This book is not what I expected.
When you’re told a book is about ‘time-travel to Roman times’, you (or at least, I) expect a story to be all Latin, togas and legionnaires, a story rather like Stephen Baxter’s recent alternative history novel Ultima.
New Pompeii does not start like that. Instead, after an initial brief prelude in AD 79, the main plot of the book begins in a near-future world where our hero Nick Houghton is an unofficial unpaid researcher, having being denied advancement in serious academia – something which may be due to the ostracising of his disgraced historian father and his work.
When Nick manages to sneak into an unveiling of an artefact at the British Museum, he finds himself brought to the attention of the major corporation NovusPart, who offer him a post in one of their investigation teams. NovusPart can bring back objects from the past to the present.
In a secondary plot we also meet Kristen Chapman, a young woman who believes that she is dead, waking up in her bath to find that no one can see or hear her.
So far, so very-Michael Crichton-like. It’s a distrust of big corporate activities, of ‘the little man’ with virtue, up against the faceless mass without scruples.
What Nick finds is a conceit that didn’t quite work for me: that NovusPart has managed to pluck hundreds of Romans from Pompeii in AD 79, just as the famous Vesuvius eruption was happening, and put them in a recreated Pompeii in modern times. The reason for this is that previous experiments have shown that bringing survivors from the past to our present, their future, even a few mere decades, never works well – most of them are unable to cope and commit suicide. By doing the rescue this way, the Romans do not feel displaced and the historians have a way of looking at the people of past eras rather than just their artefacts. The corporation in charge of the technology sees a means of making profit.
I must admit that the concept’s a little too convenient for me (it’s all a little bit too Truman Show), but it wasn’t an insurmountable issue. I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to allow Nick in the middle part of the novel to become the wide-eyed adventurer and show us what Roman society would have been like. It’s really not entirely like we think it will be, at times rather suggesting that HBO’s TV series Rome wasn’t far off the mark. And yes, it becomes about Latin, legionnaires and togas. Godrey, like his character Nick, realises that it’s more about the people, not the buildings, that piques and maintains our interest.
Pleasingly there’s a lot of details here that show research beyond the usual, even with a little bit of info-dumping. To paraphrase L.P. Hartley, ‘the past is an unknown country, they do things differently there’, and the author shows these differences well, although he is confined to one town to do so.
Nick meets local gangsters, and has a rather uncomfortable discussion with some of his heavies who discover that ‘the gods’ may not be so untouchable after all. The torture scene that ensues is rather nasty and will make male readers in particular wince. It reminded me a little of the carpet beater scene in Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale.
Nevertheless, this leads to wider, bigger issues. There’s enough conspiracies across time, double dealing and revelations to keep the reader engaged, with the usual convergence and a conclusion that sets up the next book (Empire of Time, due this month.)
In summary, New Pompeii’s a rapid-paced beach read that entertains enormously, even if it doesn’t quite hold together if you stop to think about it.
I enjoyed it a lot and want to read the sequel.
New Pompeii by Daniel Godfrey
Published by Titan Books, June 2016
ISBN: 978-1785656033
