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.

Library-a-go-go!

The Contra Costa County Library in California has launched a 'library-a-go-go' service. It is like a vending machine, but it lends library books.

Ghostlines

by Nick Gadd. Scribe, 2008.

As an unpublished manuscript, Ghostlines won a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and it’s a strong debut. Philip Trudeau, an investigative journalist fallen on hard times, finds himself drawn into a mystery involving corruption in the art world. The dialogue is convincing, the Melbourne settings are well-done, and Gadd pulls together the strands of the mystery neatly at the end. There’s no shortage of novels featuring investigative journalists. English author Joe Kelly, whose mystery novels are set in and around East Anglia, is possibly the best of the bunch at the moment, but Gadd could rival him once he’s got a couple more books under his belt. Not everyone will swallow the supernatural side of the story, which was an unnecessary element of the plot in my view, but I would certainly read more from this author.

- John.