Land of Marvels Doesn't Disappoint

Barry Unswroth Proves Once Again That Fiction and History Go Together

Jun 5, 2009

Veteran historical novelist Barry Unsworth is back with Land of Marvels, a skilled and affecting look at pre-World War I Iraq.

Barry Unsworth is one those stellar contemporary novelists who unfortunately seems to exist just under the radar of the public eye. This despite winning the Booker Prize for fiction in 1992 for Sacred Hunger, a sprawling, meticulous and devastating examination of the 18th century British slave trade.

Born in Englnad in 1930, Unsworth has written 15 novels to date, including Pascali’s Island, which takes place in 1908 as the sun is setting on the Turkish empire, Stone Virgin, about an art conservation expert who’s sent to Venice to restore a masterpiece of venetian Gothic sculpture, and Morality Play, in which a 14th century acting troupe is commissioned to enact a brutal murder that has torn apart a rural village.

Living History

As is clear from these examples, Unsworth is essentially a historical novelist, and so it’s no surprise that his new novel, Land of Marvels, is set in 1914. And because Unsworth is an intelligent historical novelist, it’s no surprise that the novel aims to give the living and breathing something that they would be well advised to chew on and learn from.

Unsworth’s protagonist, referred to throughout as simply “Somerville,” is a British archeologist whose current obsession is excavating an Assyrian palace. There’s one problem: The spot under which the palace is buried is right smack in the path of a new railroad to Baghdad.

Matters become even more complicated when an American geologist from an oil company enters the scene, posing as a fellow archeologist, and becomes another in a cast of characters that includes Sommerville’s wife, Edith, Patricia, a young graduate student, and Jehar, an Arab man who projects subservience but whose hidden depths are gradually revealed.

The Plot Thickened

Unsworth has cleverly latched onto the notion, now prevalent in intellectual and cultural histories of the 20th century, that, though the impact of World War I was so profound that it’s difficult to see the importance of anything that preceded it, the modern world has deep roots in the early years of the century leading up to the Great War. Before the psychologically damaging effects of that nonsensical conflict, many of the concrete societal and political mechanisms that we’re still feeling the consequences of were well in place.

The power of Unsworth’s conceptualizing and plotting, therefore, are clear. The Janus-faced world he evokes, where what might be called the sensuous purposeful action of archeological research is contrasted with a blinding, machine-like driving into the future, is especially affecting.

Some readers, however, might feel that some elements are lacking. While the flat epilogue that virtually announces that the novel has a moral doesn’t do too much damage to the dramatic and evocative ending, more attention to Sommerville’s inner life and the relationship between him and his wife, among other possibilities, would have helped to silence the sound of the gears turning in Unsworth’s mind.

The copyright of the article Land of Marvels Doesn't Disappoint in Modern British Fiction is owned by Douglas Nordfors. Permission to republish Land of Marvels Doesn't Disappoint in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.