The novel “All the lives he led” by Frederik Pohl was published for the first time in 2011.
Brad Sheridan works in Pompeii among the staff of the Giubileo, the 2000th anniversary of the great Vesuvius eruption that buried the ancient city in ancient times. He does earn much but his job is simple because tourists are entertained mostly by virtual reality reproductions of the ancient Pompeii.
His pay isn’t much but for Brad the situation is better than in the USA, so much that he always sends money to his family back home. However, in Italy there are problems too with terrorism and a form of flu might make many victims among tourists. Brad tends to get into trouble and the situation with his girlfriend Gerda also becomes more and more complicated.
“All the lives he led” is the last novel published by Frederik Pohl. It’s set years after the explosion of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which devastated the USA. Brad Sheridan and his family are refugees, survivors of the supereruction forced to fend for themselves to live in a nation that suddenly became poor.
The rest of the world hasn’t suffered the same devastation as the USA by the supervolcano but there are other problems, in particular terrorism. It seems that in the second half of the 21st century, anyone who has some claim immediately starts killing people to be heard. From this point of view, the novel becomes almost a parody, although really cruse and because of that I found that element frankly distasteful.
However, I think the main problem of “All the lives he led” is the way it’s told. The novel is a kind of diary told in first person by its protagonist Brad Sheridan. For a good part of the story, Brad is on the edge of the actual events and mostly complains of his situation.
Don’t get me wrong, the only decent job Brad found is still low-level but often he looks like a sucker unable to stay out of trouble who is used in various ways by his colleagues and bosses. Not all the people he works with are what they seem but Brad starts realizing that only after some time, when he ends up in serious trouble.
For these reasons, in the first part the impression is what you might have if you read the comments of an ordinary person who talks about important events known only through reading about them in the newspapers and on the Internet or through TV news. Sure, Brad is sometimes directly involved in some trouble but in 2079 the situation is such that it seems quite a normal thing.
It’s only in the second part of “All the lives he led” that the real twists begin and Brad starts finding out what’s really going on around him. For him, things change dramatically, starting with the understanding of who the people he worked with really are.
In my opinion that’s too little too late. Brad made me feel little sympathy in the first part of the novel despite his misadventures. His story was rather boring and mundane so I quickly stopped being interested in what was happening to him.
The result is a novel in which the pace tends to be slow, especially in the first part, with the aggravating circumstance that the events are told in retrospect, often as secondhand news. A not too distant future that in many ways is the direct evolution, or perhaps the involution, of the present offered a significant potential. Unfortunately my impression is that Frederik Pohl didn’t handle it properly wasting its basic ideas.
“All the lives he led” seems like a novel that contains some interesting elements in the descriptions of the world in 2079 but overall was made poor by the way it was developed. It might be of interest to Frederik Pohl’s fans who want to have all his works, otherwise I think you can forget it.
