Harris allows his Romans the occasional "By Jupiter!", but otherwise uses contemporary terms: "millionaire", "luxury cruiser", "apartment". Once characters start having to address each other as "Glutinus Maximus" and so on, the ghostly sniggers of Frankie Howerd and Monty Python start echoing round the spa baths. The model here was surely Harris's friend Roy Jenkins, a more recent example of a man who combined a brilliant literary output with high political office.Īs the Roman novels of the crime writers Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor have shown, the principal difficulties in writing modern novels about the ancient world are nomenclature and dialogue. Some aspects of the characterisation of Pliny the Elder seemed curiously familiar: a tubby, sweaty man given to elaborate courtesies which may contain a feline twist, someone who wipes his face with a napkin and then inspects the cloth "as if it might contain some vital clue". Gore Vidal has often made the same point, but he is not writing populist thrillers.įor British readers, there's another - and rather charming - code buried in the prose. More provocatively, given the importance of the US market to thriller sales, Harris also, through the use of a triumphalist epigraph from Tom Wolfe about American superiority, invites a comparison between the Roman empire's journey from smugness to destruction and imperial Washington DC. Most were coated in a thick grey dust, their hair frosted." Readers will be reminded here not of their school history books but of newspaper front pages just two years old. In the post-eruption sequences - chillingly, viscerally described - the novelist makes explicit this implied connection with September 11: "The further he went the more clogged the road became, and the more pitiful the state of the fleeing population. A culture in which we routinely see CCTV footage of murder victims in their final minutes and read transcripts of the last things terrorism victims ever said is particularly open to the subject of people living their lives half an hour from disaster. Harris always had an impressive weathervane as a journalist - buying into and then out of Blairism at precisely the right time - and he has cleverly sensed that Pompeii, though an ancient story, has a sudden new currency. Forsyth triumphed by creating an alternative tension around the question of what was going to go wrong, and Harris is equally successful in making us flinch and fear for characters who are going to a doom which we know before them. Rather than a whodunit, Pompeii is a whenwillit in which the killer looms in full view over the city, hissing magma.įrederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971) is generally held to be the model here, because history made it impossible that his assassin could succeed in killing De Gaulle. Now, switching his fictional co-ordinates from 1939-45 to AD79, he attempts, in Pompeii, a suspense novel in which every reader knows the close before they open it. Readers of Enigma (1995) knew that his hero would have to be successful in breaking the German codes or we would be living in the triumphant Nazi empire that he hypothesised in Fatherland (1992).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |