I can take or leave historical fiction - frequently I find it tedious, cheesy, obvious - but I have to say I really enjoyed this and ripped through it in less than 24 hours while on holiday. There's a lot of enjoyment to be had here - for history geeks, it's in recognising many of the historical places and people of Pompeii. If you've read anything like Mary Beard there's much you will recognise here, even some of the extant graffiti. It's very well researched and feels believable. However, it's also just a good thriller, and I like the oblique approach it takes to the disaster - the protagonist is an 'aquarius', an engineer who works on an aqueduct, so much of the first half of the book is taken up with engineering talk).
I have read some of Harris' work in the past and enjoyed it, and this has made me want to revisit some of it

One knows the end…then you start to read the beginning…. It’s rather challenging to craft a gripping novel based on a catastrophic historical and geological event – the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., – but amazingly Robert Harris does just that. Attilius is the aquarius – the water engineer, as his father and grandfather had been before him, for the region surrounding the Bay of Naples, including the thriving city of Pompeii. A straight-up, earnest young man, his moral compass is steadfast and his devotion to his career unwavering. When the Aqua Augusta mysteriously runs dry, an ominous signal that the entire water system might be in jeopardy, he sets about doing what every engineer would do – methodically investigating the unexplained cause. For not only is there urgency in fixing the problem, there is also the ominous thread of Attilius’ life being at stake. Harris has created a vibrant political, cultural and social setting against which the story is set paving the way for a rich historical fiction that literally runs alongside the geological events, which Attilius starts assessing two days before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The other character I really enjoyed was Pliny – the astute and strategic naval and army commander who was also a scholar, author and philosopher – what a great mind. Harris’ research is impressive and his writing absorbing. To successfully write an historical fiction about the eruption of a volcano a couple of thousand years ago and make it interesting, exciting and educational, well, that’s quite a feat! A highly recommended read.

Geology meets Volcanology meets All Round Mr Nice Guy.
Having read Imperium by Robert Harris few short months ago I found that I quite enjoyed his uncomplicated writing style. I in no way mean unsophisticated or simplistic, for he is an author who can comfortably shoulder the mantle of an old fashioned storyteller.
Many authors try to be story tellers, but they over write or have not the skill and under write, or get caught up in too many tangents, thinking that everything they do has to be with the single intent of delivering the next great International Epic Bestseller.
Pompeii certainly became an International Bestseller, but it was not really an epic. It was a story of a man - an Aquarius - and was melded with a intriguing blend of geology, volcanology and precise Roman history. Very well done, in my opinion, but no epic.

I do not know if the geological and volcanological elements would put others off, whether others may prefer a story about people only, but I happened to find them extraordinarily fascinating.
I have a feeling the book was not what some may expect. Where you may have expected a Wilbur Smith type epic - multiple characters and their lives in the lead up to the Mt Vesuvius explosion - that is not what you got.

Robert Harris gave you instead, Attilius (the all round Mr Nice Guy), an Aquarius who came to the Bay of Naples as a result of the mysterious disappearance of the former Aquarius, Exomnius, and took over the running of the Aqueducts. And for the most part, this is Attilius' story as he finds the water supply in disarray and bit by bit, clue by clue, he starts to unravel the causes. Will it be in time though? Obviously, since everyone knows what happened to Pompeii and Herculaneum, everyone will realise he cannot be in time to do anything about those disasters, but can he be in time to avert others?

I found the final third of the book to be the most compelling. The eruption and the various stages of the eruption and how it might be experienced from different places in the surrounding area. In the towns, at the base of the volcano, on the water, in the Bay. I was mesmerised by it all.
There was a moment where I thought the book perhaps could have finished and yet it went on. And there was a scene or two that seemed inserted to make the book longer as those scenes kind of tripped up the urgent momentum of the book during the eruption.
But I had to give the book 5 stars. It deserved it in my opinion. For despite its flaws, it had me at ave.

*nb: ave is a Roman hello.

Empecé este libro casi por accidente y, pese a ser corto, al final se me hizo un poco largo, lo que le ha costado una estrella (quizás 3,5 sería lo idóneo). Sin duda, Robert Harris ha sido para mí uno de los descubrimientos del año literario (algo tardío, lo se) y el rasgo de la calidad se nota en cada una de sus páginas.
Con esta novela Harris abordó la temática histórica centrándose en la Antigua Roma y trasladando su estilo al género de la ficción histórica, manteniendo su maestría en el relato y en la narración. El argumento me ha gustado, dando una visión alternativa de lo sucedido con la erupción del Vesubio del año 79 desde el punto de vista de un ingeniero encargado del acueducto principal de la zona. Inevitablemente, este tipo de ambientación con hechos históricos tan relevantes se ven salpicados de lo que yo llamo "la paradoja del Titanic" (me lo acabo de inventar, lo siento). Este fenómeno se da cuando ambientas una historia en un suceso del que todo el mundo conoce el desenlace final (en este caso, la destrucción de Pompeya) y el autor añade algún elemento a la trama para narrarla con dicho acontecimiento de fondo, ya sea una historia de amor imposible o una lucha de egos a todas luces secundaría cuando se desencadene la tragedia. En este caso, esa historia de amor algo forzada en mi opinión es la parte más floja de la trama, aunque todo el tema de la ingeniería del agua me ha llamado la atención y resultado muy interesante.

خيبت توقعاتي هذه الرواية.. كنت أتوقع أن تكون أجمل بكثير ، مملة ومكثفة جداً بالكاد أنهيتها..

An excellent read! This seasoned author displayed excellent writing mechanics The read was smooth and clear. I was most surprised that I could understand the water duct system which Attilius, the engineer, repaired even as Vesuvius was showing signs of volcanic activity. The volcano seemed to catch the citizens of Pompeii and other bay cities unaware., which is hard for me to understand. In every account I have read about the 79 A.D. eruption, the extreme heat has been noted. Whether that extreme heat was normal summer weather or was a phenomenon of the quakes and the volcano, I am not certain. I do like the way the author connected the duct water insufficiency, the mangled duct work, and other anomalies with the volcanic activity. Perhaps the people were caught unaware because their immediate worry was the lack of water in the sweltering heat. We know that Pliny the Elder died in the eruption but not before scientifically documenting activities relative to the quakes and the volcano. He died doing what he did best and doing that which he required of himself. I recommend the book readers of all genres.

Thank you, Mr. Harris, for a Good Read.

The story has a typical disaster movie plot but set in the ancient world. Anyone wanting to see just how difficult that is to pull off need only watch movies like Pompeii. The basic problem with disaster movies is that the hero is utterly impotent to do anything and therefore the plot is reduced to rescuing loved ones. The period before the disaster hits is spent establishing the characters and little else, because nothing that anyone does can in any way affect the plot. Efforts to make the lead character the prescient voice of reason (ala 2012) are usually doomed to failure as this simply results in a series of implausible escape scenes as the character has nothing else to do.

I just throw this out there because I think this book found a very good way to avoid some of these difficulties. The lead character is an aqueduct engineer in charge of the water supply around the bay of Naples. Something has caused the aqueduct to Misenum to break (and is causing a sulfurous smell) and he must fix it as soon as he can. As such he is given the opportunity to learn of the coming disaster before anyone else (ie. he's being proactive) while at the same time not really understanding any of it (ie. he has things to learn and conclusions to develop). This means that most of the book is focused on a more developed plot than simply 'run away in terror as the world burns'. It turns out that being an aqueduct engineer is rather interesting. The minutiae of aqueduct engineering and repair are very well described and the depiction of how it operated is believable. Although you’d have thought Pliny the Younger would have mentioned a precursor as retrospectively important as the water supply drying up in his description of the disaster.

The downside of having an outsider from Rome as the lead, though, is that we get a very basic depiction of Pompeii. Attilius only passes through it briefly on his way to fix the aqueduct and he doesn’t even encounter most of the places a modern visitor will be familiar with. I found the description of life in the city uncommonly drab. “A hustler’s town, full of people on the make”. What a depressing vision of such a vibrant small town. And the leaders of the town, men like Popidius, Brittius, and Holconius who we know from graffiti, are all vile to varying degrees and in hock to the freedman Ampliatus. More on him later. I found that disappointing both for the complete lack of interest it provokes (the town seems a very boring and unpleasant place) and the fact that it veers far too close to karmic explanations for Vesuvius’ eruption. The city died because it deserved to die; the sort of story we tell ourselves to assure us that bad things can’t possibly happen to decent upstanding citizens like ourselves and, if they do, we must have done something to deserve them. I find such explanations trite and puerile, and while the book isn’t entirely going for that (the volcano was going to explode regardless) you certainly aren’t going to miss the city. On the plus side, we do get to see the scale of the eruption in a way we probably couldn’t if we were limited to Pompeii, even if that does make the title a bit silly.

The big issue I have with the book though is the characters. Not one of them has the depth of a puddle. Our hero Attilius is entirely noble in his personal life and only the interest generated by his professional life keeps makes him worth following. And by the time the eruption begins his profession has entirely ceased to matter. The rest of the cast is far worse. His love interest Corelia is noble and tender-hearted and nothing more. Her sudden willingness to upend her whole life to help her new aqueduct engineer acquaintance is nothing less than wholly unbelievable. Her father, Ampliatus, is Trimalchio on steroids. Trimalchio was an amusing character from Petronius’ Satyricon, an ex-slave who became very wealthy and shows off his new wealth in the most embarrassingly crass and uncultured way. But while Trimalchio is played for laughs and is merely contemptible, Ampliatus is also the epitome of pure cartoonish evil. He’s introduced feeding a slave to his eels because he wants to enjoy the experience. That’s based on an incident from the days of Augustus (both this and the Trimalchio connections are explicit in the text), but merging a notorious act of cruelty so shocking it offended even Roman sensibilities with a parody of classless freedmen with cultural pretensions, and then throwing in a dollop of modern supervillainy and corporate excess in there, makes him not more believable than the sum of these parts, but less. These sort of extreme archetypes aren’t convincing in the slightest and rather ruin the book’s efforts at realism whenever they appear. Which is often.

About the only exception to this is Pliny, who’s a very ambiguous hero. While his courage and scientific curiosity are justly praised, he’s also the admiral of the fleet stationed at Misenum. Is he right to order the fleet into battle against a volcano just to satisfy his curiosity? He seems more foolhardy than brave at times. But where’s the line?

While I praised the book for finding a way to make the buildup feel in step with the disaster elements, the disaster elements are what’s handled poorly. I found the cliches here to be truly wretched. The evil aristocrat with the beautiful daughter with whom our lead immediately and inexplicably falls for; the indolent authority figures who ignore danger signs to keep business running smoothly; the villains who lose all sense of reality and force other people to remain behind as captives. The description of the eruption is also rather too clear given the people providing the narration. Everyone seems able to see the pyroclastic flows scourging Herculaneum and later Pompeii. I rather doubt that they were visible even to the Pompeiians being killed given that it struck in the pre-dawn hours and the ash probably reduced visibility to a few feet. But I suspect this sort of unreality is unavoidable if the book is to make sense. Less easy to justify is the impending revelation that Vesuvius is a volcano about to explode. It’s laid out to seem so obvious that the Romans seem rather thick for not having deduced it. But the entire event was so extraordinary that nobody could have foreseen it, and even if the Etna comparison was recognized (and the Romans did actually know or suspect that Vesuvius was a volcano), Etna’s eruptions were nothing like that of Vesuvius. Even had they anticipated an eruption they couldn’t have known it would be so massive as to endanger the entire bay of Naples.

Basically what this means is that I found the villain and payoff to be rather underwhelming, apart from the voyages of Gaius Plinius Senior. What makes the book work is the slow buildup to an outcome we already know is coming. Each chapter begins with a quote from a volcanology book and tells us the date by how long we have until Vesuvius pops. The closer Attilius gets to the volcano the more nervous we feel. This means that the momentum built up from the excitement of the early chapters (occupying about 2/3 of the book) will probably be enough to get you through the final section. But while I enjoyed the book there are definite improvements that could have been made. I really would have liked a feel for life in the doomed cities and a slightly more sympathetic ear turned towards small-town life in the Roman empire.

This just fell flat. I’m trying to figure out why.





First of all, the characters were one-dimensional. They were either all good or all bad, and not one had a personality. The writing was not great, though not horrible. I think it was all telling, no showing. There was no creativity in the writing, no clear voice. There’s sort of a romance thrown in at the end, but there is no reason for it; it is not believable.

The historical facts are rather interesting, and the timeline of the eruption is accurate. The premise is rather cool: A hydro-engineer is sent from Rome to Pompeii to investigate the disappearance of his predecessor and finds the aquaducts failing and filled with sulphur thanks to the brewing volcano. You could do a lot with this, but the writer doesn’t. He sends the main character here and there to slowly discover things. He doesn’t discover much and instead spends most of his time talking to jerks who make crass jokes. So none of it is that interesting. The characters were so flat and unlikable, I didn’t feel bad when they all died.



The audiobook cover said it was narrated by Michael Cumpsty, but the narrator proclaimed himself to be John Lee. He sounded like someone reading the Bible. (He’d make a good Bible narrator.) I turned the speed way up so I could be done faster. I’m still not sure if the main character survived; I’ll have to listen again to the ending.

Contains strong/lewd language, vulgar descriptions (including fat-shaming); some violence

Book Blog

Harris has given us a wonderful version of what it would have been like to go through the eruption of Vesuvius. His main character is an engineer, a water engineer. The engineer is an unassuming character dedicated to his work. We experience the eruption through the eyes of this engineer and because of this point of view, the story takes on more meaning and immediacy.

It is this point of view that really makes the story for me. It's obvious that Harris has done his research. As I read the novel I was taken back to the city of Pompeii that I saw as a tourist. But it is now a city that is much more alive for me than ever before.

I would definitely recommend this book to those who love historical fiction and also to those who love a good story.

Robert Harris tells a fictional story woven around the factual Vesuvius volcanic eruption in 79 AD, which destroyed the once prosperous Pompeii. The details of the events that unfolded following the eruption was fascinating and terrifying. Unlike other volcanoes,Vesuvius was completely dormant and suddenly erupted catching everyone unawares. Looking at the images of people mummified by the volcanic ash gives a new perspective of how bad this had been.
It was surprising how some managed to survive the nature's wrath. One survivor was Pliny's nephew who chronicled the eye witness account with great details.
The engineering marvel of the aqueducts was well described.
The only problem with the book was the half-baked relationship between Attilus and Corelia. The motivation for him to rush back to Pompeii to save Corelia didn't make sense.
I thank the author for presenting this historical story in this format, which I would otherwise have not read if it was a non-fiction.

I gave this book 4 stars because the protagonist (Marcus Attilius Primus) and I share the same profession - that of being a civil engineer. I was fascinated by the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that brought fresh water to people in nine towns around the Bay of Naples including Pompeii.

True, we all at least know what happened in Pompeii due to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. So at first I was a bit unsure about reading this fictionalized account of one of the most infamous cataclysms in human history. And yes, the novel was a bit of an underwhelming experience save for the Aqua Augusta but almost half of the plot revolves around it, so, 4 stars.

It is 79AD, the height of a hot summer and the Romans have settled into Pompeii and the surrounding areas for their holidays.

The aquarius, the man responsible for ensuring that the aquaducts are working, has disappeared. Attilius, a young engineer is called in to take over, but something has gone very wrong with the water supply. They will need to move ever closer to Mount Vesuvius to find out what is wrong, but the problem is worse than they could ever have imagined.

This is an interesting take on the famous eruption, which destroyed entire cities, and a great look at what life was like in ancient Roman times.

I see a lot of reviews saying that writing from a perspective of a water engineer was boring, but I didn't find it so. In fact, when I was in Pompeii, I was fascinated to see the old water pipes and flabbergasted at just how advanced these people were.

This is a story that will never cease to fascinate me, and it is conveyed so compellingly in this novel, with the history and the drama all rolled together.