Customer Reviews

Land of Marvels (Center Point Platinum Fiction (Large Print))

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is very fine historical fiction. It is very timely. Although set in the recent past, at the time of World War I in Europe, the author places readers at the heart of the Middle East, which for many is still known as the fertile crescent or the center of civilization. He expounds knowledgeably on such geographic areas as the Mesopotamian civilization (now Iraq), with extensive discussions on the origins and development of Sumerian cultures, the Hittites, the Semites, the Akkadians and the Babylonians. Between Baghdad and Constantinople, the author "travels" between what, due to current events, have become familiar places. His prose style is clear and precise; it lacks that obscurity that has become part of modern fiction,, especially in those works which employ magical realism and rich, if not fascinating, cultural references that can make reading an arduous undertaking. In contrast, Unsworth writes in prose more familiar to reading of nonfiction or of contemporary mysteries; that is, he is accessible and pleasurable easy to read. The story revolves around a British archaeologist who is working on an excavation of a long-buried Assyrian palace. The search for historical objects clashes with the rich for oil, with a geologist in conflict with the scholar. High and low ambitions do battle in the sands of time. This is a thriller that is worth reading, as fiction just for fun, or as fascinating background to our current political conflicts in that part of the world.

Iraq 1914, an archaeology site. Here gather a multinational cast of characters each with a competing interest in the land. John Sommerville, a young English archaeologist, believes he has found the site of an ancient Assyrian palace and tomb. Alexander Elliott is an American petroleum geologist masquerading as an archaeologist, who believes he has found a huge oil field at the same site. A Swedish couple, the Johannssons are missionaries who believe this is the site of the original Garden of Eden and have been given a 99 year lease by the Ottomans to build a luxury hotel here to lure spiritual tourists.

Added to the mix is Jehar an wily Arab hired by Sommerville to give him information on the German railroad under construction which is moving inexorably closer and closer to the archaeology site; Edith the beautiful but emotionally distant wife of Sommerville, Sommerville's assistant Palmer and the Patricia the daughter of a friend of the Sommervilles who is staying with them. In additional we get a duplicitous British miliary man and sinister English businessman.

In this novel of double dealing and intrigue no one is quite who they say they are. All of this seems quite promising in a novel. Unfortunately the promise is never realized until the last 80 pages of the novel. With its slow moving action and lapses into pages on Assryian archaeology and petroleum geology, interest in the story wanes quickly. Finally in the last pages the story picks up steam ending in a shattering act of violence, but it is too little to late for this reader.

King oil, Iraq and the chess game of imperialistic "diplomacy."

The elements may sound familiar, but author Barry Unsworth travels back to 1914 when the Ottoman Empire was in the closing act on the world stage and would soon be carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey in the aftermath of World War One (Iraq was created in 1920 by a League of Nations mandate and under the protection of the United Kingdom). The historical novel focuses on the already strong push by the Western super powers to gain a strong and lasting presence in the region as the empire was teetering on the brink of irrelevancy.

In the eye of the storm is archeologist John Somerville, who is looking to catch lightning in a jar with the excavation of site that is - unfortunately for him - directly in the path of a railway to Baghdad that is being financed by German interests. The dig yields an ancient palace/tomb, but Somerville is looking at time quickly ticking away and his dream of worldwide fame being buried forever. Swirling around Somerville's crew are a number of people who have ulterior motives; his wife has strong feelings that the marriage is over, with her knight being the American "archeologist" and Jehar, a swindler with a smile, who delivers a number of bogus messages concerning the railway construction as he hopes to create an unbeatable gambit for the most powerful players.

The American "archeologist" is actually an oil company geologist who befriends Somerville, but is in a race to find liquid gold in the ground. And with others not so covert prepared to converge on the land, Somerville may become a pawn in a contest where his life is a worthless commodity. With bureaucrats aplenty - and all working their own angles - greed becomes king in a violent conclusion where only the strong will truly live another day to fight the growing resource wars.

Through believable characters and a plot that swirls with intrigue, Unsworth depicts the huge appetites of forces bent on manipulation in the present, no matter what the consequences bring in the future, since the victors will confidently (re)write the history.

There's a fine recent nonfiction work "Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916=1918" which provides a fascinating look at politics and duplicity in the Middle East by Britain and other world powers. Britain (and other countries) readily made promises that they never had any intention of honoring. Much of this is reflected in Unsworth's Land of Marvels. Somerville is a British archaeologist working at a dig in Iraq in the spring of 1914. He lives for his work and hopes for recognition and financing. The dig lies in the path of the German-financed railroad to Baghdad and Basra, and the Turks have given the Germans mineral rights for 20 kilometers on each side of the railroad. The Germans plan the route to exploit mineral resources, the Turks look forward to being able to move troops in wartime.

Somerville's life is complicated by the oncoming railroad, and it gets further complicated by British interests who couldn't care less about Somerville's work. There's the British Major Manning, who is surveying and is basically an intelligence agent. There's the British ambassador to Turkey, and the shadowy Rampling representing business interests, and Rampling and the ambassador place an American petroleum geologist with Somerville, ostensibly as an archaeologist, but actually to spy out petroleum potential along the railroad route. The American also represents US oil companies. So there's a very complex plethora of agendas here, all working at cross-purposes. Somerville is small-time, sacrificial and expendable for the larger interests involved.

Unsworth gives an excellent portrayal of an archaeologist at his dig, and he also does a fine job with the other characters--this is a rich, complex, and satisfying novel. Somerville can see a part of the larger picture--he has his own person out spying on the progress of the railroad. But he cannot see just how inconsequential he himself is in the larger picture. The novel reminded me of some of the works by Graham Greene where little people are caught up in the large torrents and eddies that swirl around them. This is certainly one of Unsworth's better novels.

I really wish I could say more for this book. It's a mildly interesting novel about a British archaeologist excavating in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I. It has ancient history, which I enjoy, and intrigue, which is always entertaining. But it wants so badly to be significant that it ought to have, as its epigraph, "Please be advised that this book tells a *very* important story. Pay close attention!"

The archaeologist, who must make an exciting find to make his career and keep the admiration of his wife, stumbles on evidence of a forgotten Assyrian palace and a secret burial. He fears that German engineers building the Baghdad Railway nearby will overrun his site and destroy his work. The British Foreign Office insinuates an American oil prospector into the dig to locate sources of oil to power Britain's new navy. I'll give you three guesses as to what happens between the virile young geologist and the archaeologist's wife. A buttoned up British major arrives to harrumph about Empire (and keep an eye on the geologist), a "Swiss" journalist also arrives to protect Berlin's interests, and finally, the archaeologist's crafty Arabic foreman (now who ever heard of a character like *that,* I wonder!) has ideas on how to earn enough money to buy a girl who has won his heart in a nearby village.

This is all very well, I guess, but I felt as if I had read better in Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins, while part of it also reminded me of Hemingway's "Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and, last but not least, the author's own "Pascali's Island" of some years ago. "Idealistic man and cynical double dealer have their lives upended by a striking ancient find that captivates them, but they run afoul of power politics, with violent consequences." This is pretty much the same scenario.

Poor Unsworth wants so badly for this story to be important and portentous that he creates characters who don't, for me at least, really live on their own but "stand for something." One stands for the repressed past, another for the adventurous future, another for women's eventual emancipation, another for global capitalism, etc. I am amazed at the favorable reviews in both the New York Times and the Times of London and was gape-mouthed at the London reviewer's comment that "Unsworth is...far too sophisticated and subtle a writer to allow his characters to be merely emblematic"--what in the world can the reviewer mean? That *is* precisely what is wrong with the book: you read it either because you hope for thrilling intrigue or momentous ancient history or at least hot carnal fun among the sand dunes, but if those things don't sustain you, it's hard to keep going because you simply can't care about the characters for very long. And the book is only 287 pages.

Mesopotamia - just prior to WWI. Turks. Germans. Brits. Archeological dig. Sure to be an important find. Certain there will be all sorts of shenanigans. This should be good - and it could have been if it had it been well written. Unfortunately, Unsworth missed with this one.

I like authors who can write long, convoluted sentences; those that bring a smile and a shake of the head - but at the end you know full well what was said and meant. Unsworth, on the other hand, writes clause after clause and the reader gets quickly lost. Some of them make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

There were too many inconsistencies and way too much filler that added to the page count but added nothing to the story. The most ridiculous problem with the book is covered in the spoiler warning at the bottom.

I dislike quoting from books, especially fiction. In this instance there is no other way to describe what I mean. I'll limit myself to three from early in the book.

1st line of the book "He knew they would come that day or the next. Jehar had sent word."
He sneaks out of the compound and to the dig to see if Jehar was there. He was. While they are meeting, he says: "I did not expect to meet you here." What???

They had found a piece of carved ivory that had been through a fire; but made no connection to anything they had found. Several pages later, we read they had previously dug through a layer of ashes referred to as "devastation by fire". What???

They had uncovered two yards of a wall - "it ... showed no sign of coming to an end." Unlike all those other walls that nicely come to an end after only six feet?

There are many more instances of this throughout the book. I managed to make it all the way through this. There were times, however, that I wanted to pitch it and start reading something else. I definitely would not recommend this.

SPOILER WARNING: The archeologist spent the entire book obsessing over the railroad being built right through the dig. This was a major part of the entire story line. He hired a "spy" to check the progress of the railway. However, within sight of the dig was a railroad storage facility. Why didn't he walk over and ask "Is the line going to run through the dig?" Unbelievable!!! END OF SPOILER & REVIEW.

(4.5 stars) Mesopotamia, once the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, boasted vibrant civilizations four thousand years before the Christian Era, and the ruins of these civilizations, many of them buried for six thousand years, dot the countryside. By 1914, when this novel opens, Mesopotamia (Iraq) is being ruled from Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire. Virtually every European country is in Iraq, however, waiting for the weakened Ottoman Empire to fall. The Germans are building a railroad from Basra through Baghdad to Constantinople, and they may excavate along the track, through vast oil fields. An American from Standard Oil is on site, the French are making noises, and the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian Empire hope to profit. With World War I looming, the need for oil and chrome ore (to make armor-piercing weapons) is pressing, and everyone sees Iraq as a source of materiel.

Trying to ignore this turmoil is John Somerville, a thirty-five-year-old archaeologist who has been working for three years at Tell Erdek, an ancient site near Baghdad that has so far yielded few artifacts. A broken piece of ivory, a carved flat stone, a reconstructed clay tablet with writing, and the beginning of a wall made of kiln-fired bricks are all that Somerville has to show for three years of work. Unfortunately, his excavations are in the path of the German-built railroad, and he is running out of money. As Somerville tries to protect "his" dig, he must deal with the Turks, and with deceitful British entrepreneurs and officials. The British believe that war is coming, and they are not going to interfere against the German railroad, even if it means the destruction of unique archaeological artifacts.

As Booker Prize winner Barry Unsworth explores conflicts, deceits, and betrayals on all levels, he creates memorable characters, both on the dig at Tell Erdek and in the wider world. Love stories and affairs among those on the archaeological team reveal as much about deceit and betrayal on a small scale as does the duplicitous behavior of financiers and governments on a grand scale. No one can trust anyone else. Unsworth creates a vibrant picture of a tumultuous time and place, endowing what might have been an exotic tale of archaeological discovery with a broader thematic scope.

The action never flags as the points of view change from Somerville's excavation, to life at the team's headquarters, to the courtship of Jehan the informer, to government officials and financiers. As artifacts reveal the fate of the ancient "palace" and its inhabitants, Somerville is able to identify the seventh century BC ruler (or his double--another possible deceit). Those familiar with ancient art history, archaeological procedures, and the culture of the Babylonians and Assyrians will be thrilled by the details of Somerville's discoveries. Those with little interest in these subjects may find the technical details challenging, if not tedious. n Mary Whipple

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Unsworth presents us with a timely historical novel set in the land that will become Iraq. In 1914, Somerville, a British Archaeologist, uncovers what he feels will be major discoveries at Tell Erdek, a site near Baghdad, that will make his name. Unfortunately, he fears that a major new, German-funded railway is headed straight for his site. His fear is helped along by Jehar, an Arab petty criminal and con man who agrees to find out information for Somerville for payment; the messages he delivers are often made-up and detail how the Germans are headed right for Tell Erdek. Into this heady mix of characters (and nations) attempting to use this land comes Elliot, an American geologist posing as an archaeologist, who is apparently working for the British and the German governments but truly dedicated to American industry to discover the region's oil. What unfolds is a dramatic tale, told primarily through conversations, of intrigue in the small community of characters that reflects the goings on in the world at large at the time but still has relevant for our world today.

None of the characters are likable, but they aren't unlikable either, because they just aren't real. They are one dimensional, pale imitations of life. They aren't believable as real human beings living, thinking, feeling representatives of life in the beginnings of the 20th century. Rather, they appear to be stiffly moving marionettes, with all the depth of a badly written modern textbook. Modern sterotypes are superimposed over them, and Unsworthy fails to give people of the early 20th century "the privilege of living a complex life." ( Purdue History Professor Cutter).

Contributing to the flatness of these characters is the way Unsworthy repeatedly tells us, rather than shows us, what we are to think of each character. We are told more than once that Somerville is 'one of those...predisposed to feel singled out for harm,' (Jehar), 'a victim preordained...' (Palmer), 'he feels that it is certain to happen, that something has been set in motion that can only end in destruction.. and it's coming straight for him...' (Patricia). This character trait must be stressed in such an underlined with a sharpie marker fashion because the author cannot let his political points be diluted by taking the time to hone his craft so that we reach this conclusion for ourselves rather than needing to be told outright.

I really wanted to like this book- the blurb and descriptions sounded fascinating. It just did not live up to its promise.

There are lots of historical details in this book and some of them are likely to be accurate. It has no overt violence/sexual scenes so would be appropriate for teens/schools. And there we come to the problem.

There is no real character development, just various folks who wander through the landscape. The reader does not get that feeling of wanting to know what is happening next due to a relationship with a character. This means that the reading is rather a tedious pushing on to hopefully find something of interest.

There is a sort of historical perspective of parts of Iraq being fought over by various factions as prospective oil drilling sites, with the prospect of a coming war sort of intensifying the situation. But the whole book could have been much more enjoyable with a bit of character development.