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Dig Site Tale Unearths Some Mideast Insight

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By KEVIN WALKER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 18, 2009

"Land of Marvels," by Barry Unsworth (Nan A. Talese, $26)

It's 1914, and British archaeologist John Somerville and his team of local diggers have just unearthed what looks to be a great find at a site in Mesopotamia. Breathing down his neck is the 20th century in the form of a German railroad that has just crossed a river some miles away and is slated to be constructed right through the Tell Erdek site where the dig is located.

It's enough to keep a man up at night. Somerville also doesn't even know about his bored wife's growing interest in an American oilman, the designs a rich British lord has on the area or the schemes of Jehar, his Arabic informant.

That's the setup for Barry Unsworth's latest novel, a compelling look at, among other things, the rise of oil as the world's most influential commodity and the fate of empires.

You won't come away feeling great about being from the West (Unsworth, who is British, lives in Italy).

The novel opens as Somerville learns the Germans are perhaps only weeks away from reaching his site. Somerville is a likable character, but weak in ways that will lead to his own undoing.

Having made a "modest fortune" in his father's Manchester cotton trade - a job he detested - Somerville sold the business after his father died and pursued his consuming passion: archaeology.

Since boyhood, his hero has been Henry Layard, who made some of the key finds that unlocked the history of the Assyrian Empire. Like everything in the book, the presence of Assyria feeds into Unsworth's examination of empire and its inevitable decline. Of Somerville, Unsworth writes: "But it was the Assyrians who had made a conquest of his imagination, theirs the empire that had seemed to him a paradigm of all empires."

Later, when Somerville and his assistant, Palmer, realize they have uncovered an important site of Assyrian artifacts, Unsworth writes of the sudden end of the Assyrian Empire: "And it was this suddenness, this death in the midst of plenty, that made Assyria the supreme symbol of the doom inherent in all dominion."

Unsworth wags no fingers, instead choosing a carefully constructed plot to make his points.

Concerned about the railway, Somerville seals his fate by seeking the aid of the British ambassador, an old schoolmate. Little does he know the ambassador is controlled by the powerful Lord Rampling. Through the ambassador, he gets Somerville to accept a deal: They will talk the Germans into moving the railway (they really won't, of course) if he will take an American onto his staff.

The American, Alex Elliott, is there only to find out if there are oil reserves worth tapping in the region.

Once Elliott arrives, things begin to unravel. A character without moral compass, Elliot is only interested in finding oil, which he is zealous about, and bedding Edith, Somerville's beautiful, repressed and extremely bored wife. When Lord Rampling discovers Elliott is also selling information to the Germans, he decides the American's usefulness has come to an end.

As the Westerners maneuver, Jehar is hatching a plan that will win him the hand of Ninanna, a woman his uncle is willing to sell to him as a wife for 100 pounds.

Ultimately, Unsworth seamlessly weaves these various threads together into a violent ending, all of it culminating in the novel's final word, which will give American and British readers a little insight into our current Middle East difficulties.

Kevin Walker is Friday Extra editor for The Tampa Tribune.

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