Iraq before the war - WWI
By Lynn Harnett
seacostonline.com
February 22, 2009
Landof Marvels
Barry Unsworth
Doubleday/Talese
The faded glory of Mesopotamia meets the faction-fractured mess that will become Iraq in Unsworth's latest, a 1914 brink-of-war novel.
Booker prizewinner Unsworth sets this carefully crafted tale on an archaeological dig in the undeveloped desert oil fields of Mesopotamia. British archaeologist John Somerville, 35, has invested all his hopes and money in Tell Erdek, a mound "on the borderlands of empire," where he hopes to find the buried remains of a palace or a temple.
But in three years the mound has yielded little and failure looms. Not only is Somerville at the end of his finances, but rumors of imminent war abound. Worst of all, the railroad the Germans are building is headed straight for his dig. The Arab he pays to keep him informed of its progress, Jehar, takes a certain pleasure in informing him of its progress.
Jehar "was sensitive in certain ways and had understood very early in their acquaintance that the Englishman was one of these — he had met others in his time — whom Allah for reasons inscrutable to mortals had predisposed to feel singled out for harm."
Somerville's wife of four years, the beautiful Christine, has accompanied him on the dig. She had fallen for a man of passionate ambition, a man who now seems harried, preoccupied and "almost pathetic." Discontented, a victim of her own conventional ideas of "womanly" behavior, she is ripe for cultivation by the dashing, unscrupulous Alex Elliott, an American oil geologist posing as an archaeologist, foisted on the expedition by British intelligence.
Ah, British intelligence. The desert is crawling with spies and schemers of various nationalities, swarming over the soon-to-be spoils of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. While the Germans scramble to acquire as much of oil- and ore-rich Mesopotamia as possible through their rapidly crawling railroad (land on either side having been deeded to them), the British, French, Turks and Americans are also vying for influence, wealth and colonial expansion.
Meanwhile, Somerville finds a few intriguing relics. His hopes rekindle — along with his fatalistic desperation. His imagination and observation fuel each other, informed by his knowledge and professional judgment. In Unsworth's prose Somerville's transformation into a man of greatness — a man who harnesses his imagination to his knowledge and professional judgment in pursuit of a momentous goal — is a subtle and beautiful thing, somewhat spoiled by his nagging sense of doom.
Lies, intrigues and betrayals mount as Unsworth brings his various plot threads together in a spectacular finale, which at first seems over-the-top, but on reflection appears all but inevitable.
The intrigue leading up to World War I, the deadly greed over oil and ore, and the eventual forced cohesion into colonial Iraq, juxtaposed to the crumbling, forgotten, bloody empires of the past, is subtly done. Unsworth's prose, as always, is exquisite and keenly atmospheric.
But, as absorbing and fine a novel as it is, "Land of Marvels" is not compelling, not a book you can't stand to set aside, and the reason for that is a certain distance from the characters. While sharply delineated, there is no warmth to any of them. Even his masterful portrayal of Somerville's passion arouses no empathy for the man, or not much. At his best, Somerville remains a bit, well, pathetic.
But, given the book's scope, intelligence, and vivid setting, this seems almost a quibble. Anyone who enjoys thoughtful, literary historical fiction will appreciate this novel.
Lynn Harnett, of Kittery, Maine, writes book reviews for
Seacoast Sunday.
She can be reached at
lynnharnett@gmail.com.
