The New York Times
January 18, 2009 Sunday
Late Edition – Final

Passion in the Desert

Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER de BELLAIGUE.

Christopher de Bellaigue’s new book, ”Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s
Forgotten Peoples,” will be published next fall.

LAND OF MARVELS
By Barry Unsworth
287 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26

Like the ancient mound its British protagonist excavates in
Ottoman-run Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I, Barry Unsworth’s
new novel is made up of layers. First, there are the remains of
long-lost empires, lying compacted under the archaeologist John
Somerville’s feet. Over that Unsworth places contemporary terrors, for
Somerville the student of the past is beset by the realities of the
present — not only the possibility of conflict between a new
generation of imperialists, but also by oil prospectors and railway
planners who see the land he is digging up as a source of wealth, not
knowledge. Unsworth’s 21st-century readers inhabit a third stratum. We
read ”Land of Marvels” exquisitely aware that the great American
empire entered its own crisis as a result of its occupation of the
vast territory where Somerville is digging, to which Unsworth affixes
its modern name only when tapping out the book’s last, portentous
word: Iraq.

The suggestion here of history as an irresistible cycle, raising
nations only to consign them to oblivion, is essential to Unsworth’s
knowing, detached brand of historical fiction. Occasionally in ”Land
of Marvels” a character muses rather too obviously about the
transience of imperial might, or a history lesson is inserted into a
section of dialogue to the disadvantage of both. Generally, however,
Unsworth assembles his layers with the subtlety you would expect from
a renowned, if restrained, historical novelist and Booker Prize
winner. When a young woman named Patricia, who has joined Somerville’s
expedition fresh out of Cambridge, rues the ”contrary spirit of
dismemberment” that threatens the archaeologists, who are trying to
”put things together, make sense of things, add to the sense of human
community,” her sentiment soars above the narrative. We see these
interlopers and the other Westerners who surround them as frozen
between the past and the future and between two instincts: to preserve
what one has discovered under the sands or to unleash a destructive
energy that may, even in its terrible crucible, have regenerative
power.

Unsworth puts the second argument in the mouth of Alex Elliott, a
young American geologist: tall, tanned, easy on the eye. Attaching
himself to Somerville, who naively expects support from Elliott’s
backer, the financier Lord Rampling, the American passes himself off
to the Ottomans as an archaeologist, while in fact he is prospecting
for oil. Disenchanted by her husband’s obsessive quest for the
archaeological find that will make his career and riled by the
precocious Fabianism of young Patricia and her new fiance, a cuneiform
expert named Palmer, Somerville’s wife, Edith, is enthralled by
Elliott’s apparently guileless passion for oil. It’s like a ”genie,”
he tells her, trapped inside the earth, whose release ”will bring
prosperity and ease of life to millions of people. . . . He will light
their lamps, warm their houses, drive their engines. This genie will
be the harbinger of a golden age.”

Unsworth repeatedly uses fire to suggest both passion and death. When
Elliott seduces Edith, it is by the flickering, hallucinatory light of
flaring gas in the middle of the desert: ”His arms were around her
and she still saw the fire through closed eyes, and the beauty of the
fire was in everything she felt and did.”

While Elliott and Somerville tramp about in search of their respective
treasures, and the Englishman frets over the railway line the Germans
are laying in the direction of his dig, threatening to obliterate
everything in its path, an expanding cast of characters gathers for
luncheon and tea around the Somervilles’ table. Already charged with
the intensity of Edith’s feelings toward her husband and her lover,
these rituals get still edgier when Lord Rampling, cutting deals in
Damascus, discovers that Elliott has been in contact with the rival
Deutsche Bank. Incensed, Rampling deputes a British spy, Major
Manning, to kill Elliott — but only after the American has committed
his findings to paper.

In a fitting plot twist, Manning has a rival, the gnomic Spahl, a
Deutsche Bank agent who is similarly concerned about Elliott’s divided
loyalties. But both are upstaged by a priceless pair of Swedish
missionaries who plan to open a luxury hotel on the very place, quite
near the excavated hill, that the Society for Biblical Research has
determined to be the original site of the Garden of Eden, and whose
idea of dinner table conversation is to predict a rain of fire and
brimstone on modern-day sinners.

Amid the tension, and some deft characterization — Edith’s
exasperation at Patricia and Palmer is especially well done —
Unsworth’s themes of extraction and exploitation are
irresistible. Somerville is fired by the spirit of an actual
historical figure, Sir Austen Henry Layard, the Victorian adventurer
and diplomat who excavated the sites of ancient Nimrud and Nineveh
and, in the process, amassed the British Museum’s priceless Assyrian
collection. But the comparison does not flatter Somerville. Layard
loved the Near East, where he put himself through countless perils and
made fast friendships. Somerville, by contrast, finds no joy in his
environment and longs only for the applause of the Royal Society back
in London. It’s a pity that Unsworth’s only local character of note,
the duplicitous hireling Jehar,lies flat on the page next to the
book’s Western characters.

Lord Rampling is a much fuller beast: rich, virile and indecently
cosmopolitan, living in luxury in Constantinople and London, an
embodiment of the sense of boundless opportunity that fires global
capitalism and a brother in literature to the fabulously wealthy
real-life oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian. Born in Constantinople of
Armenian ancestry, educated in Britain, Gulbenkian helped set up Royal
Dutch/Shell and was a prime mover behind attempts to exploit Ottoman
oil fields.

The early summer of 1914, when the novel’s action takes place, is the
last outing for what Edith Somerville endearingly calls
”splendidness,” a strikingly Victorian combination of ”power and
strength and passionate certainty,” before Europe is plunged into
darkness.

Unsworth’s denouement is dramatic and richly symbolic, if rather
abrupt. And, as is only to be expected, it involves an incendiary
meeting of the railway project, the dig and the as-yet-untapped oil
fields. Unsworth’s description of the conflagration that ensues, a
river of fire ”stinking and shrieking” and consuming everything in
its path, brings to mind the fire and brimstone of the book of
Genesis, the burning oil fields after the 1991 gulf war, the seemingly
ever-present images of the charred remains of Iraqi civilians on the
television news. In ”Land of Marvels” — and particularly in this
final scene — Unsworth succeeds in summoning the demons and the
angels of Iraq’s present and past. Not bad for a volume you could read
in an afternoon.