The last days of Pompeii told anew.

I resisted reading this new novel about Pompeii for some time. I am not sure why, for when I settled down to read it, I found it riveting.









Pompeii

Robert Harris’s Pompeii (304 pages, Random House, $15) tells the story of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried Pompeii and the nearby Herculaneum in ash and pumice. Harris centers his tale on Attilius, an engineer, who has been given the job of running the Augusta Aqueduct when its director has gone missing.

No sooner is he in position in the Bay of Naples than the Aqueduct shows signs of breaking down. Sulfurous pools and lowered reservoirs suggest that something is seriously amiss, and when he begins to investigate he realizes that he will have to divert the Aqueduct near Pompeii in order to look for the break and to make repairs.
He needs to persuade Pliny the Edler, the author and admiral, to help him with funds and supplies, and before long he is on his way to Pompeii, where he hopes to get local labor to help with the job. His foreman seems to be antagonistic, however, and his trip is fraught with difficulties not entirely explained by various earthquakes and strange natural events.

In Pompeii he is confronted with a wealthy autocrat, who is also a former slave, who seems to control everything that happens in Pompeii. Ampliatus runs the town, but he also has rigid control over his family. His daughter Corelia, someone Attilius has encountered earlier, is being forced into a marriage against her will, and when she sees Attilius negotiating with her father, she tries to let him know how wicked her father really is. When Attilius gets the men and equipment he requires, though, he passes through the gate of the city to meet up with the crew he has sent forward to find the break.

Once he has found and repaired the break in the aqueduct, his trouble has hardly begun. Just before he makes his way back, he meets Corelia, who has run away from home. He sends her back to Pompeii, sure that she is safer there than she is with him on the mountain. She leaves, but as she goes he wonders if he is doing the right thing.

Soon enough the mountain erupts, and an incredible description of the phases of destruction, much taken from actual records of such events, makes this compelling reading. As the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum are destroyed, Attilius makes his way to a ship that Pliny is planning to sail along the coast. Pliny wants to confront nature at its most violent and record what he sees in the depth of the firestorm. Needless to say, they do not get very far before being driven to shore.
From there they witness various stages of the volcanic eruption, each stage bringing even more devastation than the last.

In the midst of this violence, Attilius makes his way back to Pompeii in order to liberate Corelia from her father and attempt an escape before the storm of fire whips down the mountainside killing all in its path. This is chilling reading, as exciting as any thriller.

Harris has done a wonderful job of recreating the world of the Roman Empire and explaining what it was like to experience one of the greatest of natural disasters. This is a first rate novel.

















Robert Harris

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An eighteenth-century murder mystery, anyone?

Who can resist a ghost story set in eighteenth-century Cambridge, England? Well, I certainly can’t.








The Anatomy of Ghosts

Andrew Taylor’s The Anatomy of Ghosts (432 pages, Hyperion, $24..99) is set is 1786 and tells the story of a bankrupt bookseller who has lost both his son and his wife in the River Thames, next to which they were living in London. John Holdsworth is bereft but he also feels guilty. After his son’s death, his wife visited a medium who persuaded her that her son was near and that he was watching from the beyond. This angered John, who went so far as to write a book about the fallacy of belief in ghosts, The Anatomy of Ghosts of the title; and his wife’s belief drove him so crazy that he was driven to strike her. After that even she disappears, and when her body is discovered, it seems that she may have committed suicide.

With this background, Holdsworth finds a job that carries him to Cambridge. Lady Anne Oldershaw asks him to go to Cambridge to work with her son, who has been committed for his own wild expression of his belief in ghosts. Her son Frank has been a student, in good standing, at Jerusalem College, but suddenly everyone in Cambridge is worried about him. Lady Carbury, the wife of the ailing head of the college, has come to help Lady Oldershaw plead her case; and this Cambridge woman, whose first name is Elinor, finds herself strangely attracted to the bookseller. The feeling is mutual.

The Cambridge scenes are certainly harrowing. The students seem to be drawn into a private club, run by a local aristocrat, in which local girls are victimized and the students are caught up in a vicious activity that haunts them throughout their lives. Holdsworth finds himself in the center of this crisis. Frank Oldershaw’s mania is the direct result of a mysterious night in which two women have died.

As readers, we get peeps into the corrupt world next to which the college seems like a mere excuse. Gradually, though, the college’s own corruption becomes an important feature of Holdsworth’s discoveries.

The eighteenth-century context is wonderfully rendered, and what is especially interesting is how poor Frank Olderwshaw is handled in the asylum to which he has been sent. Luckily, Holdershaw manages to get him out of the asylum and to work with him on his own. This is an interesting sequence, and Frank’s gradual emergence into a coherent world of thought and speech is truly fascinating. Especially fascinating is his emergence as a silly undergraduate after all.

Taylor does a good job with the smoldering romance between Holdworth and Lady Carbury, whose husband is dying and whose desires are more than a little frustrated. The two barely spend any time together, but they are both so present in each other’s thoughts that they are hardly ever apart.

The ending is surprising and well-crafted, and the wealth of detail with which Taylor creates this eighteenth-century world is truly engaging. I hope he writes another eighteenth-century mystery soon.















Andrew Taylor

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Jonathan Rabb writes a thriller set during the Spanish Civil War

I have enjoyed Rabb’s novels in the past, and I thought this one about the Spanish Civil War sounded intriguing.









The Second Son

The Second Son (304 pages, Farrar, Strauss and Grioux, $26) is another masterful novel by Jonathan Rabb. It tells the story of a liberal German Jew, who has been Chief of Police in Berlin until the mid-1930s. After he is asked to retire early, he decides he should go to Spain to look for his son, a filmmaker, who has gone missing just as the vents of the Spanish Civil War get most intense.

Nikolai Hoffner, the hero, has figured in both Rosa and Shadow and Light, and this is the last in a trilogy. In this novel, Hoffner, seasoned and nearly disillusioned as he is, realizes that there is little place for him in Berlin. His son’s disappearance at first seems like an excuse to get away; but as the novel develops, it becomes easier to sense his real dedication to the boy.

The early chapters of the novel involve getting out of Berlin just as Nazi power is reaching its height. As Police Chief, Nikolai has known and dealt with a lot of underworld characters, and they are the ones he turns to in hopes of getting a plane to increasingly war-torn Spain. Even at this early stage it becomes clear that Germany is deeply involved in the Spanish enterprise, supplying Franco and his soldiers with tanks, guns, and other machinery that they need to overrun the peninsula. Nikolai finds himself confronted with details about the secret arms shipment, and at first he thinks that his son was trying to get this information to him.

While in Barcelona he meets a woman, Mila. She is a doctor, and she takes him home and, in a sense, takes him in. Before long she is accompanying him on the search for his son. Her own brother has started fighting on the Franco side, and she, a staunch republican, wants to find him and see whether she can make any sense of his decision.

As Nikolai gets to know Mila, the relation becomes deeper; and before long they become the chief support of the other as the situation in Spain becomes less and less tenable. Because Nikolai speaks decent Spanish and can do a commanding job of self presentation, for part of the expedition he pretends to be a high-ranking Nazi official. This gets them closer to the their goal, but it doesn’t stop Nikolai from being exposed and thrown into prison. As he languishes there he starts to see what kind of a trap he has walked into, and he worries as much about Mila, his friend, as he does about his son.

In the end, the situation in Spain only gets worse, and Rabb makes it clear how deeply all the major powers are implicated in what has been happening just by turning their backs on the truth. As Franco receives the shipments from Germany, his progress through the country is remarkable. Nikolai and Mila escape just in time.

I won’t say whether or not Nikolai finds his son, but the last sections of the novel are truly intense. What started out as a quest becomes a bitter family battle, and the results would be brutal if Nikolai did not feel that he had Mila to turn to after all.

This is a taut and well-written novel that is in keeping with Rabb’s record. As other critics have said, he is a writer to contend with the likes of Alan Furst and Philip Kerr. I recommend it.
















Jonathan Rabb


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E. M. Forster’s earlier novels deserve more attention.

I decided to read an earlier novel of Forster’s after rereading Maurice. The early novels remain surprisingly vital. They prepare for the great later novels, like Howard’s End, Maurice, and Passage to India, to be sure. But they deserve more attention themselves.








The Longest Journey

E. M. Forster’s second novel, The Longest Journey (416 pages, Penguin, $14) first appeared in 1907. It is hard for us to imagine that Edwardian world, as blocked out as it is by the First World War, but Forster’s novel gives poetry to those odd years in which a culture was slowly dying. Almost as if he understood that death at the time, the novel is a tragedy. But it is much more than that as well.

The novel concerns Ricky Elliott, an undergraduate at Cambridge when the novel opens. Ricky is sensitive and intelligent, maybe not as intelligent as some of his Cambridge friends, but he is self-aware and ready to work at his classical studies. Even more important than his studies, for him and for many of his Cambridge contemporaries, are the friendships they are establishing. In fact, friendship could be said to be the most important issue in the novel. Even though Rickie meets a woman whom he loves, or thinks he loves, and marries, that is nowhere near as important as the friendships he establishes. “There should be a registry of friendships,” the Cambridge undergraduates declare.

The plot is complex, but it has simple contours. Rickie, who suffers a club foot, is lame and a bit withdrawn from the games and much of the social life at Cambridge. Instead he hangs out with an intellectual set, led by one Stewart Ansell, who imagines himself a philosopher and has an annoying habit of ignoring people if he doesn’t think they are worth his attention. One such person is Agnes Pembroke, a friend of Rickie’s who visits him in college. Ansell ignores her. This upsets Rickie, but it forebodes later developments in the novel.

Agnes is engaged to the handsome athlete Gerald. Rickie sees them as a kind of ideal couple, and when Gerald dies suddenly, he thinks that Agnes should dedicate herself to the memory of Gerald. When after a while, he befriends her again, they fall in love and they decide to marry. At first they are all right together, but before long it becomes clear that they are going through the motions.

By this time Rickie and Agnes are living in a boarding school, which Agnes’ older brother Herbert has started. Rickie’s teaching, and responsibility for boys at other times too, makes it impossible for him to keep up the writing he was doing when he was younger, but Agnes still encourages him. It is as if the writing might offer them an escape.

In fact they never do escape but something else rather shocking happens. They meet a young man at Rickie’s aunt’s house in the country. This rather rough, but handsome and direct fellow is known as Stephen. He and Rickie get on very badly, but when his aunt gets upset with Rickie, she lets it be known that Gerald is his half brother. When Agnes finds this out—she is there when the announcement is made—she is quick to decide that it has to be kept secret, and Rickie, weakly and reluctantly, goes along with her.

The rest of the novel is concerned with this deception, which Rickie regrets, and with his ultimately intense relation with this half-brother. Their relation, in the end, becomes the most important in the novel. Forster doesn’t call it or even describe it as a gay relation, but the novel feels as if it almost needs an explanation like that.

The ending is tragic, or perhaps bittersweet is a better word, but it is a profound analysis of an age that is nearly forgotten.


















E. M. Forster

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Nicholas Sparks writes another tender romance.

I picked this novel up in a weak moment, knowing enough about Nicholas Sparks to think: an easy read even if dull. I have to admit to being more engaged than I expected.









Safe Haven

Safe Haven (340 pages, Grand Central Publishing, $25.99) is a touching romance set in a coastal town in North Carolina. Nicholas Sparks is on familiar ground here, as several of his recent novels and a few well-produced movies suggest. This attempt is the story of a woman who has escaped from a brutal and abusive marriage.

As the story gradually emerges, we find that Katy, who has appeared suddenly in this seaside town, has actually arrived fearing for her life, after absconding from a marriage in New England. She has scars, both mental and physical, and it is clear that she is hiding something, but at first she is unwilling to open up to anyone.

Luckily a neighbor probes gently—and sometimes not too gently—and we begin to get a glimpse of this hideous past. Another person who takes an interest in her is Alex, a widower with two young children who runs the local store and boat house. As Katy and Alex get closer, party through her involvement with his children, she at first seems too hurt and shy to tell him anything about herself. When she finally opens up a bit, she finds a caring and encouraging guide. Alex does not want her to do anything she doesn’t want to do, and he manages to make her feel a little bit secure.

As soon as she does manage to feel secure, of course, her past returns to haunt her. Her husband, an undercover cop and a drunkard, has never stopped looking for her. His sick love is all tied up in his anger and resentment, and he is not sure whether he wants to recover his wife or kill her. He has definitely decided, though, that he will kill anyone who comes close to her.

When he finally shows up in the little town, Katy is not at home. Rather she is babysitting Alex’s kids while he attends a wedding in another town. The climax of the novel comes as the husband tires to burn the building where Katy and the children are sleeping. They are saved because Katy’s nosy neighbor has noticed something odd.

There are some harrowing moments as the novel draws to a conclusion, and Sparks does a decent job of building drama at the close. As readers might hope, Katy survives the attack and ends up even stronger for what has happened.

At times a reader might wish that the characters were more complex or the conversations more fully developed. But Sparks certainly captures something about romance in these southern novels. There are few writers who are more popular.
















Nicholas Sparks


Safe Haven is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Kate Pullinger sets her novel in nineteenth-century Egypt

Pullinger novel concerns the nineteenth-century travel writer Lady Duff Gordon.









The Mistress of Nothing

Kate Pullinger’s prize winning novel, The Mistress of Nothing (256 pages, Touchstone, $24) follows the travels of Lady Duff Gordon, the outspoken nineteenth century traveler whose letters about life in deepest Egypt—she travels down the Nile to settle at Luxor (formerly Thebes)--are a treasure. Gordon is traveling for her health rather than for her amusement, and even as she experiences the thrill of a culture that is different from her own, she is steadily growing weaker from tuberculosis. As she weakens, she also becomes mean, and that is part of the story that Pullinger is trying to tell.

The story is actually told from the perspective of Gordon’s maid, Sally Naldrett, who travels with her and helps to supply medical relief when she needs it. The relationship between the two women in wonderful, and as they are exploring Egyptian ruins and settling into a comfortable life in the dry climate of Luxor, they seem more like sisters than mistress and servant.

This comfortable life is destroyed, as it were, by the presence of a man. Omar is a good-looking and industrious Egyptian, from Cairo, who comes into their household to help with translations and give them a familiarity with Egyptian customs. Both women appreciate him deeply, and although we only know Lady Gordon’s feelings by trying to interpret her brusque dealings with the young man, we suspect she harbors deeper feelings for him. We know for certain, however, that Sally is falling deeply in love with him. When it becomes clear that Omar has a thing for Sally too, it is only a matter of time before they are making love almost under the nose of their employer.

Matters are slightly complicated by the fact of Omar’s being already married, but as he assures Sally that is it really she that he loves, she is easily persuaded to overcome her resistance and give in to his beckoning beauty. She torments herself about the situation, especially when Omar goes to visit his wife and child, who are living with his parents in Cairo. While she is trying to figure out her place in Omar’s life, she determines that she is pregnant.

Omar is thrilled with her news, but also a little worried about what their boss will say, and they both decide to keep the pregnancy secret for as long as they can. As it turns out, they keep it secret until Sally gives birth one impossible night while they are on a boat on the Nile trying to avoid local skirmishes that are threatening to erupt into a revolution.

Lady Gordon helps with the delivery of Sally’s baby girl, but after that, she washes her hands of the girl and insists that she give up her baby and return to England. This can’t happen immediately, and Sally and her baby exist as ghosts in the house. Sally only emerges when there is a medical emergency that needs her attention. This is a brutal decision on Lady Duff Gordon’s part, but it seems as if her decision is made and it will be impossible to get her to change her mind.

In the course of telling this story, Pullinger creates a feeling for the experience of nineteenth-century Egypt; she gives the thrill that these travelers feel, but she also gives all the difficulties of taking on a foreign culture, as they do. She makes the politics of the era palpable as well, and when the political events seem about to spill over into their glorious retreat, it becomes a personal matter as well.

This is a splendid novel. It received Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award, in 2009. That award is well-deserved.














Kate Pullinger

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Charles Todd writes another compelling mystery concerning the First World War

Charles Todd is a mother-son writing team, and they specialize in mysteries that are somehow connected to the brutal conflict of the early twentieth century. They are always readable and often engaging.









A Lonely Death

Ian Rutledge is a World War I vet working for Scotland Yard in the years immediately following the conflict. In Charles Todd’s A Lonely Death (352 pages, William Morrow, $24.99), Rutledge is called in when three different World War I vets from a single village are murdered in a short span. All three have been lured into quiet byways and garroted. And all three leave behind families that had been happy to have these young men back from the war, even if they had seemed very different from the boys who left four years before.

Rutledge has his work cut out for him, especially since he has his own war trauma to deal with and his own ghosts to dispel. This is not easy when he is working on a case that brings him into confrontation with his deepest fears. But that’s the man we have some to know as Ian Rutledge. He’s ready to take on the task, no matter how unpleasant it is.

He is not exactly welcomed into the village in Sussex where the murders have taken place. The locals are very private, and they can’t understand why Scotland Yard has to poke its nose into a local concern. But Rutledge is good enough at his job that he mostly wins respect. Still, respect is withheld by a key person, a schoolteacher who was engaged to one of the men who was murdered, and she makes Rutledge’s life hell.

Accused of unprofessional behavior, of which we know he was not guilty, he is almost barred from the case. Well, actually he is barred for a while, but he returns when his successor is almost murdered. He cannot resolve the case, however, and he begins to despair of ever doing so.

Todd is good at getting into the spirit of a small village, and the tiny jealousies and shrouded histories of village life are all grist for the mill of this mystery team. The outline of the plot is not the novel's strongest point, but the feeling for the place and the sense of desolation after the war surely are.

In the end Rutledge succeeds and he justifies himself as well. This is surely satisfying. But even more satisfying is the sense that we have seen into the heart of the village and that we understand even a little more about the horrors of war, even when that war is fought in another country.














Charles Todd

A Lonely Death is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.