Review: “The Wolf Den” by Elodie Harper
The Wolf Den, Elodie Harper’s award-winning novel and first installment of her Wolf Den Trilogy, is a harrowing, provocative, and unflinching portrait of life in the brothels of Pompeii.
The story’s protagonist and emotional center is Amara, a freeborn girl forced into slavery after the death of her physician father. Sold to the notorious Wolf Den, she becomes one of its she-wolves, subjected to cruelty, privation, and the social infamy of prostitution.
Amara is joined in her suffering by the other inhabitants of the novel’s eponymous brothel: Victoria, rescued from a trash heap as an infant to be raised as a whore; Dido, a noble girl from Carthage kidnapped and sold by pirates; Berenice, hopelessly in love with the brothel’s doorman; and Cressa, haunted by the loss of her son, who was sold away from her. Despite their disparate origins, the five women are united in their struggle for survival, their subjugation at the hands of their ruthless master and pimp, and their desperate yearning for the merest semblance of calm and normality.
The Pompeii that Amara and her companions inhabit is jarringly different from the white marble and decadent frescoes of popular imaginings. Their Pompeii is one of manure-strewn streets and soot-stained walls; crude graffiti, leering jokes, and casual cruelty. It is uncaring, brutal, and uncomfortably true to history. Harper draws heavily on archaeological remains as well as legal records of Roman slavery, breathing life into the marginalized women who are rarely given attention—much less a voice—in traditional classical histories.
Harper’s tale is unapologetically harsh, often remarkably tender, and sometimes unexpectedly funny. The callousness of the women’s customers is offset—if not cancelled out—by the kindness, loyalty, and camaraderie that they exhibit to one another. The sharp comedic voice of Victoria, honed to a wicked edge by a life of hardship, carries the reader through some of the novel’s most difficult scenes.
Amara is more than a tragically sympathetic protagonist. She is a woman who, stripped of nearly every shred of agency, still finds ways to act. She employs not only her beauty but also her wit and resourcefulness in attempt after attempt to attract the sort of client who could free her. But when her opportunity to escape clashes with the feelings she develops for a fellow slave, what choice will she make?
This is not a story for the faint of heart, nor for those seeking a light beach read. But for anyone who is ready for a novel about the cost of freedom, the meaning of friendship and solidarity, and the fragility of hope in the face of despair, The Wolf Den is essential reading.