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Pompeii, Robert Harris
Arrow
Reviewed by Sheila Forbes (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

As you would expect, this book is about the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in August, AD79. It is also the story of a young engineer, Attilius, who has been sent to maintain the great aqueduct, the Aqua Augusta, that supplies water to several cities around the Bay of Neapolis following the mysterious disappearance of the previous caretaker.

It is the height of the Roman holiday season, and the great villas built around the bay are full of the wealthy and their slaves. One of the wealthiest and most corrupt is Ampliatus, a freed slave who takes fiendish delight in his ascendancy over the men who once owned him, to the extent that he is prepared to marry his young daughter, Corelia, to Lucius Popidius, his former master.

When the water supply is first tainted with sulphur and then begins to fail, it is Ampliatus who is prepared to provide the equipment and labour for Attilius to locate the problem in the aqueduct and repair it. Not surprisingly, he has an ulterior motive, and one that does not include the survival of the engineer.

With a sullen and uncooperative team of labourers, and carrying the memory of his brief encounters with Corelia with him, Attilius first establishes that Pompeii is the only city where the water is still flowing, warns that the supply is to be shut down temporarily, and then sets out to find and repair the break.

There appears to be no recognition of the fact that Mt Vesuvius is a volcano; the barely noticeable earth tremors, the strong smell of sulphur and the rupture of the pipeline are attributed to earthquake activity similar to that which had shaken the area several years before. When Attilius climbs to the summit after completing the repairs, finds a body and witnesses another death, he becomes aware of a terrible danger.

The story begins two days before and ends on the second day of the eruption. The tension builds slowly as each chapter is headed by the time of day and excerpts from books on volcanology describing the process by which a volcano reaches eruption point.

From the first rumbles and showers of pumice as the mountain explodes, to the final, fatal pyroclastic flow that overwhelms the citizens of the two cities and buries them in deep ash, we follow the attempts of many to escape, while others complacently wait to resume normal life.

Harris has meticulously researched the background and describes convincingly the sophisticated but decadent Roman society. While I found the use of modern colloquialisms jarring, this is a minor quibble. It is an absorbing re-creation of a major historical event.