Customer Reviews

The Doomed Oasis

Hammond Innes (1913-98) is a name that conjures up the memory of dog-eared paperbacks around the house during my childhood, to be read on a rainy day. He's a writer very much in the tradition of John Buchan. The Doomed Oasis, dating from 1960, is about oil in the Persian Gulf and the attempt to save an oasis in the "empty quarter". The oasis is named Saraifa in the book, and it's fed with water by ancient "falajes" or aqueducts which are gradually crumbling away. The real-life location is almost certainly the Buraimi Oasis (on the border of the Trucial States, Trucial Oman and Saudi Arabia), which was the subject of a border dispute during this period, as described in the book. Innes always made a point of traveling to the locations about which he wrote, and went to the Persian Gulf in 1954 with one of the earliest oil exploration parties. The book is focused around the fractious relationship between Colonel Charles Whitaker (said to have been based on Lawrence of Arabia), and his son David. It's not a perfect book, but it's an accessible introduction to the history and geography of that region during the 1950s.

In 1954 Innes visited the Persian Gulf with one of the earliest British oil exploration ventures, that trip, coupled with his longtime interest in ecological issues led to this somewhat stilted novel. The story is narrated by a Welsh lawyer, who begins by recounting his involvement in the affairs of a working class family in Cardiff. This dovetails with his handling of affairs for Charles Whitaker, a kind of modern T.E. Lawrence knockoff who has adopted Islam and lives among the Bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula. It turns out that David, the ne'er-do-well teenager of the working class family, is the bastard son of Whitaker. In trouble with the law and obsessed with his absent father, the boy contrives to stowaway and make for Arabia with the minor assistance of the lawyer.

After some years, the lawyer is forced to head to Arabia to track down Whitaker in order to meet concerning his affairs. Once there, he discovers that David has recently disappeared into the desert in suspicious circumstances. His probing reveals a certain resistance from the oil company David was employed by, and some minor assistance from an Italian journalist and an Algerian prostitute leads him to the oasis town of Saraifa (perhaps modeled on Buraimi, near the Saudi/Omani border). The plot then spirals into a muddled mish-mash involving the search for oil, the need for water, border disputes, father-son rivalry, corporate greed, and an accusation of murder. The story is far from being thrilling, and the courtroom climax proves a tepid ending.

The characters are fairly uninteresting, David is a one-dimensional obsessive, his father is the stereotype colonial figure "gone native", the Arabs are all either cunning, cowardly, or steadfastly loyal, the Italian is a sensationalist, etc. The narrator is the most interesting one of the lot, but he exists primarily to tell the tale. An uninteresting work that probably deserves to remain out-of-print.