Pompeii

One of the – dubious? perverse? – pleasures of the disaster story is to be entertained by destruction from the comfort of your cinema seat or sofa. Earthquakes flatten cities. Fires ravage skyscrapers. Tsunamis flood the land. And when it’s all over, we leave the cinema, close the book, turn off the TV. Safe and comfortable and ready to go on appreciating our comfortable lives.

Pompeii is a disaster story. But one with a difference. Readers with only a faint working knowledge of ancient history will know the city was swallowed up following the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD. And I’m sure anyone picking up the book will be thinking they’ll be treated to a vivid recreation of the eruption and the devastation that followed in its wake.

Except that they aren’t. What Pompeii is really about is the struggle of an aquarius (an engineer responsible for the smooth functioning of Rome’s water supply) to discover why the aqueducts carrying water to the towns on the northern side of the Bay of Naples have dried up. And it’s a gripping story that had me hooked before the first chapter was over.

Vesuvius does duly erupt, and Pompeii is duly smothered and buried. But this comes only after our hero has discovered the cause of the drought, battled corruption and survived a murder attempt. (Not to mention provided a lot of genuinely interesting background information about how aqueducts worked in Roman times). But with the eruption comes confusion.

Whereas everything up this moment has been clear and straightforward, the eruption and its results are a little mystifying. We experience everything from the point of the view of the characters, seeing it only as they see it, without any authorial, third-party narration to explain just what’s going on. So while it’s vivid enough, it’s hard to know exactly what is happening. The characters’ confusion becomes the reader’s. It was only when I finished the book and opened up Wikipedia that I learned about pyroclastic flow and understood what had happened to the city and its unlucky inhabitants. Then it all made sense.

So I’d chalk this up as a terrific mystery set in ancient Rome, rather than a thrilling (see above) disaster story. Which is maybe what Robert Harris intended it to be all along.