Robert Harris's latest thriller details the destruction of Pompeii - but it's very much a contemporary tale, writes Arminta Wallace
'Two?" Robert Harris looks startled at the mention of awards. He has, it seems, forgotten that two of his three novels have made it on to shortlists, Fatherland for the Whitbread first-novel prize and Archangel for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He shrugs and stirs his tea. "I'd love to win literary awards, but I'd sooner win readers," he says. "And given that the two seem to be mutually exclusive, I'd choose readers every time." Not, if his sales figures are anything to go by, a problem. And not just any old readers, either. Nelson Mandela chose Fatherland as one of the books he'd like to give as a Christmas present because it handles suspense like a literary Alfred Hitchcock".
Thrillers that win both readers and awards are rare hybrids in the black-and-white world of contemporary book-selling, but Harris says he didn't set out to cross boundaries or create genres. "I just set out to write the books that came naturally to me. I mean, my new novel has Pliny the Elder as a character and a lot of quotations from Pliny's Historia Naturalis. Not exactly Tom Clancy, is it? Yet at the same time I really like telling a story. I like the pull of a story. I would never like to write a book which didn't have that."
Harris began his career as a reporter on current-affairs television programmes such as Newsnight and Panorama. Then he wrote books on the Falklands conflict, Neil Kinnock and chemical warfare. Did he have a novel-in-progress stashed away in a drawer somewhere, even at that stage?
"I was quite happy writing non-fiction books, to be honest," he says. "But then I wrote a book called Selling Hitler, about the so-called Hitler diaries, and I began to get quite interested in what it would have been like if Hitler had won the war. I thought I'd write a kind of guidebook about that - a Baedeker's guide to Hell sort of thing - but I found I couldn't get inside what it would have been like except by inventing characters. That was how I got into writing novels, as a progression from non-fiction."
With his first three books Harris painted highly detailed pictures of enclosed, almost claustrophobic worlds: Albert Speer's Berlin in Fatherland, the British intelligence boffins at Bletchley Park in Enigma, Stalin's Russia in Archangel. Then he went for a change of scene and spent 18 months working on a futuristic thriller about a giant entertainment conglomerate - only to end up producing a book about ancient Rome.
How, exactly, did that happen? "I wanted to write about America as superpower," he says. "About the sense of overwhelming superiority - technological, economic and ideological - yet at the same time the sense that it would, or could, pass away. " He hit on the idea of setting the story in a Walt Disney World-style model community. "But I just couldn't make it work. It was like trying to catch smoke, somehow. Then I read a news story about Pompeii and what had happened to it, and I thought, well, maybe I can make the Bay of Naples my Florida and create an authentic novel about Rome which, at the same time, would get out of my system a lot of the things I wanted to say about the vulnerability of empires."
A news story about Pompeii might seem a contradiction in terms, but in fact the nature of the eruption that destroyed the city in 79 AD baffled vulcanologists until very recently. It wasn't until the entire side blew off Mount St Helens in Washington in May 1980, that reports of what had happened to Pompeii and the neighbouring town of Herculaneum - a spectacular explosive eruption, with vast quantities of magma spewing into the air at lethal speeds - began to make scientific sense.
The more background material Harris read, the more fascinated he became. But the pyrotechnics on Vesuvius would not, he realised, tell the story by themselves. "The breakthrough for me was discovering the huge aqueduct in Campano," he says. "That made it possible for me to have an engineer as the central character - a very modern sort of figure - and to write about Roman technology, which, so far as I know, no one has done before.
"I learned," he adds with a grim smile, "a great deal about Roman aqueducts." It wasn't all he learned. The book is crammed with telling details about Roman brothels, Roman snack bars, Roman laundries. There is a marvellous feast scene in which the menu is described by a disgruntled guest, a sort of Roman restaurant review. "Sow's udder stuffed with kidneys, with the sow's vulva served as a side dish, grinning up toothlessly at the diners. Then the delicacies: the tongues of storks and flamingoes (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot and it had indeed tasted much as he imagined a maggot might taste if it had been doused in vinegar."
The disgusting stuff is, he says, all authentic. But the mere shovelling of vast quantities of toga trivia into a narrative is not a guarantee of readability. On the contrary, too much detail can kill a historical novel stone dead. Harris's Pompeii, on the other hand, is the sort of place you can easily imagine featuring on a travel programme: bustling, attractive, recognisable. How does a novelist make that imaginative leap? Is there a trick? "One thing, oddly enough, is to do an enormous amount of research and then just let go of it," says Harris.
"There certainly came a point in this book where I felt I'd done so much research that I didn't have to look at it any more. I felt as if I was writing about my own town, my own street. Now if you're writing about somebody on a London pavement, you don't find it necessary to describe every curve, every shop window, every passing car. You just write: 'He crossed the street.' If you do enough research you can feel confident enough to ignore it."
Not that he intends to waste a drop of that research; he's already planning a second literary excursion into the Roman world as a follow-up to Pompeii. And having read all 37 volumes of his Natural History, Harris remains convinced that Pliny would have been a good man to go for a pint with.
"It's the most marvellous Roman's-eye view of the world - a way into their psyche - and the moment I read it I knew I had to make him a central part of the book. Not only because he was, in reality, but also because he provided the opportunity to broaden the book out. To take in the Roman view of nature and science and the gods and death and courage and all those sorts of things. There is an enormous interest in Rome, a great appetite for books about it, which I hadn't expected. And the reason, I think, is that the Roman empire offers a kind of parallel universe to our own time. Some things are very different and exotic and some things are astonishingly similar."
It gives a piquant twist to the expression: "When in Rome . . ."
Pompeii is published by Hutchinson.