end to all the stories of the city.

I got fully wrapped up in the story. This was perhaps helped by not actually reading the book, but listening to it through LibraVox. It is nearly seventeen hours long. There is a wide range of volunteers who read the chapters and their diverse pronunciations of the Greek and Latin names can be a little bit distracting, but overall it is nice to lean back and let other people deliver the story to my ears.