Pompeii, Robert Harris
ften historical novelists chose to work with an historical event that serves as a metaplot. By that I mean that if you want to tell a story about people who survived (or didn't survive) Hiroshima, or the Titanic, or Gettysburg, or in this case, the eruption of Vesuvius and the subsequent destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD, you have a certain set of facts and figures to deal with.
Unless you're writing alternative history, which I'm not going to address just now.
Robert Harris decided to write a novel about the fate of Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted, and to do that he had to (1) learn about the eruption itself, what actually happened in geoglogical terms; (2) create a set of characters; (3) decide which historical characters he wanted to use (the primary one being Pliny the Elder, who actually wrote a description of the eruption and then died in its aftermath); (4) construct a set of conflicts that would fit neatly into the structure provided by the eruption.
This novel is an excellent example of how to write this kind of story, I think mostly because Harris began with a major character who was believable and likeable. He gives us Marcus Attilius Primus, who at a young age becomes the aquarius of the great Aqua Augusta, one of the aqueducts that brought water from inland to the communities along Italy's coast. A water engineer would be one of the first people to take note of the signs of the coming eruption, even if he didn't know what to make of them, and in fact it's easy to imagine that there was a real person whose experiences paralleled those Attilius had to deal with. The drinking water brought to the coastal communities of Italy by the aqueducts -- engineering marvels that they were -- is corrupted by sulphur in some places, and goes dry in others. Imagine if southern California had one day's worth of water and you were the person in charge of the whole system. See? High drama.
The novel works on multiple levels. Historically, it provides wonderful detail and images and background; quotes from geological texts begin every chapter and bring the reader up to date on what is happening below the surface -- the information that the characters don't have; the main characters are interesting and engaging, and the conflicts intruiging. You don't know when you start who will survive, and who won't.
This is an action novel. It moves fast, it's exciting, and it's concerned primarily with the bigger picture rather than close characterization. But it does what it set out to do, and does it very well.