Classic review: Pompeii

[The Monitor occasionally reprints pieces from its archives. This review originally ran on Nov. 18, 2003.] One cataclysmic disaster can ruin your whole day, but at least it has the advantage of surprise.

That's more than can usually be said for stories about cataclysmic disasters, which lumber toward their climax like some bore telling a multipart joke you've already heard. Who honestly didn't feel the urge to push a few heads under water to speed up James Cameron's interminable "Titanic"? We endure documentaries about German aerodynamics because we want to see the Hindenburg in flames. "Oh, the banality!"

Robert Harris confronts this very problem in his new novel about the explosion of Vesuvius, called simply Pompeii. When the story opens on Aug. 22, AD 79, we know that by the end of the week, none of these characters will be shouting "TGIF." But how to fill the pages till that moment when the mountain erupts with a force 100,000 times as strong as the Hiroshima atomic bomb, shooting magma at a speed of Mach 1?
Harris admits that he just barely avoided disaster himself. After observing the United States for more than a year, he had intended to write a novel set in the near future.

"The story I had in mind," he says, "might loosely be described as 'The Walt Disney Company takes over the world': a thriller about a utopia going horribly wrong," but "the characters stubbornly refused to come alive and the subject remained as flimsy as smoke."

Or, perhaps he realized that Julian Barnes had already written that novel brilliantly just three years ago in "England, England." But for whatever reason, we've been spared another Brit's satire of America ("Vernon God Little" is enough to endure for this season), and given this terrifically engaging novel instead.

The key to Harris's success is his concentration on a crisis that preceded the volcano's eruption by two days. Back in 33 BC, the Romans had constructed a 60-mile aqueduct that eventually served towns all along the Bay of Naples, giving rise to a culture and an economy that floated high on the presumption of dependable, clean water. When a break in the main line begins shutting off one town after another, only Marcus Attilius Primus knows how to save the day.

Attilius, as he's called, is a young widower, a water engineer from a long line of water engineers, who's just been appointed to Misenum, home to a Roman fleet. His early weeks on the job have been rough: His predecessor has vanished mysteriously, his staff mocks his authority, and now the water has stopped flowing for the first time in 100 years, threatening to plunge a quarter of a million people into dry chaos.

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