Land of marvels

by Barry Unsworth. Hutchinson, 2009

Not too many novelists in their 70s produce great work. It’s as if there is a slackening off of power. But Unsworth, pushing 80, has just produced a novel twice as good as anything recent by authors half his age. It should be a contender for novel of the year. Set in 1914 in Mesopotamia, the story concerns events surrounding an archaeological dig. As the scholars excavate through layers of the past, revealing the fate of doomed empires of long ago, events in the outside world foreshadow the end of another Empire. Others, with different agendas, gather at the dig – an American geologist, German and British spies, religious zealots. The action and tension are gripping to the end. Unsworth has explored imperial ambitions in the past, notably in Pascali’s Island, and the Booker-prize-winning Sacred Hunger, and Land of Marvels is well up to their standard. Here he is marvelously subtle, not only harking backwards to the age of the Assyrians, but making ironic reference to the most recent oil-fuelled imperial folly in the land now known as Iraq.

- John.