Land of Marvels: A Novel

Christoper de Bellaigue

…Unsworth assembles his layers with the subtlety you would expect from a renowned, if restrained, historical novelist and Booker Prize winner…Amid the tension, and some deft characterization…Unsworth's themes of extraction and exploitation are irresistible.
—The New York Times

Jonathan Yardley

…immensely intelligent and entertaining…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…All in all, a lovely, memorable book.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Booker Prize-winning Unsworth (The Ruby in Her Navel) sets his intelligent and timely new book in Mesopotamia during the spring of 1914, just before the chaos of WWI. John Somerville, a British archeologist desperate for fame, worries that his new discovery, an ancient tomb, will be compromised by the construction-funded by Germany-of a new railway line. At the excavation site, Somerville's wife, Edith, wonders if her marriage has fizzled, especially after the arrival of Alex Elliott, a handsome American posing as a geologist but secretly searching for new sources of oil. Meanwhile, Jehar, an Arab confidence man, brings often fabricated messages to Somerville, warning him that the Germans are quickly approaching. The tension between the players-all eager to claim rights to what the land provides-builds toward a violent, unexpected finale. In elegantly modulated prose, Unsworth creates a tapestry of ambition and greed while, at the same time, foreshadowing the current conflict in the region. (Jan.)

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Library Journal

Well known for the widely acclaimed novel Sacred Hunger, which received the Booker Prize, and his well-craftedMorality Play, Unsworth here offers historical fiction at its best. It provides some insight into current political divisions in the Middle East as it explores the power and limitations of storytelling. While the publisher characterizes this novel as a thriller, and it certainly has a compelling plot, Unsworth exceeds the limitations of that genre by drawing characters with depth and complexity. As several Western countries do their best to exploit the looming prospect of war and potential oil reserves in 1914 Mesopotamia (now Iraq), a British archaeologist races against time to uncover the secrets of an Assyrian site before construction on the new railway flattens the site and his hopes for further expeditions. Consumed with worry, he doesn't realize who, among his growing party, has betrayed him, who is working undercover, and who is just lying. Highly recommended for all literary fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ9/1/08.]
—Gwen Vredevoogd

Kirkus Reviews

The Booker Prize-winning British author's latest novel is a tale of archaeological exploration and global political cross-purposes, set in the former Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the immediate pre-war year of 1914. When obsessed researcher John Somerville attempts to unearth a buried Assyrian palace that lies directly in the path of a German-built railroad line leading to Baghdad, rival international interests collide in the area of the dig (a mound known as Tell Erdek). British diplomat Major Manning, scheming oil magnate Baron Rampling, Somerville's assistant Palmer (encouraged by his love interest Patricia, an educated woman committed to feminist advancement) and Somerville's neglected, resentful wife Edith enact a dance of mutual involvement, estrangement and conflict that's disturbed by two manipulative "outsiders." American petroleum geologist Alex Elliott, ostensibly employed by Rampling but driven by a more complex agenda, easily infiltrates both Somerville's activities and Edith's starved affections. And Arab interpreter-factotum Jehar (whose name bears a sly echo of "Jihad") works against his employers' priorities, consumed by his love for a beautiful young Circassian girl. As tell-tale "Layers of Parthian, Byzantine, Roman occupation . . . [are] found," Somerville anticipates scholarly fame for having deciphered mysteries related to once-glorious Assyrian kings. But much more is at stake than his love of the past, and as plotlines are skillfully drawn together, the ingenuous prophecy of a visiting pair of biblical archaeologists who seek the site of the Garden of Eden is fulfilled-as "the danger of human overreaching" precipitates a literally explosive climax. One hopes this richnarrative may inspire a film version enlisting the talents of Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Ben Kingsley and their peers. A transfixing melodrama alive with crackling suspense, sharply drawn characters, intense historical relevance and ideas in action. Absorbing and irresistible.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The past, William Faulkner wrote, is never dead and isn't even past. He might have added that the present, at least in fiction, is always present. Just as the past keeps creeping into our contemporary lives, so do writers and readers like to insinuate our current preoccupations into stories about what went before.

This kind of sly time-bending is a hallmark of the novels of Barry Unsworth. Born in an English mining village in 1930, he's the author, since 1966, of 16 books, many of which range across time and space from 12th-century Sicily (The Ruby in Her Navel, 2006) to the last days of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century (The Idol Hunter, 1980). Like all fiction, Unsworth's historical novels both reflect on and are influenced by the age in which they were made. Land of Marvels returns to territory he has covered already -- Mesopotamia in the beginning of the 20th century -- while illustrating, through the story of an archaeological dig, the way time's layers "were jumbled up and the dawn of history confused with the day before yesterday."

The year is 1914, and the setting is an archeological mound called Tell Erdek, located about 100 miles from the left bank of the Euphrates River, in what will eventually become western Iraq. Excavations like this are going on throughout the region, conducted by archaeologists from France, Germany, England, and America, all of them anxious "to get out of the earth as much as possible, before it was barred to them."

What's the urgency? Only that the European nations, on the brink of war, are all intent on grabbing pieces of territory as the Ottoman Empire disintegrates. As a Turkish commissioner puts it, "We see that the British have designs on Mesopotamia as far as Basra, the French have their eyes on Syria, the Russians are seeking to absorb Armenia." Meanwhile, the Germans are building a railroad, designed to link Constantinople to the Persian Gulf, whose path threatens to cut directly through the heart of this particular excavation.

In addition to the greed for land, there's a hunger to begin tapping Mesopotamia's vast oil fields. The race is on to obtain prospecting rights: with oil about to replace coal as the world's major fuel source on land and sea, "he who owns the oil will own the world," Unsworth writes. Sooner than anyone here might imagine, "the day will come when oil will be more desired, more sought after than gold."

To make the geopolitical personal, Unsworth introduces a cast of engaging international characters who are all trying to maneuver through these tumultuous circumstances. At the center is John Somerville, the 35-year-old British archaeologist in charge of the Tell Erdek excavation. After years as an assistant on previous digs, this is his first opportunity to lead an expedition, and as he has failed thus far to make any major discoveries, it may well be his last. Somerville is hardly the hero he or his demanding wife, Christine, had expected he would be. With his funds running low and the railway's advance looming, he's feeling anything but optimistic.

It doesn't help Somerville's cause that everyone involved at the site is stewing with self-interest, including his scholarly young assistant; his Bedouin informant; an officious British major; and the resentful Turkish commissioner quoted above. The anxiety reaches a crescendo when several fateful events coincide: Somerville suddenly unearths what looks to be the royal palace of the last king of Assyria, while the American geologist sent by a calculating British industrialist to pinpoint the location of nearby oil fields makes some crucial findings of his own, managing at the same time to capture the imagination of Somerville's disenchanted wife.

The conventional storytelling elements of Land of Marvels are mostly pretty solid. When the book impersonates a thriller, the action is thrilling, although its momentum doesn't truly get going until the end; when it plays at being a romance, it's genuinely romantic. The characters are unfailingly lively: Somerville's hard-to-please wife feels contempt for his assistant because "there was no splendidness in him," while Lord Rampling, the British industrialist meddling in the region's affairs, reflects that "accusations of mismanagement and incompetence brought out a strain of patriotism in his fellow countrymen like almost nothing else."

If there are moments when Unsworth's narrative feels a little clunky -- it can't quite reach the level of unforced radiance in Sacred Hunger, his novel set aboard a 19th-century British slave ship that shared the Booker Prize in 1992 with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient -- there's a good reason to forgive him. That's because his story is much larger than its specific details might suggest. He's not just writing about the overreaching and aggrandizement of the rivalrous European powers but about imperial greed through the centuries; not just about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire -- "one of the greatest and most enduring empires the world had ever seen" -- but about the termination of every empire.

Without being didactic or trite, Unsworth uses the archaeological mound to show how intimately the ancient past and the quotidian present are fused: at Tell Erdek, they both lie just under Somerville's feet. At one point, he reflects on

...the powers that had marched and countermarched across this land of the Two Rivers: 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.

It's a long story with shifting particulars, this rise and fall of empires, each built atop the shards of another, each deaf to the warnings of the ones before it, each caught up in what the writer Will Self has called its own "centrifugal strivings." But it is always the same story. What distinguishes Unsworth's tale of evanescence is the implicit way he links archaeology and fiction, proving that once the present has leaked away into the past, after the same lessons have been forgotten all over again, "what chiefly remained was a story." --Donna Rifkind

Donna Rifkind's reviews appear frequently in The Washington Post Book World and the Los Angeles Times. She has also been a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, and other publications. In 2006, she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.