Books
Toga wars. Who would have thought that a novel about a Roman plumber could be a pleasure to read? What a pity that the Booker jury did not have the guts to include at least one readable novel in its list. By Philip Kerr
Published 15 September 2003
Pompeii
Robert Harris Hutchinson, 432pp, £17.99
ISBN 0091779251
On 23 August 79AD, Pompeii looked like any other prosperous city in the Roman empire. People were moving about, trading gossip, and making business deals. Three days later, all these sounds had fallen silent and the city had vanished beneath a rain of ashes, like a mountain village buried in deep snow. Following the eruption of Vesuvius, some 20,000 inhabitants were mummified in a volcanic stratum and the city remained lost for more than 1,700 years.
Until Robert Harris went there on holiday a couple of years ago, the most famous writer to have visited Pompeii was Goethe who, following his trip there in 1787, wrote in Italian Journey: "There have been many disasters in this world, but few which have given so much delight to posterity, and I have seldom seen anything so interesting." Evidently Harris felt much the same. Posterity will no doubt be even more delighted that he has added the weight of his own word processor to the chronicling of Pompeii's igneous fate.
Harris's fourth novel, Pompeii, is a sort of thriller about a Roman water engineer named Marcus Attilius who sets about restoring water to the city unaware that the real reason the aqueduct has ceased to flow is because of the effect of the incipient eruption. To this extent, the book is a pared-down, modern version of Edward Bulwer Lytton's romantic novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which has been committed to film at least eight times, most notably by Ernest B Schoedsack in 1935. What all these films and both books have in common is that we know what happens in the end: Vesuvius blows its top and kills lots of people. To this extent, there are none of the great surprises and twists that characterise previous Harris novels. Since you know all along what lies around the corner, the major tension is to be found in wondering whether Marcus Attilius and his girlfriend, Corelia, will survive the eruption. Along the way, there is a lot of fascinating stuff about Roman plumbing and water engineering that would have delighted Vitruvius, who appears to be the main source for Harris's exhaustive research. This book is not so much Up Pompeii as, well, underneath it.
If none of this sounds particularly interesting, then that is mea maxima culpa. For this is a gripping novel that carries the reader smoothly along as in a litter borne by several muscular Nubian slaves. Almost in spite of his subject matter (in truth, who would have thought that a novel about a Roman plumber could be such a pleasure to read?) Harris proves, if proof were needed, that he is a writer who, unfashionably, never loses sight of his obligation towards the reader's welfare and enjoyment. Indeed, from this expert piece of storytelling, it is tempting to imagine that Harris has a small bronze tabula on the wall above his desk on which is inscribed his own variant on the Horatian aphorism: carpe lector.
The book is not without its faults, however, and these are mostly to do with the period detail. Take, for example, this anachronistic sentence: "With his puffed-out cheeks, pursed lips and sparse grey curls plastered down with perspiration, he had the appearance of an elderly, furious cherub, fallen from some painted peeling ceilings."
I'm not much of a classicist, but it's my impression that the Cherubim, which was the second of nine orders of heavenly beings as described in the Old Testament, did not become synonymous with putti, or depictions of nude boys with wings until the early Renaissance. And while the Greeks might have had a word for "snack bar" and "fuck", I'm not sure that the Romans did. In fact, I'm certain that the nearest the Romans got to a good "fuck" (pace the 15th-century poem "Flen Flyys", which contains the bogus Latin word "fuccant") was futuo, which means to lie with, and is hardly the same thing. Nor am I convinced by the author's somewhat tenuous attempt in his inspirational flyleaf quotes to claim a common ground between Rome and the United States of America. This looks like nothing so much as a desperate attempt to appeal to a parochial American readership. And I do think the Hutchinson marketing department might have been a little bit more mindful of the rather awkward prochronism that appears on the front cover of the book, which equates the eruption of Vesuvius with "a time bomb".
These infelicities, however, will do nothing to quell the enjoyment of the average reader; and I might add that it is a great shame that the Booker jury did not have the guts to include at least one readable novel on its long list. Like ancient Rome, Harris is doubtless also the subject of envy among his less wealthy peers, among whom, on the strength of this book, I now number myself.
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