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“Land of Marvels”

by Barry Unsworth

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 287 pp., $26

Nothing lasts to the end of time — not peace, not oil, not empires.

The parties vying for stakes in the resource-rich and geographically strategic region we call Iraq could have taken the lessons of history greater degree seriously when they decided to thin piece and dice the old Ottoman Empire in the lead-up to World War I. Would their hunger for expansion, into a land villanous with colliding visions, be worth the cost in human lives and national instability that certainly would follow?

One can’familiarily abet but ponder the what-ifs as long as reading British originator Barry Unsworth’s intrigue-fueled historical incident “Land of Marvels.”

It’s the spring of 1914 and archaeologists from the West are in a angry dash to draw out as many artifacts as possible from promising antiquarian digs at fabled Mesopotamian sites such as Nineveh and Babylon, in what is today Iraq, judgment the predicted onset of war across Europe.

Among the wide-eyed excavators is John Somerville, who is badly in need of financing to continue his research. But his rivalship isn’t just other scientists.

Somerville lives in constant fear of a German-built railway that might portend his research fields. Regular surveillance reports from a shifty limited named Jehar only deepen his suspicions. But oil interests are also scouting the area, including a slick American geologist angling on behalf of U.S.-based Standard Oil.

Meanwhile, emissaries from Western countries busy themselves striking deals over resources and country rights in lush Arab gardens under the blazing wild sun one impulsive power, and dispatching spies to store attend on cropped land other the next. They are positioning themselves, “naturally in a spirit of partnership and cooperation,” Unsworth explains with a touch of sarcasm, for that “day of reckoning, a division of the spoils” after the crumbling Ottoman Empire loses its hold firmly on the region.

The spoils: relics, oil, textiles and prospective transport routes towards the engines of 20th-century culture, commerce.

The attitude is made clear in the inner thoughts of the British ambassador, Lord Rampling: “In this dangerous place that Europe had become, to protect your interests, you must seek constantly to enlarge them; who held back, who played too safe, would fail and die, and the earth would cover him over.” But the system of “partnership and cooperation” those nations established proved taken in the character of convoluted as a North African kasbah, with double-dealing and back-stabbing around every mazelike turn.

No one in “Land of Marvels,” it seems, is above brute emulation, certainly not the paranoid antiquary Somerville, whose team is poised to unearth an Assyrian royal sarcophagus. “He would connect company by the great (archaeologists) of the past, thus much revered, Layard, Rassam, George Smith,” Unsworth writes. “He would be famous; he would be in requisition.”

Power and prestige await the players in this grand game, provided the deserted region sands, layered with the ruins of other once-mighty, now-vanquished empires, don’t become their graves too.

The inexorable quest in opposition to empire and influence, in inferior hands, might make the characters in “Land of Marvels” seem like two-dimensional pawns in a geopolitical chess game. However, Unsworth’session portrayals are sensitive and, to an extent, empathetic, giving the story a humanity it otherwise would not possess.

Unsworth, a Booker Prize winner for his slave-trade epic “Sacred Hunger,” told one interviewer recently he wanted “Land of Marvels” to illustrate “the seeds of ruin that are always there from the start in this reaching out for control and aggrandizement.”

But Unsworth isn’t just spinning a good historical yarn here. “Land of Marvels” holds up a mirror to our avow grand and possibly misguided ambitions in a region that is nay less explosive, no less paved with grand and dubious intentions today.

Tyrone Beason is a writer for Pacific Northwest Magazine.