Interconnect

Under the volcano again

In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even more cataclysmic by Harris’s angle on it. Not until nearly the end of the book does he describe the mushroom cloud, the blood-red lightning, the choking ash four feet deep, the terrifying withdrawal of the sea, the darkness and the final silence.

Harris concentrates on the early warnings, the disappearance of the drinking water, the drying up of the sparkling fountains, the mysterious blockage of the Matrix, one of the wonders of the Roman world that carried the water of life across Italy. The mountain watches as it had watched Hercules in mythical times trying to drive back the giants who had wracked the place with fire.

Vesuvius is an old mountain. But it is the young scientist, a water-engineer, who comes out of the horrors better than the locals: the sleazy politicians, epicureans and con-men who mostly lose their heads, search for scapegoats, throw the innocents to be eaten alive in a tank of great eels. A few intellectuals — Pliny the Elder, who was dying of obesity anyway — some women and the odd slave die well and bravely. Some even survive. It is a full and first-rate yarn.

Harris, however, acknowledges on the jacket of a new Vesuvius book, Pompeii: The Living City, by an archaeologist and an art historian and dramatist, that here is a different thing. It is a very detailed narrative, mixture of historical fact and patches of italicised fiction, and Harris wishes that it had been available when he wrote his novel.

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