The Temple of Fortuna, by Elodie Harper
Most of the rave reviews I have for Elodie Harper’s Wolf Den trilogy have been covered in my posts on the first two books, The Wolf Den and The House With the Golden Door. This series about the lives of slaves and sex workers in ancient Pompeii is absolutely brilliant and engrossing; Amara was a character I could cheer for from the very first page of the series to the last; the whole series managed that tricky historical-fiction balance of making the past seem at once fresh and immediate and relatable, while at the same time starkly different from our time, with values so different we struggle to understand them. I’ve been waiting eagerly to see how the whole story would be resolved in this third volume, and absolutely nothing about it disappointed me – the ending was perfect.
With all that said, and the points I’ve made in the last two posts on these books, I wanted to talk a bit about one aspect of this novel that particularly interested me: the obliteration of Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted, and how that’s handled narratively in this novel.
If you pick up a novel set, as The Wolf Den is, in the 70s CE in Pompeii, and you know it’s the first of a series, you can be pretty confident from page one that sometime before the end of the series, likely near the end of Book 3, that volcano is going to erupt. History itself provides the foreshadowing, and there’s not a huge amount of extra foreshadowing added by the author in the first two books: occasional earth tremors, which the citizens of Pompeii dismiss as “just how things are around here.” These become more frequent and troubling when Amara returns to Pompeii from Rome in book 3, and readers know from the date that the volcano is about to blow. But the characters don’t know that, and Harper does a great job of keeping the foreshadowing light, illustrating how huge, world-changing events arrive with very little notice, and life often continues as normal right up to the exact second when it can’t anymore.
The eruption could be seen as a kind of deus ex machina in the novel: certain problems that have plagued Amara since The Wolf Den are going to become much less serious, if not eliminated altogether as a threat, once the entire city is buried under a layer of ash. Instead, readers’ concern shifts to whether Amara herself can survive and escape the disaster, and which, if any, of the people she loves might survive with her. The scenes in the immediate aftermath of the eruption brilliantly capture not only the physical experience but the desperation of suddenly becoming refugees, the pain of losing people, and the hope of going home to rebuild — which is dashed when the survivors realize what has actually happened to the city. There’s also a fascinating glimpse into the year after Vesuvius, and how the survivors who did manage to escape Pompeii built new lives for themselves in other places. A disaster that wipes out everything you own and have worked to build can also, sometimes, wipe out your past as well — and that might be just the ending your story needs.
