Robert Harris’s blazingly exciting new novel ends with the incandescent spectacle of Vesuvius’s fiery eruption in AD79. But its central character is a man whose element is water.

Attilius, a young Roman from a dynasty of aqueduct builders, is sent south to take command of the Aqua Augusta, the great stone watercourse (the longest in the world) that irrigates the coastal plains and cities of Campania. Scarcely has he arrived before the system mysteriously chokes, jeopardising the teeming conurbations sweltering in the ferocious August heat around the fabled bay of Neapolis: pleasure resorts such as Stabiae or Baiae with its sulphur baths, Misenum where the imperial fleet rides at anchor and — higher towards the forested green pyramid of Mount Vesuvius — the prosperous trading-town of Pompeii.

As Attilius urgently deploys technical know-how, deduction and intuition to locate and clear the blockage clogging the vast aqueduct, Harris provides an awe-inspiring tour of one of the monumental engineering triumphs on which the Roman empire was based. By the time Attilius (raising sluices, plumbing reservoirs, probing filtration tanks and crawling along finely graduated underground channels) has found and repaired the tunnel floor that has unaccountably buckled in the vicinity of Vesuvius, you are in no doubt about the imposing achievement of Roman hydraulic architecture. But, even as Attilius is resourcefully resolving the water problem, intimations of a far more terrible danger are making themselves felt — in the form of tremors shaking the parched earth. Where Harris’s three previous thrillers — Fatherland (1993), Enigma (1995) and Archangel (1998) — were shrouded in a chilly, dank atmosphere, Pompeii palpitates with sultry tension.

Not that this change of climate means that it severs contact with his earlier preoccupations. His fascination with sadistic megalo-maniacs (Hitler in Fatherland, Stalin in Archangel) is evident in this novel’s villain, a cruelly rapacious new millionaire (first seen ordering a screaming slave to be flung into a feeding-pen of razor-toothed moray eels), with whose mutinous daughter Attilius becomes involved. Another persisting concern (science’s crucial role in interpreting puzzling phenomena and combating hostile ones) is exhibited not just by Attilius but by the ailing yet still intellectually acute admiral of the imperial navy, Pliny. Keenly monitoring developments even under heavy bombardment from the volcano, he seems a togaed prototype of the Bletchley boffins that Harris portrayed in Enigma.

Avid for facts, Pliny reads voraciously. So does Harris, this book indicates. The research it draws on is extensive, although never awkwardly intrusive. Harris’s story is divided into four parts, each corresponding to one of the Roman days leading into the eruption: Mars (where belligerence is appropriately dominant), Mercury (when wiliness becomes paramount), Jupiter (which resounds to the earth-shattering cataclysm) and Venus (fiery turbulence eventually subsiding into a glow of human warmth). Within these sections, chapters take their titles from Roman hours of the day and watches of the night. What happens during them is kept authentically in period, too.

Harris evokes the milieu soon to be engulfed by the volcano with confident expertise, from its public baths and patrician villas to its taverns and slave galleys. His depiction of a wealthy vulgarian’s banquet (the menu includes mice rolled in honey, parrot’s tongue, nightingale-liver stew and sow’s udder stuffed with kidneys, with its vulva served as a side dish) catches its grossness so pungently that you feel like heading for the vomitorium. His realisation of the Roman mentality has equal immediacy.

Harris never lets his historical tableaux look remote. Resonances for our time vibrate from them. His novel’s opening epigraphs signal affinities between Rome’s world superiority and present-day America’s (the occasional term such as “superpower” reinforces this). Emphasis on civilisation’s dependence on water seems timely, too. Carefully registering the natural-history notions of Pliny and his philosopher friends, Harris complements them with more recent knowledge. Encompassing both the feast of Vulcanalia and contemporary vulcanology, his book preludes its chapters with extracts from modern studies purveying data such as that the thermal energy released by Vesuvius in AD79 was about 100,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

What makes this novel all but unputdownable, though, is the bravura fictional flair that crackles through it. Brilliantly evoking the doomed society busily 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 read — unless, perhaps, you are holidaying in the Naples area.

POMPEII by Robert Harris
Hutchinson £17.99 pp352

Available at the Sunday Times Books Direct price of £13.59 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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