Product Description

A sweltering week in late August. Where better to enjoy the last days of summer than on the beautiful Bay of Naples? But even as Rome's richest citizens relax in their villas around Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are ominous warnings that something is going wrong. Wells and springs are failing, a man has disappeared, and now the greatest aqueduct in the world - the mighty Aqua Augusta - has suddenly ceased to flow...Through the eyes of four characters - a young engineer, an adolescent girl, a corrupt millionaire and an elderly scientist - Robert Harris brilliantly recreates a luxurious world on the brink of destruction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13236 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Certain thriller writers burst upon the scene with considerable impact: Forsyth with The Day of the Jackal, Cruz Smith with Gorky Park and Robert Harris with the masterly Fatherland. Interestingly, of these three authors, by far the most consistent has been Harris, and his new novel, Pompeii is in some ways his most audacious offering yet, a brilliantly orchestrated thriller-cum-historical recreation that plays outrageous tricks with the reader's expectations.

As in the equally adroit Enigma, Harris takes a familiar historical event (there, the celebrated code-breakers at Bletchley Park, here the volcanic obliteration of an Italian city in AD79) and seamlessly weaves a characteristically labyrinthine plot in and around the existing facts. But that's not all he does here: few novelists who (unlike Harris) make a speciality of ancient history for their setting pull off the sense of period quite as impressively as the author does here. As the famous catastrophe approaches, we are pleasurably immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of the Ancient World, each detail conjured with jaw-dropping verisimilitude.

Harris's protagonist is the engineer Marcus Attilius, placed in charge of the massive aqueduct that services the teeming masses living in and around the Bay of Naples. Despite the pride he takes in his job, Marcus has pressing concerns: his predecessor in the job has mysteriously vanished, and another task is handed to Marcus by the scholar Pliny: he is to undertake crucial repairs to the aqueduct near Pompeii, the city in the shadow of the restless Mount Vesuvius. And as Marcus faces several problems--all life threatening--an event approaches that will make all his concerns seem petty.

Other writers have placed narratives in the shadow of this most famous of volcanic cataclysms, but Harris triumphantly ensures that his characters' individual dramas are not dwarfed by implacable nature; Marcus is a vividly drawn hero: complex, conflicted and a canny synthesis of modern and ancient mindsets. Some may wish that Harris might return to something closer to our time in his next novel, but few who take this trip into a dangerous past will be able to resist Harris's spellbinding historical saga. --Barry Forshaw

Review
Acclaim for Robert Harris's Pompeii, the #1 international bestseller
"Blazingly exciting...Pompeii palpitates with sultry tension....Harris provides an awe-inspiring tour of one of the monumental engineering triumphs on which the Roman empire was based....What makes this novel all but unputdownable...is the bravura fictional flair that crackles through it. Brilliantly evoking the doomed society pursuing its ambitions and schemes in the shadow of a mountain that nobody knew was a volcano, Harris, as Vesuvius explodes, gives full vent to his genius for thrilling narrative. Fast-paced twists and turns alternate with nightmarish slow-motion scenes (desperate figures struggling to wade thigh-deep through slurries of pumice towards what they hope will be safety). Harris's unleashing of the furnace ferocities of the eruption's terminal phase turns his book's closing sequences into pulse-rate-speeding masterpieces of suffocating suspense and searing action. It is hard to imagine a more thoroughgoingly enjoyable thriller."
--"London Sunday Times"
"Breakneck pace, constant jeopardy and subtle twists of plot...a blazing blockbuster... The depth of the research in the book is staggering."
--"Daily Mail"
"[A] stirring and absorbing novel...The final 100 pages are terrific, as good as anything Harris has done; and the last, teasing paragraph, done with the lightest of touches, is masterly."
--"The Sunday Telegraph"
"The long-drawn-out death agony of [Pompeii and Herculaneum]--a full day of falling ash, pumice stone, and then, the final catastrophe, a cloud of poisonous gas--is brilliantly done. Explosive stuff, indeed."
--"The DailyTelegraph"

Tom Holland, Daily Telegraph
‘Britain’s leading thriller writer… Explosive stuff, indeed – and yes, it goes with a bang’

Customer Reviews

Explosive Read
Read this book if you wish to be transported back to the week of Vesuvius erupting and to witness it all from the eyes of the engineer responsible for the fresh water supply to the Bay of Naples. This is a very difficult book to put down, and can cause sleep deprivation in the suceptible. Harris captures the culture, customs and corruption of the time, and also shows just how advanced the Romans were as builders and engineers. The descriptions of people, places and events are excellent.He manages to build the tension in the plot in parallel to the pressure in the vulcano.
Probably the best novel I have read this year.

Possible Hollywood blockbuster?
This book, although not complicated or amazingly original plotwise, is utterly enthralling and i challenge anyone to be able to put it down for too long.
You cant help but like Marcus Attilius or get involved with his struggle to prove himself to the might of the Roman Empire as the new Aquarius, overseer of the aqueduct providing Campania with its much needed water supply.
Through his obvious enthusiasm and research into the topic Harris gets across with ease the sense of self importance and indestructibility that the Romans felt at this period in their history, in the decades before the fall of the empire.
Some of the characters are fictional but others such as Pliny the Elder (author of 37 volumes entitled Natural History) were actually in the city at the time of its destruction and some of the events and dialogue described in the book are well documented by his nephew (also featured) who survived to tell the tale.
Harris fuses fact and fiction into a tale that remorselessly picks up pace from the idyllic surroundings of Pompeii at the height of Roman civilisation to the humbling and ruin of the city by one of natures greatest forces. I forsee a Hollywood blockbuster coming before long.

That is so Roman
I haven't read any other books by Robert Harris but have every intention of doing so after reading this book.
There were many aspects of this book which I adored to see because they fit in perfectly with how I envisaged Roman culture to be and I should, hopefully, have a good impression of this being a student of Ancient History.
First - The corruption of various public figures in Pompeii is very accurate and was a huge problem during the Imperial age of Rome.
Second - The death of Pliny, this was lifted straight from the works of Pliny the Younger and so is as accurate a description of the death of Pliny as you will get. The tension and fear were so well described that there were moments when my breath was short because of all the ash.
Third - The instance of a slave being thrown to some eels is also a well known anecdote from the period, some masters were so cruel to their slaves that they would do this. Likewise some were very beneficient and even left large sums of money and freedom to their slaves in their wills.
Fourth - the sense of duty the hero felt to get the aquaduct working again. This idea of working for the public good is one that is not highlighted much when looking at the Romans but it is something that their Empire was pretty much founded on and so was a integral part of their culture. Of course no everyone was like this, probably a minority but it is by no means far fetched.

There was of course a feeling of inevitability to this story but it is a wonderfully written book and as historically accurate as historical fiction gets. I think it gives a very good impression of what life was like at the time, of the dangers and of the perks. I for one would not be dissapointed if Robert Harris explored more of the period.