Robert Harris, Pompeii *** 1/2

In advance of our summer trip to Italy, I read this fictional thriller that takes place around the Bay of Naples over four days in late August A.D. 79. The new aquarius deduces that there is a rupture in the mighty Aqua Augusta aqueduct, somewhere between Pompeii and Nola. He hurries out to repair it, but gets embroiled in power struggles between the city fathers of Pompeii. He solves the mystery of his predecessor's disappearance and fixes the water flow, but you know what happens next.

The disrupted water flow provides the plot with a clear narrative motor. The story is well designed to introduce details about the impressive Roman aqueduct system and the harbingers of the Vesuvius eruption naturally, without undue exposition. Plenty of historical color, too, such as a feast that features Roman delicacies like "mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds." When the climax comes, Harris does a great job of showing what the eruption looked, felt, and sounded like from various perspectives.

Knowing how the story ends made the middle section a bit less compelling: why wonder about the motivations of a character when you know that character is doomed?

Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned *** 1/2

The very nice cover of We, the Drowned advertises it as an "epic tale of the sea." Its 675-page heft marks it as epic, and it does include several seafaring adventures, but the book is really the (fictional) story of a (real-life) town: Marstal, Denmark. The men of Marstal are sailors, which influences all aspects of town life. In the first half of the twentieth century, they had to adjust to the coming of steamers and engine-powered ships -- and one widow attempts to move the townspeople away from the dangerous sea entirely.

Although We, the Drowned is a multigenerational saga written partly in the second-person plural, Jensen keeps the focus on individual stories. I enjoyed the adventure and was intrigued by the widow's quest to re-orient a traditional town toward safer pursuits. However, her quest just kind of fades away in the final section of the book, and the final scene (at the end of World War II) reminded me far too much of the Ewok dance party at the end of Return of the Jedi.

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful ***

This slim book contains Dyer's impressionistic meditations about jazz. Each chapter is an imagined scene from the life of a jazz master like Duke Ellington, Lester Young, or Chet Baker, described in a manner intended to capture the feeling of the man's music. It's beautifully written and contains passages of insightful music criticism. The cumulative effect is a bit too monochromatic though: every one of the musicians is closed off and dealing with an addiction or mental issue.

My favorite chapters were the first two, about Lester Young and Thelonious Monk. The Young chapter best describes the artist's life in musical terms, and the Monk chapter has the best description of his music.

Sometimes the song seemed to have turned inside out or to have been constructed entirely from mistakes. ... But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated.

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries ***

This winner of the 2013 Mann Booker Prize takes place in New Zealand, 1866. A cross-section of society in the gold-rush town of Hokitika tries to explain several events that took place on 14 January: a hermit was found dead with a fortune hidden in his house; a popular local whore apparently tried to kill herself with an opium overdose; the richest man in town vanished without a trace. How do these events relate to the politician who arrived in town the same day? Or to the ominous sea captain who may or may not be related to the hermit?

The Luminaries is an amalgam of a hard-boiled detective novel (its twisty plot recalls something like Farewell, My Lovely) and a nineteenth-century "loose baggy monster" (for its locale and loquacious prose style), with a dash of modernism (characters and chapter titles based on signs of the zodiac). It is entertaining, although I'm not sure it justifies all of its 830 pages. I was disappointed that Catton resolves the final mysteries of the plot through flashbacks instead of the detective work of Hokitika's citizens.