Thomas Jones writes:

Now, as America’s first black president is promising to ‘leave Iraq to its people and responsibly end this war’, Unsworth looks back to the war’s early 20th-century colonial and commercial origins. ‘Iraq’ is the last word of his new novel, withheld for nearly three hundred pages though evident throughout just below the surface of the narrative, the punchline that anyone can see coming. Land of Marvels is an altogether more genteel affair than Sacred Hunger, perhaps because, at least among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties are still unresolved more than 90 years later – no one knows whether or not King Sinsharishkun survived the sack of Nineveh by the Medes and Chaldeans in 612 bc – Somerville must either be mistaken, or doomed never to publish his discovery. As almost always with historical fiction, several strata of dramatic irony underpin Unsworth’s story.

(LRB 12 March 2009)

Hutchinson | hardback 287 pp. |ISBN: 9780091926175