Most critics praised this historical novel; differences in opinion centered on execution rather than subject matter. All agreed that Land of Marvelsoffers a compelling portrait of the Iraq of nearly a century ago, with reverberations for our own involvement in the region today. Unsworth expertly sets a scene and imbues his story with local color, drama, and impressive knowledge of archaeology and geology. However, some reviewers noted the unevenness of Unsworth's characters—the relatively flat Jehar, for example, compared with the richly drawn Lord Rampling. Others faulted a somewhat predictable plot and the thriller's leisurely pace. However, readers hoping for a historical and entertaining read—and a lesson into the transitory nature of empires—will not be disappointed.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
The workings of imperialism in all its guises form the subject of Unsworth’s latest historical, set in 1914 Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). As Britain, America, France, and Germany scramble for footholds in the dying Ottoman Empire, John Somerville, a British archaeologist, excavates an ancient Assyrian palace, the lost remnants of a once-thriving world power. However, the site lies in the projected path of a railroad linking Constantinople to the Persian Gulf, which would open up access to rich oil fields and serve as a vital supply line in case of war. As Somerville accumulates evidence for his discovery’s significance, his nervousness and desperation grow, as do tensions and double-dealings among his party. His bored wife, Edith, looks elsewhere for excitement; an Arab hired to spy on the railway’s progress schemes to earn his own fortune; and an American geologist ostensibly working for British interests conceals his real motives. With measured prose that builds steadily in suspense, Unsworth does an excellent job at simultaneously evoking a past era and foreshadowing American involvement in the modern Middle East. --Sarah Johnson
Review
“This is the work of a master: lean, elegant, and wise, weaving the doomed ambitions of two fallen empires into a compelling story that also deftly comments on the American presence in Iraq.”
—Andrea Barrett
“Land of Marvels is up to Unsworth’s highest standard, featuring a cast of fascinating characters thrown together in the desert of Mesopotamia just before the Great War, all furiously digging for the past and turning up the future. American readers will recognize the landscape and learn some surprising facts about how we got exactly where we are right now. As well as a great read, Land of Marvels is an important book.”
—Valerie Martin
“An intriguing story, elegantly and eloquently told.”
—Peter Ackroyd
About the Author
Barry Unsworth (1930-2012), who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker Prize finalist for Morality Play and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Barry Unsworth's immensely intelligent and entertaining new novel takes place in 1914 in what was still known as Mesopotamia. It was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, but that ancient Turkish state was in the process of falling apart, and the nations of the West -- which by the end of that year would be embroiled in world war -- were competing for its strategic territory and its vast resources of oil, the incalculable value of which was only beginning to be understood. That much of this territory is now known as Iraq is not incidental to Land of Marvels, but the book is offered as background to what has happened there in recent years rather than as a politically inspired commentary on current American policy. Unsworth is now 78 years old, and Land of Marvels is his 16th novel, but if he's lost a step along the way, it certainly isn't evident here. Not only does he confidently steer a complicated narrative populated by numerous characters, all of them believable and interesting, but he displays an impressive command of archaeology and geology, difficult subjects that are at the center of his story. The archaeologist is John Somerville, an idealistic, naive Englishman who is supervising and underwriting an ambitious dig that thus far has yielded little of consequence. The geologist is Alex Elliott, an ambitious, unscrupulous American who is looking for oil and serving a number of masters. How matters play out between the two is at the heart of the novel, though there is much more to it than that. Mesopotamia is a beehive of archaeological activity "where French and German and British and American archaeologists [are] digging and tunneling into mounds pretty much like this one" that Somerville has chosen at a place called Tell Erdek: "Some were making important finds -- and the recurrent awareness that [Somerville] was not among these fortunate ones was like the intermittent throb of a sore tooth -- but all were in haste, no matter what the place, Tell Halaf, Tell Chagar, Khorsabad, Nineveh, Babylon. Haste, in this spring of 1914, to get out of the earth as much as possible, before it was barred to them." They are looking for relics of the past; others, like Elliott and those whose interests he allegedly represents, are looking for the fuel of the future, what Elliott -- a true believer in oil if not much else except himself -- calls "the greatest boon ever bestowed on the human race." Somerville is accompanied by three fellow Brits -- his wife, Edith, his assistant, Palmer, and a young woman named Patricia who soon becomes Palmer's fiancée. Somerville is occasionally given information of dubious value by an Arab named Jehar, "a Bedouin of the Harb people" who, at 34, has "become a person who postponed his pleasures, planned ahead," especially as regards Ninanna, the 15-year-old girl he hopes to marry. Much of this information has to do with the Baghdad Railway being built nearby, "financed by the Deutsche Bank, designed to link Constantinople to the Persian Gulf." Somerville is obsessed by the conviction that the railroad is "aiming at him," that it will destroy Tell Erdek before he can complete his excavation there. He knows that Jehar frequently lies to him about the railroad's progress, though to what end he has no idea, but he also wonders about himself: "Once again the question came to him, sickening in its quality of irresolution: Was he not a much worse liar, a real liar, one who told lies to himself? Deep within him did he not really want this railway track to come crashing through his mound, or close enough at least to put paid to any hope of further excavation? Convenient, a salve to his pride, if he could lay the blame for his failure on the incursion of the line. If the failure were seen to be his, it would reduce his chances -- already not great -- of finding a sponsor, raising money for other digs. His own money was running out; there would not be enough for another season." Then his luck begins to change. He extracts "slightly more than half of a circular ivory plaque, broken across diagonally, showing the head and right foreleg of a lion." He is puzzled because neither the material nor the design is typical of the period he believes himself to be exploring, and even more puzzled when another article -- a stone slab -- raises similar questions. The deeper he and Palmer go, the more he becomes convinced that the site is in some way connected to the Assyrians, with whom he has been fascinated since boyhood, "the empire that had seemed to him a paradigm of all empires," one that gave them "domination of practically all of the world they knew and . . . the development of a ruthless militarism that had made their army the most feared and efficient fighting machine that world had so far seen." Somerville becomes so convinced of the potential importance of his dig that he goes to Constantinople to ask the British ambassador, whom he had known slightly in school, to persuade the Germans to direct the railroad away from Tell Erdek. When he arrives, he is puzzled to find that the ambassador is accompanied by Lord Rampling, a rich, powerful and abidingly cynical man who has no interest in archaeology but a great interest in oil. He and the ambassador convince Somerville that they will see to his ambitions -- they have no intention of doing so -- but in exchange they insist that he agree to take on Elliott in the guise of a fellow archaeologist when in fact he will be there as "an expert in petroleum geology, to have a look around." Everyone wants Middle Eastern oil and the power it promises. While Somerville studies the empires of the past, Rampling and his like are trying to build empires of the future. Patricia, who is smart and thoughtful, puts her finger on things when she tells Palmer that "something has been set in motion that can only end in destruction" and that Somerville sees it "coming straight for him." When he expresses skepticism, she replies: "It must be distressing to be living at a time when people like [Somerville] -- and like you too -- people trying to put things together, make sense of things, add to the sense of human community, are facing a contrary spirit of dismemberment and destructiveness that is terribly strong and pervasive. It is a kind of brutality that goes under the name of realism, and it is alive and well in Britain. You can call it the spirit of commerce, or the spirit of empire, or the élan vital. At Cambridge I made a special study of the Whig administrations of the mid-nineteenth century and their dealings with Belgium and Russia, and what Lord Palmerston said during his time as Foreign Secretary has always stayed in my mind. I've forgotten a lot of the stuff but not that. 'There are no longer permanent principles, only permanent interests, and we pursue these to the exclusion of all else.' That's more than half a century ago, but nothing has changed." Nor, needless to say, has it changed since then. Land of Marvels can -- and I believe should -- be read as a corrective to the arrogance and overweening self-confidence that led the United States into the morass of Iraq, but it also is a reminder that nothing is forever. Somerville, who may indeed march in the "army of the gullible," has a far keener understanding of history's realities and truths than those men pursuing empire in the underground oceans of oil: "Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans, all bent on conquest, all convinced they would last forever, building their cities and proclaiming their power, empires following one upon another, their only memorial now the scraps that lay belowground, which he and his like competed in digging for." Land of Marvels can be read for that lesson, one as old and familiar as "Ozymandias" but forever in need of repetition, but it also can be read as singularly skillful entertainment. Its characters are real, its prose is fluid, its sense of place is pervasive, and its ending is exactly right, on a note of loss, survival and irony. All in all, a lovely, memorable book.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1.
He knew they would come that day or the next. Jehar had sent word. But it was only by chance that he saw them approach. He had risen soon after dawn, tense with the fears that came to him in these early hours of the morning, and fumbled his clothes on, taking care to make no noise that might disturb his wife, who slept in the adjacent bedroom, only separated from him by a thin wall. Crossing the courtyard, he saw that Hassan, the boy who kept the gate, was asleep under his blanket, and he took the same care to avoid arousing him.
By habit--it was the only route he ever took whether on foot or on horseback, though rarely so early--he followed the track that led for a half mile or so through low outcrops of limestone toward the hump of Tell Erdek, the mound they were excavating. This seemed to fill the sky as he drew nearer to it, black still, like an outpost of night. Then he saw a sparkle of silver from the floodlands in the distance and knew that the sun was showing behind him.
It was above the horizon by the time he reached the tell and bright enough to dazzle the eyes, though there was no warmth in it yet. He stood for a while in the shadow of the mound, strangely at a loss now that he was here, uneasy, almost, at the silence of the place, at the sense it gave of violation, this ancient heap of earth and rock and rubble, gashed and trenched for no purpose immediately apparent, as if some beast of inconceivable size had raked it savagely along the flanks. Before long it would resound to the thudding of the pick and the scraping of the shovel, the shouted orders of the foremen, the cries of the two hundred and more Bedouin tribesmen, who would come with their baskets and harness--valuable property, often fought over--to resume their antlike task of carrying away the loose earth and stones from the digging.
But it was now, as he felt the silence of violation in this place where so much of his hope and his money were invested, that he saw the men approach. News of the railway came to him in a variety of ways, but the reports he paid for were announced in the same way always: the dust of the riders, lit this morning to a glinting ash color by the early rays of the sun, seen far off across the flatland to the west. He knew in every detail the route they had taken: the rail yards of Aleppo, then Jerablus on the Euphrates, passing within sight of Carchemish, where Woolley and Lawrence had made the Hittite finds barely a year ago, then the desert steppeland rising and falling, dusted with green in this early-spring weather, scattered with mounds like this one, the tombs of long-dead cities. And so to this little swarm of dust in the middle distance.
It was the way the line would take, straight toward him, straight toward his hill, between the village where his workforce came from and the floodlands of the Khabur River. Sometimes he imagined he could catch the shine of the rails as they reached toward him. Mica, salt, asphalt, quartz, any glinting thing in the landscape might work this effect on him, even the fields of pitch where the oil seeped up, which were too far away to be seen at all, except in occasional, shifting gleams. It kept his worry alive, though he knew it for illusion; the journey on horseback from Jerablus, where the line had reached, where the Germans were building the bridge, took four days.
Sometimes it took longer, and Jehar would enumerate the reasons: desert storms, problems with the horses, attacks by raiding parties. He was grave-faced in recounting these things; his tone was charged with sincerity; further details were ready if required. But it was never possible to know whether he was merely inventing these episodes; such things happened on occasion to any traveler in these lands; why not, on this occasion, to them? The motive was clear enough--no secret was made of it--and it was this that made the accounts less than fully reliable: Jehar was seeking to extract a few more piastres for their hardships and their loyalty. He took care not to do it too often. He was a man of the Harb people; but he had traveled widely outside the tribal lands, and his travels had taught him that moderation, whether in truth or in falsehood, was likely to be more profitable than excess.
When the figures were near enough to be distinguished, Somerville stepped out into the open so that they should see him as they followed the track toward the expedition house. They dismounted at a distance of a hundred paces or so and left the horses in the care of one of their number. The others, headed by Jehar, walked toward him, inclining their heads in greeting as they drew near. None would have dreamed of approaching mounted when the khwaja was on foot. Jehar, as always, would be the spokesman. The others drew around him in a half circle. The hoods of their cloaks were thrown back, but they wore the folds of the headcloths still drawn over the mouth against the cold they had ridden through. They would say nothing, but they would keep a close eye on the sum handed over to Jehar; he was their employer, as the archaeologist was his, four being deemed a sufficient escort to ensure safe passage through lands in the main unfriendly, guard against ambush by day and depredation by night. Often enough, of course, they were themselves the raiders and despoilers; in their saddle slings they carried Mauser repeating rifles of recent make, weapons that had been issued to the Sultan's irregular cavalry units in Syria. But none of these men belonged to any unit at all, however irregular...
Jehar uncovered his face, which was handsome, narrow-boned, and level-browed, fierce in its serenity. "Oh noble one," he said in Arabic, the only language they had in common.
"Well," Somerville said, "speak out, why do you wait?" The delay, he knew, was more due to Jehar's relish for drama than to any diffidence about delivering unwelcome news.
Jehar raised his arms on either side. "Lord, the bridge is made, its claws have come to rest on our side of the Great River." He continued to gesture, lifting his arms higher, then lowering them to make the sweeping shape of an arc. "A great marvel, this bridge of the Germans," he said. "It is all made of steel, the span is greater than any floods can reach."
He looked keenly as he spoke at the face of the man before him, who had sustained the infliction of this news without change of expression. "Farther than ten throws of a stone," he said in a tone of wonder. "High in the sky, the sparrows cannot fly over it." He was disappointed by the other's failure to show feeling but not deceived by it; he was sensitive in certain ways and had understood very early in their acquaintance that the Englishman was one of those--he had met others in his time--whom Allah for reasons inscrutable to mortals had predisposed to feel singled out for harm. He was himself an optimist, blessed with a belief in his destiny. Only one such as he could set out to raise one hundred gold pounds, starting from nothing. This was the bride-price of the Circassian girl who filled his thoughts. He knew that this man was searching for treasure and was possessed by fear that the people of the railway would bring the line too close and take the treasure for themselves. It must be an enormous treasure, for one to spend so much on the finding of it. They had not found it yet; this was the third year they had come; they had dug down and down, but they had not found it yet...
"We were approached by a ghazwa of the Shammar people," he said. "A dozen men. They followed us for some miles and fired at us. We killed one and they fled, the cowards."
There was nothing in the attentive faces around him that could be taken to confirm or deny this story. Next time he spoke of it the Shammar raiding party would be fifty strong at least, the deaths five or six, and the encounter would already belong to the realm of legend.
"Now we will be pestered by his relatives with demands for blood money," Somerville said.
"No, no, they did not know us." For the first time Jehar glanced around at his companions, who all shook their heads.
"Well, we shall see. Now that the bridge is completed, have they started immediately to lay the rails on this side of the river?"
"No, lord, there will be some delay. New rails have come from the steelworks in Germany, they have come by sea to Beirut. Now they wait for the unloading of the rails and the transporting of them to Aleppo and so to Jerablus. They will bring the rails and the coal into the yards in Jerablus. All this will take time, perhaps ten days. Also, they lack timber. It must be brought from the north, from Urfa. This I was told by one whose word can be trusted. For this very precious information I gave him money from my own purse."
"But they had already laid some miles of track on this side of the river, even before they started work on the bridge. They were already engaged on it in my first season here, three years ago. Then the work was abandoned, the rails were left to rust. Now there are German surveyors and engineers here, they have rented houses in the village, they have taken some of our workpeople to build their storage sheds."
He paused, aware of having spoken too rapidly, with too much emphasis, aware of Jehar's eyes on him. There was always something unsettling in the man's gaze, something too intent. "Under our noses," he said. "They brought the stuff downriver." In fact the warehouses had been there already when he arrived in mid-February. The sight of them, the presence of the Germans, had been a grievous blow to him; before that it had been possible to hope that they intended to take the line farther north, toward Mardin. He said, "The sheds are stacked to the roof. Strange they should be waiting for supplies at Jerablus when they have the timbers and the rails stacked up here."
"But they are intended for this part o...
