TITLE: Pompeii: A Novel 
AUTHOR: Robert Harris
STARTED: June 4, 2010
FINISHED: June 13, 2010
PAGES: 280
GENRE: Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: They left the aqueduct two hours before dawn, climbing by moonlight into the hills overlooking the port - six men in single file, the engineer leading.
SUMMARY: [From Amazon.com
] In this fine historical by British novelist Harris (Archangel; Enigma; Fatherland), an upstanding Roman engineer rushes to repair an aqueduct in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, which, in A.D. 79, is getting ready to blow its top. Young Marcus Attilius Primus becomes the aquarius of the great Aqua Augusta when its former chief engineer disappears after 20 years on the job. When water flow to the coastal town of Misenum is interrupted, Attilius convinces the admiral of the Roman fleet-the scholar Pliny the Elder-to give him a fast ship to Pompeii, where he finds the source of the problem in a burst sluiceway. Lively writing, convincing but economical period details and plenty of intrigue keep the pace quick, as Attilius meets Corelia, the defiant daughter of a vile real estate speculator, who supplies him with documents implicating her father and Attilius's predecessor in a water embezzlement scheme. Attilius has bigger worries, though: a climb up Vesuvius reveals that an eruption is imminent. Before he can warn anyone, he's ambushed by the double-crossing foreman of his team, Corvax, and a furious chase ensues. As the volcano spews hot ash, Attilius fights his way back to Pompeii in an attempt to rescue Corelia. Attilius, while possessed of certain modern attitudes and a respect for empirical observation, is no anachronism. He even sends Corelia back to her cruel father at one point, advising her to accept her fate as a woman. Harris's volcanology is well researched, and the plot, while decidedly secondary to the expertly rendered historic spectacle, keeps this impressive novel moving along toward its exciting finale. THOUGHTS: Reading a book when you know the climax creates quite an interesting reading experience. You know Vesuvius is going to blow its top. You know know Pompeii is going to be buried. What you don't know is what is going to happen to the characters Harris has chosen to throw into this environment. I picked up this book because I'm (still!) going through the massive TBR pile that has acquired in my apartment. Other than the setting, I knew nothing about the plot or the characters beforehand. Harris did a decent job of setting the scene and the mood, but this book felt incomplete.
There was very little set-up to the story. Harris starts his novel a few days before the eruption. The reader is dumped right into an ongoing story line. From the beginning there is an intense feeling of foreboding (again, you know the climax). This heightens the drama of the story that I don't think the reader would feel otherwise.
If Harris did one thing very well, it was keeping the intensity of the setting going through the book and his characters' story. The characters by themselves work well together, but I don't think they were special in anayway. Attilius is your hero, Corelia is the damsel in distress, and her father is the villian. The other characters are fantastic background pieces but they are purely set players. I wish Harris had written more depth into the people, because he gets the setting and the era so right. I was fascinated by his descriptive detail of this area of the Ancient world. Unlike other novels, his research did not feel like an info dump, it actually enhanced the story without feeling know-it-all-ly.
If Harris' characters had risen to the awesome setting, this would have been a fantastic reader. As it is, it was just a decent book I didn't mind reading.
RATING: 6/10 [Good]
Comments