 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Pompeii
By Robert Harris
Hutchinson $29.95
 British ex-journalist Robert Harris has metamorphosed into a writer whose works, including Enigma and Archangel, have sold more than six million copies and been translated into thirty languages. In this gripping piece of historical fiction he visits the world's most famous natural disaster, the eruption of Mt Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii in August, AD 79, when the Roman empire was at the pinnacle of power.
While slaves did the hard work, those who owned them devoted serious attention to their gastronomic and love lives, with almost everything imaginable on both menus.
'Ampliatus's banquet was just entering its second hour, and of the twelve guests reclining around the table, only one showed signs of truly enjoying it, and that was Ampliatus himself.
'Did Ampliatus not understand that hot weather called for simple, cold dishes, and that all these sauces, all this elaboration, had gone out of fashion back in Claudius's time?'
The fare had begun with oysters, lobsters, sea urchins and then mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds, and moved on to the tongues of storks and flamingos, roast pigs stuffed with live thrushes...
And so it went all along the Mediterranean coast, where the servile waited upon, or fornicated with, decadent citizens who ate too much and too richly, and relaxed in bathing pools filled by the Augusta aquaduct that watered nine towns around the Bay of Naples - until things started to go horribly wrong.
Enter: the likeable engineer, Marcus Attilius Primus, a younger man appointed to maintain the aquaduct following the mysterious disappearance of his predecessor, who apparently took bribes from Ampliatus in exchange for supplying limitless water to the latter's bathhouses.
When Attilius notices the water's diminished flow and sulphurous taste, he contacts the authorities, including the scholar-admiral Pliny, who minimises his concerns before agreeing to mount an expedition to Pompeii, near the smoking Vesuvius, to investigate further.
With plenty of Roman-style intrigue and a love interest from the desirable Corelia, betrothed to a much older man, the resulting brew includes action aplenty when the aquaduct fails and the volcano begins to erupt, showering pumice on all within its deadly reach.
From one of the chapter headings taken from texts on vulcanology, we learn that, 'the thermal energy released during the AD 79 eruption would have been roughly 2 x 1018 joules - or about 100,000 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.'
A powerful book indeed.
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