FROM MAGO’S CELLAR

Two stories separated by millennia unite in the famous buried city of Pompeii in Laudrigan’s novel.

This book is constructed as a narrative within a narrative. In the present day, Titch, a narrator who shares the author’s name, describes his acquisition and painstaking reconstruction and translation of scrolls that were recovered from a villa north of Pompeii. The contents of those scrolls constitute the book’s inner narrative: the life story of a soldier and thief named Mago who lived through several signature events in the reigns of the Roman emperors Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula. This text by Mago is burned and corrupted, making it a nonchronological challenge for Titch; it’s further complicated by Mago’s tendency to skip the narrative around to points over a long span of Roman history, with Titch industriously inserting parenthetical explanations for the many details that Mago mentions. The story, of course, marches inexorably toward the natural disaster that will end Mago’s story forever. Laudrigan’s novel is intriguingly multilayered, and the narrative makes effective use of the one element every reader will already know: the famous eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum nearly 2,000 years ago. The book’s liberal sprinkling of Latin among the historical accounts is likewise engaging. However, its narrative voice comes in a rush of rambling, tangled prose, and readers may often find themselves bewildered: “It is not of your behavior this day I want to inquire, of that I already know,” says one character, going on to elaborate: “It is something of your Gods I wish answered, a piqued considered interest, merely an opinion needed to sate a rapacious curiosity and moreover, something I can get further information at another time.” Such excessive overwriting slows the momentum of the plot as effectively as an eruption of ash.

An ambitious but disjointed and hyperbolic historical novel.