So much to blog, so little battery… I’ve just finished Pompeii by Robert HarrisFlightblog I is here. I had noticed it last weekend at the head of bestseller lists in Dublin bookshops after having heard good things about it, so had to snap it up. It’s a breezy read, but with bizarre mannerisms that make it fall far short of Robert Graves’s gold standard, or even Gore Vidal’s excellent effort.

It’s a pity that there aren’t more Roman historical novels — I blame this in part on Graves, whose I, Claudius is such a daunting masterpiece that subsequent efforts are doomed to lower the genre’s average quality, or so I imagine writers might figure.

This book follows Attilius, a young aquarius in charge of the aqueduct feeding Pompeii, in the days leading up to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. His aqueduct runs dry, so he sets out on a repair mission that takes him through Pompeii and onto the slopes of Vesuvius, just as that mountain prepares to blow its top.

Harris’s descriptions of the technical feat that was the Roman aqueduct system are the best parts of the novel, though the singlemost impressive factoid is found in a prefatory note excerpted from Roman Aqueducts & Water Supply by a certain A. Trevor Hodge:

How can we withhold our respect from a water system that, in the first century AD, supplied the city of Rome with substantially more water than was supplied in 1985 to New York City?

To which the only possible comment is: Filthy New Yorkers, bathe alreadyI can hardly believe this factoid, and would have checked online but for the fact SAS has no inflight wireless broadband. SAS does, however, have the coolest in-flight entertainment system. It includes two live feeds, one from a camera aimed ahead and one aimed below, as well as video games, though sadly not yet arcade games that use the live video feeds as a component of the game, or I’d be carpet bombing Canada right now. Other possible creative uses: extra scary last moments as the plane careens into the ground.!

Vesuvius is Harris’s excuse to delve into vulcanology, though here the premise is sometimes a little forced, as when our protagonist is made to climb the summit even as everybody else flees for their life, alert to the mountain’s warnings. An incredulous bystander asks “why?”:

A good question. Because the answer to what has been happening down here must lie up there. Because it’s my job to keep the water running. because I am afraid.

Nah. I would have run.

My main problem with the book, though, is a curious literary affliction whereby Harris is compelled to use contemporary slang and terminology that is clearly anachronistic. I’m not demanding the book be written in Latin, just that characters refrain from exclaiming in German (“Ach,” he spat, “get out of my way, both of you.”) or speak in pidgin English (“Not safe money here. Money hidden. Plenty money. Some place clever. Nobody find. He said. Nobody.”).

Venturing onto less certain ground, I found myself pausing over mentions of traffic noise, of people eating at snack bars, and of buildings made from concrete (a word invented in 1656 AD). He uses words like malarkey (1929) and coiffeured (1907, and what’s that e doing there?), which bring me violently forward into the modern age, frustrating my efforts to willingly suspend disbelief and imaginatively recreate Pompeii’s final days.

But maybe that’s just me. I will not yield, however, on the matter of referring to Pliny the Elder as an “old solider”. Yes, solider is a great Scrabble phony bingo, but there exists an anagram that perhaps describes the old admiral more aptly.

Nor can I let pass the following:

“what’s so funny about that?” demanded Pomponianus. “It’s not so funny as the idea that the world is flying through space — which, if I may say so, Pliny, rather begs the question of why we don’t fall off.”

Are we really at a point in the English language where writers of bestsellers are allowed to perpetuate misuse of the term begging the question with impunity? Are the language barbarians well and truly inside the gates? Ach!