A Review: Pompeii by Robert Harris

3/5 stars I first heard part of this book read on the radio back when The Radio Reader was a thing on NPR. I remembered it being pretty good. There were also literally stacks of copies in the gift shop of the museum where I saw the Pompeii exhibit which got this whole Pompeii reading series started. So, I knew of the book and I knew I had to read it. I got it from the library and blew through it in a weekend. It is not a dense book. I hesitate to call the author a hack, but this is not great literature. It is a very accessible thriller. The story gets a pass from me, though, because of the innovative choices Harris made in his approach to the material. I also enjoyed the explicitly modern volcano science which kicked off each chapter and suffused the climax. Yet, by the end I felt the novel was missing something. Now, like magma squeezing up into a lava tube and inflating the cinder cone, I'll expand these points a measurable amount.

The plot of the book is this: Marcus Attilius Primus is a young aquarius – a hydrological engineer. He has just been assigned to take over management of the aqueduct running along the Bay of Naples after the previous aquarius disappeared. So, the book starts with a mystery. Then the mysteries start to pile up when first the water in Attilius' home base of Cumea turns sulfury and then a report comes in of the failure of the aqueduct altogether. To prove himself in his new role, Attilius rises in the face of these mysteries and sets about the solve them one by one. Like most good mystery stories, all the disparate elements start to come together into one big mystery. Attilius convinces General Pliny, a famous polymath, he can do the job, but in Pompeii he runs afoul of Ampliatus an ex-slave turned real estate mogul. Perhaps inevitably for a thriller, there is also a young woman who turns Attilius' head. Unfortunately, Corelia also happens to be the daughter of Ampliatus. All of the plot lines come to a head, on the day of the famous eruption in 79 CE and the climax plays out during the eruption itself.

I like Attilius as a protagonist. He's young enough to be a bit reckless; but as an engineer, he takes time to think through a problem before acting. Not that I mind a good meaty-fisted protagonist in this kind of story, but I like that Attilius isn't that kind of man of action. I also really enjoy the life Harris breathes into the rhythm of Roman life. The way he discusses how the aqueduct works and the cultural systems in place to access the water give me a picture of the Romans I didn't have before. I don't know personally if they are accurate, but Harris describes the road network and the role of slave labor and the lives of leisure enjoyed by the wealthy in their coastal mansions in terms which seem entirely plausible. While there are good elements in the story, there come along with some bad elements. First, Ampliatus as the villain of the piece had mustache-twisting levels of cliché. He is vain, spoiled, corrupt, merciless, manipulative, all the adjectives really. Secondly, the story is just a little too pat. There's one source of all the problems, the only woman and young hero every meets is the one he falls, every insane and risky thing the hero tries works out because he's the hero and if he died on page 50, there wouldn't be 150 more in the book. I guess it's not really a big complaint. It's a summer vacation or airport-reading style thriller. It isn't supposed to be a challenging read and it sure isn't.

I do want to step back to praising the book for a moment. Each chapter begins with a quote from a modern scholarly work on volcanology specifically talking about what was happening in the earth under the Vesuvius before this eruption. Harris quotes a scholar about how tremors would have preceded the final eruption, then the chapter begins with Romans sweeping up their broken pots. The last third or slightly more of the text takes place during the eruption itself and Harris' descriptions of the stages of the eruption – particularly the pyroclastic flows which buried the city seem quite realistic. Speaking as someone whose volcano knowledge only consists of being old enough to remember the news coverage of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and reading the volcanology blog Eruptions, I felt like Harris got all that science stuff right and actually offers some science “value added” for the general reader to know what's happening as the setting of the story itself tears itself apart. These modern snippets are, of course, anachronistic for the text, but I think the contrast really helps shed new light on the events for me. When you get scholarly discussion of modification of the environment and CO2 degassing then the first century characters talk about giants shaking the foundations of the earth you realize they had no idea what they were up against. They had no chance against the forces at work below their feet.

That brings me back to the “something” which is missing from this story. When you sit down to read a story set during the final days of Pompeii, you know from the beginning everything is going to be covered in pumice at the end. That is no “spoiler” 1937 years later. Harris has put the material culture of the Romans front and center in the story with his focus for the first part of the book on repairing the aqueduct. The reader knows all the fancy buildings and fish ponds and villas Harris describes, and the aqueduct as well, are all going to be covered in pumice by the end. It tends toward tragedy in the classic sense. Attilius' heroic efforts are for nothing because pumice. Pliny's rescue mission is for nothing because pumice. Ampliatus' schemes are for nothing because pumice. The images of the characters preserved in the ash could have given some kind of bittersweet import to the events. Instead, Harris ends with a more ambiguous fate for the central characters. We are given a little bit of hope, but the idea is so undeveloped as to be almost no hope at all. It's as if Juliet's nurse shouts, “They're not dead yet!” as the curtain falls. It doesn't convert the story into a comedy, it is just confusing. Maybe I am asking too much from a book which is so obviously a light, easy read. I recommend it, and enthusiastically, for it's unusual subject matter, it's breezy pace and for it's vivid portrayal of ancient Roman life.