You've got Pompeii. You've got Vesuvius. You've got Pliny the Elder. We all know what's going to happen while they don't, and that's not enough tension for you? You've got to throw in a romance and an assassination attempt as well?
The book starts promisingly, with the aquarius, or chief engineer, investigating some unusual behavior by the aqueduct which carries water to the cities around the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius towering silently in the background. A slave is put to death for killing a rich man's valuable fish, screaming that it wasn't his fault but something wrong with the water. It is reminiscent of the beginning of Eruption or of a Michael Crichton novel: random people going about their ordinary day just before all hell breaks loose.
It's hard to believe that this is the same author who wrote Imperium, though. This is an airport novel of a book, full of squalid sex scenes, many more instances of harsh language than the book about Cicero, and the aforementioned romance, which seems to be based on nothing more than the fact that both participants are young and the girl is good-looking. (I was going to say they were both young and good-looking, but it's only Corelia's legs and breasts that rate a description.) Much like Jack and Rose, we seem to be supposed to believe they're meant for each other only because they are our designated hero and heroine. I don't recall who it was now, but I recall reading about an actor who said he alternated blockbusters, for bankability, with movies he wanted to make for art's sake; perhaps Harris works on the same principle, with a beach read like Pompeii giving him the leeway to write his Cicero trilogy.
The bits about Pliny the Elder and the looming mountain are brilliant, as are the technical descriptions of the Aqua Augusta and its repair, but the romance and the plots of the villain against the aquarius Attilius merely distract from the real drama of the eruption. A fictional digression which does pay off is the mystery of the disappearance of the previous aquarius; the scene where his whereabouts are finally discovered is worth the price of admission and even partially justifies the murder-for-hire angle, which ties in with it.
The villain Ampliatus is a bit unfortunately-drawn, I think. He is a freed slave and a self-made man and owes a great deal to Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now. As he is the only freed slave in the narrative, his grasping villainy and his daughter's contempt for his vulgarity come across as classist.
A commonality with Eruption is the vanity of the human species vis-a-vis nature. In the Mount St. Helens account, it's the conservationists desperate to protect old-growth forest from the rapacity of the lumber industry; in this book, it's Rectina, willing to die herself if only she can preserve her husband's invaluable library of irreplaceable books in Herculaneum. In both cases, the mountain destroys what human beings feel so responsible for stewarding.
"[Human beings] always had to put themselves at the center of everything," Harris has Pliny muse in his last moments, as he faces the oncoming pyroclastic surge. "That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer -- it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us -- we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little -- a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him -- unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent -- and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretension."
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