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Adventure, Roman culture
in novel 'Pompeii'
By Emily Stack
Collegian Reporter
Picture this: Mt. Vesuvius erupts with a force
100,000 times as strong as the Hiroshima atomic bomb and shoots
magma upwards at Mach 1, obliterating an entire city while a
hero and heroine steal away in the nick of time.
Robert Harris tries to capture this experience,
but does so by leading his readers through terribly contrived
characters in Pompeii. In the closing scene, his hero, Attilius,
and love-interest, Corelia, escape the lava flows by jumping
in a sewer drain and supposedly following it out to an escape.
To narrate the countdown just days before
Vesuvius' eruption, Harris focuses on the malfunctioning Roman
aqueducts located around the Bay of Naples.
Young Marcus Attilius is the new aquarian,
or aqueduct engineer, in charge of the enormous Aqua Augusta.
Political corruption and social scandal surround Attilius as
he attempts to repair the aqueduct so as to avoid a draught.
Two thousand years later, the technicalities
of the aqueducts remain fascinating. Knowing this, Harris captivatingly
describes the aqueducts, their administration, and engineering
in detailed layman's terms. Yet Harris' research is awkwardly
joined with a substandard plot. Additionally, descriptions of
the volcano and its progress were fascinating, not because of
Harris' skills as a wordsmith, but because of their own natural
facts and workings.
While Harris succeeds in depicting the aqueducts
and other historical details, his characters are lifeless and
their stories are unoriginal, without a shadow of human complexity.
These flat characters frustrate and distract in their blandness.
Corax plots against Attilius; Ampliatus personifies evil; Pliny
writes his scientific and historical exploits to the alienation
of actual human beings; Corelia is feisty and rebellious as
Attilius' love interest. Harris does not release his characters
into a true human form, for character traits never vary from
the shade of black or white the author painted on them. These
characters rarely escape from the assumed descriptive barriers.
Though an interesting exercise in translating
mores between two societies, our modern one and their late Roman
one, Harris struggles to put the readers in a trace of Roman
culture and customs. Their mores are roughly sketched in, as
though trivia about the period is added in between volcanic
events. Harris tries to connect his readers by adding romance,
mystery and intrigue in typical formulaic settings.
Because it is void of human characters and
their reactions, Harris' attempt at creating his own sense of
suspense outside of volcanic activities fell flat. Filled with
historic and scientific data, a trivia-like effect kept the
novel fast-paced. Yet a scantily-clad corruption story and a
cheesily unbelievable romance dull down Harris' own contribution
to the mounting suspense.
In many ways the strongest suspense-building
element in the novel is Vesuvius itself, an anticipated source
of tension, which far overshadows Harris' own original creations.
The activities of the characters themselves are entertaining
rabbit trails as a mildly entertaining subset of human commotion
in contrast to the volcanic action.
Though he is at times an effective historian,
Harris may be stronger in writing history than fiction, and
certainly ought to be careful in joining the two.
Aside from the author's frustrating writing style, Pompeii has
its place in popular book trash.
Amusing and mildly entertaining, Harris writes
for the sort of audience whose purchasing power propels his
work to the top of the bestseller lists.
Looking past the simpleton's mystery story and the expected
character conflicts, Pompeii is pleasant, a nice distraction
from homework. Borrow it from the library, huddle up in a cold
dorm room and escape the Michigan cold with thoughts of molten
lava and sun-drenched Grecian resort cities.
If you simply want to know about Mt. Vesuvius
and Roman culture, then I suggest you pick up Paul Zanker's
Pompeii: Public and Private Life and A. Trevor Hodge's Roman
Aqueducts and Water Supply for a more informative, academic
view.
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