Robert Harris: Pompeii

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

The title does not lie: this is indeed about the massive 79AD eruption, and yet Harris, a former political editor of Britain's Observer, builds into the historical drama a sensibility for the geo-politics of our own time, in particular the power of the United States and the American Dream.

Under his pen, the apocalypse of Pompeii becomes, if not quite a judgment on the corruption that was eating away at Roman society, at least a warning to mighty civilisations that they will not last forever. Nature is king. The gods, in this case Vulcan, will have the last laugh.

Marcus Attilius, a young engineer from Rome, has been ordered to the Bay of Naples to take charge of the Aqua Augusta, the magnificent aqueduct that supplies water to the nine towns in the area. His predecessor has disappeared and it's clear there is some sort of public scandal being covered up - a whiff of corruption that leads to the most powerful man in Pompeii, Ampliatus.

We meet this powermonger early on in the novel, and are left in no doubt that he epitomises the worst excesses of the Roman Empire. A former slave turned free-man who has exploited the system and other men for his own ends, he evilly has a slave thrown to the eels and plots the end of our hero Attilius.

The structure of the book is a countdown towards the eruption that we, of course, know is coming. A major fault develops in the Aqua Augusta, and Attilius must find and fix this before the population runs out of water - hopeless, given the impending doom, but they don't know that. Harris gives due tribute to Roman engineering, and fills his reader with a sense of awe at their great achievements.

Pompeii is part-thriller, part-historical novel, part-jolly good excuse for thrilling us yet again with stories of Roman greed and cruelty, part-thinly veiled exercise in framing research in an accessible manner. But it's strangely compelling all the same. Some literary types might say that books such as this are exactly why journalists should not write novels; others, less fussy about, say, the complexity of their characters, will say it's why they should.

Hutchinson, $34.95