Pompeii, by Robert Harris
In Robert Harris's Pompeii, the volcano is the real protagonist.
To be sure, there's a hero — Marcus Attilius, a hydraulic engineer — who has been sent from Rome to fix the failing water supply of towns near Mount Vesuvius. As a newcomer to the area, Attilius plumbs Pompeii's political turmoil while trying to find out what's happening to the Aqua Augusta. He falls for Corelia, the daughter of a local millionaire, with whom he eventually faces the massive volcanic eruption that will kill thousands of people around the Bay of Naples.
Throughout the book, however, it's Vesuvius who grips our attention. Harris builds suspense beautifully, putting us inside the volcano at the beginning of each chapter. ("At some point, hot magma interacted with ground-water seeping downwards….") When the mountain finally blows its top, his descriptions are so vivid and harrowing that you want to grab your cat and head for the hills. He's also a master of technical detail, explaining how Roman engineering delivered boundless water to towns and how to repair a leak in an underground aqueduct.
That said, his human characters have far less depth than the misbehaving mountain. All we know about Attilius, for example, is that he comes from a line of aqueduct engineers and grieves for a dead wife and infant. He's an implausible first-century Roman in a number of ways:
He's wide-eyed at Pompeii, calling it a "hustler's town," as if he'd grown up on an Amish farm. This is a 27-year-old man from Rome, the corruption capital of the world?
He's humble and insecure when directing his work gang, without a trace of the arrogance that most Roman professionals would bring to an assignment in the boonies.
For someone who has a lot to live up to, he's oddly unambitious. It never crosses his mind that if he's successful in fixing the problem, he can return in triumph to Rome.
He's sympathetic to the weak, a very un-Roman trait.
Harris obviously wrote Attilius this way so modern readers would view him as a modest, kind, sensitive underdog. On the technical side, it's far-fetched that he soon pinpoints Vesuvius (which at that time was not believed to be active) as the cause of the water disruption, and knows enough to warn Corelia about pyroclastic flows. Well, gotta move the plot along somehow.
One nice touch: to the delight of the town fathers, the Sybil of nearby Cumae prophesies that a thousand years or more in the future, Pompeii will become "a city famed throughout the world. Our temples, our amphitheater, our streets — thronging with people of every tongue." We 21st-century readers chuckle at the irony.
Due to an anticipated actors' strike, plans have been put on hold for a $130 million film of Pompeii to be directed by Roman Polanski and (rumor has it) to star Orlando Bloom. No matter who ends up playing Attilius, I expect an Oscar nomination to go to the volcano.
