Famous, respected and popular as he is I had never, until now, got round to reading any Robert Harris. It did occur to me, however, that I should after I’d seen the wonderful film Conclave (plot twist to die for) a few days after it started winning awards earlier this year.
Then my sister recommended Harris’s 2003 novel, Pompeii because she and I share very fond memories of visiting the site in 1966 on a road trip with our parents when it was relatively uncommercialised. So I read it – with great pleasure.
Of course it’s one of those stories whose ending you know before you start – like Robert K Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1967) Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (2020) or even Antonia Fraser’s groundbreaking biography Mary Queen of Scots (1969). The interest is seeing how the author handles the intrigues before the blow finally falls. And in this case I loved the tiny signs in the days preceding the colossal 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius: water in the piscina and wine in glasses shivering, rumbles underground, and why has the aqueduct cracked – providing Harris with his core plot line as engineer Attilius sets out to repair it? It’s effectively dramatic irony because the reader/audience has foreknowledge denied to all characters.
It’s a skilfully plotted, ever-topical story about corruption. Ampliatus is a former slave who, through cruel and unscrupulous wheeling and dealing has become the richest and most powerful man in the city. Most of us have met, or know of, people like him. The real nobility regard him as a vulgar upstart but are very careful to keep on the right side of him because he’s a thoroughly nasty piece of work. As a lifelong ichthyophobe I couldn’t read the graphically described episode in which he has a slave thrown into his pool of moray eels to be eaten alive and you don’t need to be a vegetarian to be utterly nauseated by the feast he serves to mark Vulcanalia. It’s all testament, though to the power of Harris’s writing and I found myself hoping fervently almost from the start that he was going to give Ampliatus a really hideous death when Pompeii was eventually engulfed by volcanic ash.
It’s a novel full of strong characters some of whom you find yourself caring about. There’s Ampliatus’s daughter, Corelia, whom Attilius a young widower, finds attractive. She’s a pretty feisty critic of her cruel father so there’s a bit of feminism in the mix. The slave Polites is a decent sort too. And Pliny the Elder, knowledgeable, experienced and curious but obese and nearing the end of his life is nicely done too – because, of course, it was his writing that provided posterity with an eye-witness account of the (literally) devasting events in the bay of Naples in the first century.
Above all I admire Harris’s descriptive powers. He has researched volcano science pretty thoroughly and quotes from a number of reference books at the head of each chapter. The imagination he then brings to what he knows is breathtaking: the heat, the storms of pumice, the fires on the mountain side, the ash, the panic, the terror, the screams and the loss.
Another thing I liked was the way he deals with the Roman polytheism which our primary school teachers told us all Romans believed in. Well, of course, there must have been some commonsensible sceptics, especially amongst educated people. Harris has several characters who more or less reject the whole concept of the gods and that rings very true.
Of course I was curious about how he was going to end it because it’s a fact that most people died. I really liked the way Harris steps outside the confines of 79 AD and simply invites the reader to speculate and consider 2000 years of stories and myths. Under some circumstances this would be a cop out. Here it works perfectly.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves – A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale
