The Lost Voices of Pompeii, by Jess Venner

For my recent 50th birthday, the Dr and the children took me to Pompeii — a trip I’ve wanted to make since studying the subject at school. They also bought me this new novel, which is an exercise in what the author calls “critical fabulation”, a,

“refusal to treat gaps in the evidence as dead ends,”, 

while seeing,

“absence as production space” (p.18).

This is very much my wheel-house — I’ve written books about absences in the historical record relating to old Doctor Who serials: The Evil of the Daleks (1967), where just one of the seven episodes survives; and The Edge of Destruction (1964), where no production file and very little paperwork survives.

After a scene-setting introduction, each chapter of The Lost Voices of Pompeii follows one of seven people in the 24 hours before the eruption of Vesuvius. There’s some overlap between the lives of Petrinus the slave, Julius Felix the businesswoman, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus the everyman, Umbricia Forunata the matriarch of a working poor family, Euxinus the innkeeper, Amisusius the priest of Isis, and Gaius Cuspius Panda the politician. The structure reminded me a little of 253 by Geoff Ryman, with the same sense of these individual lives connecting into something bigger and more profound.

We see some of the same events from their different perspectives, so understand what a business deal or prayer or shopping trip mean depending on class and status. It’s a good way to explore the intricacies of Roman society. The book is peppered with photographs and footnotes, underlining the fact that this is based on the real, and I found it a bit strange to visit the real-life house of Julia Felix having just read about her.

There’s then a chapter on what happens to these people in the hours after the eruption, and a chapter on the longer-term aftermath. It’s a moving story, but then I also found Pompeii by Robert Harris (2003) and the TV mini-series The Last Days of Pompeii (1984), bits of which we watched at school. 

What’s different is how much more firmly Dr Venner bases her story in fact. That includes some relatively recent new assessments — that the eruption did not take place on 24 August 79, but was later in the year (she suggests 24 October), and that fewer people died than once thought. She gives a figure of between 1,600 and 1,700, or between 9% and 11% of the population (p. 19). (That will be of some solace to Donna Noble, I thought, as we watched The Fires of Pompeii after our trek around the town.)

Dr Venner argues that her “critical fabulation” gives a voice back to the voiceless. I really like the way she explains, in the footnotes, where she’s based things on evidence and where she has embellished things. I can see she’s also tried to make this relevant to now, so there are referencing to upselling, personal brands and so on. I wonder how much those and this fictionalising approach will date over time.

We were in Naples for three nights. On our first evening, we went to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where I was stunned by the frescoes. They’re were once displayed like works of art in a gallery, but now they’re vivid evidence of people’s ordinary / extraordinary lives.

That was a good grounding before a long, hot day at Pompeii itself. I’d seen photos and footage of the site but being there I was knocked out by the scale — a whole town, with main thoroughfares and back streets, whole chunks of it still buried. Waiting in a shady spot at one end of the forum for the Dr to catch us up, it struck me that it was of a similar scale to the Winchester, where I grew up, once a Roman city.

The following day, we explored Herculaneum, which I think the children preferred because there were fewer herds of tourists and more cats. 

The Dr has written her own blog post about the trip, “What remains of humans: Casts in Pompeii.”