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Pompeii | 
| Author: Robert Harris
Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  100 reviews
Sales Rank: 1856
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 4.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 0099282615
EAN: 9780099282617
ASIN: 0099282615
Publication Date: September 27, 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 95 more reviews...
 Read the detractors but make up your own mind! December 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Having set out to give Harris the 5 stars he deserves, I read, and was amazed by, all the 1-star offerings. Some see Harris as a pretentious and self-regarding writer intent mainly upon earning full marks for erudition and research. Personally I thought the very opposite: naturally he wishes to convince, and in my case he does, triumphantly, - but this is because he wears it all lightly, does not insinuate his own ego into the proceedings and simply writes with the dispassionate intelligence evident in all his other (highly contrasted) novels. The reviewer who put him on a par with Dan Brown seems motivated by malice: almost nobody else writes as poorly as that, and Harris is a very, very long way higher up the tree. Somebody else cited the inevitability of the eruption as a defining weakness: a rather cheap shot, given that Harris (well aware himself of precisely that risk) sets out to build the whole story on the ominous presence of Vesuvius. I think it's worth saying that 'The Day of the Jackal' managed to become something of a classic despite - perhaps because of - the strength of one's feeling that the assassin could not possibly fail, even when one knew from history that he must. It's true that for a lot of people 'Pompeii' will stand or fall for similar reasons, but I don't see how anyone could accuse Harris of not knowing what he is doing. I'm a fairly demanding reader and also somebody rather anal about poor or sloppy prose. Apart from one glaring and uncharacteristic lapse ("...in the time it would take you or I to scrape together enough..."), the writing is as elegant, but also straightforwardly readable, as it needs to be. The suspense builds convincingly, the sense of place and atmosphere is admirably handled, the merging of documented historical fact and original fiction is excellent and I found myself reading the whole book in under 24 hours, having never intended to. One critic in the 1-star category says that the hero is one-dimensional. This, too, is rather unfair: the tension of what he is up against arises not from faults in his character, but from those in the earth's crust, and in any case there are plenty of vividly drawn personalities elsewhere. My only slight reservation is that an encounter on the very lip of the volcano rang an uneasy bell (surely there's a film where we've seen this before? - and if Harris is aiming at a take-off here, surely things of that type are best left to Wallace and Gromit?). I think it's a mistake to compare Harris's novels with one another: a complete change of tack from each one to the next seems to be the conscious rule. The common factors are shrewd, detailed observation, agile intelligence and a pleasing kind of emotional distance between the writer and the creatures of his imagination. Anyone who has found these features agreeable in past novels by Harris need not hesitate, while many coming to him for the first time will be quickly converted.
 A missed beat December 18, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was seriously disappointed by this book, and I need to explain why without giving away the plot device.
Harris is a very good novelist in his genre, and in Fatherland he not only wrote a cracking thriller, but one that was waiting to be written. It was jaw-droppingly clever. Subsequent novels kept the level high, and so I was looking forward to 'Pompeii'.
The problem isn't the creation of the ancient world: he does that as well as Stephen Saylor (which is high praise), and in the later Imperium has produced something really quite startling and potentially very good indeed when the trilogy is complete.
It's a genre problem. Once you know the formula of a thriller, and once you know the mechanism by which tension will be generated (in this case, obviously, the volcano) the only surprise left is how the tension will be resolved. And in 'Pompeii', once you know the man's work you know how he'll get out. No sleepless nights for me. The tension dissolves in the opening pages, and the only interest remaining was to see if I was right (I was disappointed that I was - I was hoping for a red herring), and how a competent writer manages the formula.
So, if you want a good thriller, read Fatherland or any of Harris' other books. If you want ancient Rome, read Imperium, or Stephen Saylor, beginning with Roman Blood (the best in a growing field) - or even better, Pliny himself The Letters of Pliny the Younger (Penguin Classics). And if you don't know how thrillers work, then go and read few, or Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Storieswill tell you in exhaustive detail.
Unputdownable ! December 8, 2008
Great plot with suspense on a number of levels. I enjoyed the historical setting and also learnt a lot about volcanoes. This was my first Harris and I've now ordered three other titles!
Pompeii November 27, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Dull as ditchwater. What a disappointment. This book is as dry as the aqueduct. The chapter splits broken into hours serve to deaden rather than increase the tension. If you are looking for a story to inspire the imagination about pompeii you should look elsewhere. The characters are as dead as the original inhabitants. Harris seems to write either gripping suspenseful novels or dross, sadly this falls into the latter category. Fatherland it ain't.
 A fun history lesson July 19, 2008
It's been a few years since I read any Harris and this proves that he is still a fine writer to me. Here he succeeds quite well in weaving a unique plot around the volcanic eruption of 78AD. Quite why he used an Aquarius beats me (an ancient roman water mains manager type). I have given him 3 stars and not 4 for this, for the simple reason that it took overly long in my opinion to get to the real action. In saying that, as another reviewer has said, Harris still makes the historical lessons interesting.
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