Brontides

This has just appeared as a guest post over at All Lit Up. Any comments would be appreciated over there.

A Winter In Arabia by Freya Stark is not a straightforward book to read, but it is extremely rewarding for anyone with an interest in history, archaeology, the Middle East, and kick-ass female explorers who make it look easy.

The book was published in 1972, some 45 years after it was written. In it, the author chronicles the season that she spent – along with her companions – searching for the ancient city of Shabwah, the capital of the southern Arabian state of Hadhramaut. Long since lost, the city had been a capital of culture and trade in the region; Pliny catalogued it thus:

Almost in the very centre of that [South Arabian] region are the Atramitae [Hadramis] – the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota [Shabwah], a place situated on a lofty mountain. At a distance of eight posts [days' travel] from this is the incense-bearing region inaccessible because of rocks on every side, while it is bordered on the right by the ocean, from which high plateaux shut it in. The forests extend eighty miles in length and forty in width.

In search of this city, Stark travelled through pre-Westernised Yemen, detailing the culture of the people with whom she interacted and the landscapes through which she journeyed. Her heroics are matched by the land she describes; Hadhramaut is a particularly dramatic part of Arabia. Comprised of an immense valley, which runs for 160 km from open plains in the west, where the cliffs of the rocky plateaux to north and south close in about it, near Shabwah, towards the dry and inhospitable Wadi Masilah in the east, the area is a curious mix of desert and fertile river plains. The main Wadi (Wadi meaning river or river-cut valley) Hadhramaut itself is 12 km wide in some places, and is fed by innumerable tributaries, but beyond the city of Shabwah one quickly reaches the desert of Saihad – ‘an empty desert, a wilderness where the winds blow in all directions, a country where crows are king ‘. Only after travelling west across this desert for three days would one come to irrigated fields and settled lands once more, the beginnings of highland Yemen. This is the country that Stark describes.

The first thing that should be said about this book is that it is deeply poetic. Stark’s writing is fluidly lyrical, and is as evocative as it is enlightening. Her voice is not that of a dull-but-worthy academic, in pursuit of esoteric potsherds, any more than it’s an echo of the manly heroics of Thesiger and Lawrence; it’s… well. It’s a voice the deserves to speak for itself:

In the dry bed of the canal, close to where it takes off from an ancient “damir” or dam, we pitched our camp. A lithab tree (ficus salicifolia) hung above with long and pointed leaves; from its boughs my mosquito-net and the guns of the beduin were suspended… As I lay in bed I could hear Sayyid ‘Ali entertaining, and the entranced laughter of the company: he was imitating the
sayyids of Meshed, and the voices murmured on into my sleep; till a shock-headed man, creeping round my bed for his gun, woke me – the last inhabitant of Radhhain going home. I lay then, enjoying the warm delicious night. A sickle moon was shining; the pointed leaves of the lithab hung black before it, in Chinese loveliness; a small wind woke suddenly from nowhere, flapped the leaves against each other and died as it had come. The moon sank. Voices of foxes echoed in the cliffs – echoed and re-echoed, like some lost chorus high above the world. When I woke again it was to the singing of birds. The branches, so lovely against the moon, were the everyday branches of the lithab. Only their enchanted memory remained.

Stark’s writing conveys deep knowledge and understanding, but also profound affection for the land, the people, and the life that surround both. It’s not necessarily easy to read; you have to concentrate, or otherwise after an hour or so it all starts to elide into a formless mass of undifferentiated beauty. But this is a book to dwell over, and it rewards the persistent reader with keen insight and human detail.

The star of the book is the character behind the narration, however. Stark was an incredible woman. This book doesn’t document her first trip to Yemen; a previous expedition had failed due to an illness that almost killed her. Before then, she had already travelled extensively throughout Arabia, notably completing three dangerous treks in western Iran and being the first European to reach Alamut, the long-lost fortress of the Assassins. She was more than just an explorer, however, and A Winter in Arabia is littered with passages expounding upon her own philosophy (of which a lengthy excerpt can be found here). She continued to travel until her death, at the age of 100, in 1993. To experience Arabia with the benefit of her perception, humanity and fierce intellects is one of the great draws of this book.

This book deserves to be regarded as belonging to a corpus of European works which, when taken together, provide an overview – albeit Eurocentric – of pre-Westernised Arabia. The aforementioned Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is perhaps the most famous of this body of work. In many ways, Stark and Thesiger had a great deal in common. Thesiger was an explorer, too, most famous for crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arab peninsula – several times. He was only the third Westerner to do so, and often operated contrary to the wishes of the local and international authorities, but with the respect, admiration and friendship of the local Bedu – a respect that lasts to this day; an adventurer in the classic sense of the word, but also a gifted social observer. He shared Stark’s dismay at what he perceived as the growing Europeanisation of Arabia and its indigenous culture. A major theme of both books was the deterioration of an old order, just as it was about to be swept away: Thesiger’s last journey across Arabia’s sands was from the oasis of Al Ain to the trading port of Muscat, now a city in the UAE and the capital of Oman respectively. He spent nearly two months in 1949 in that interior. It now takes just under 4 hours to drive from the Hilton in Al Ain to the Sheraton in Muscat; I know because I’ve done it. Thesiger would have hated it, and the power of the book is such that it made me hate it, too, even as I was doing it.

Stark’s work evokes a similar sense of deterioration, but unlike Thesiger, the bland, monied future that she feared, cleansed of all of its identifying features by a glut of RAF bases and oil revenue, didn’t come to pass. What did come to pass was worse; an awkward halfway-house between modernity, with its guns and narcotics, and tribalism, poverty and alienation. Unable to resist the world that developed around it, and lacking the resources to preserve its heritage, the Yemen of today is a much-changed beast.

An alternative perspective on the issue comes from Geoffrey Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun. At the outline level, these books have a great deal in common; like Stark, Bibby was an archaeologist seeking the remains of a long-lost civilisation. Bibby’s obsession was the empire of Dilmun, a long-lost – and supposedly mythological – empire which was mentioned in Sumerian legend but never geographically placed. Contemporaneous with the Indus Valley civilisation, Sumer, Babylon and Akkad, Dilmun was found by Bibby on the island of Bahrain, although hints have since been found of an earlier civilisation on the same grounds; it is thus one of the oldest sites of human civilisation that we know of.

Unlike Stark, however, Bibby was an oil man himself, based in Bahrain and gifted only with an intellectual curiosity and a slightly more moralistic outlook than many of his contemporaries. Where Stark and Thesiger detailed an Arabia as yet unsullied by the graft of Europe’s finest grubbers, Bibby’s story is all about the cracks in the façade as they slowly spread, and the desperate attempt by Arabia’s last traditional rulers – such as the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, who distrusted Bibby enough to eventually exile him despite Bibby’s professed academic and historic mission. Compare that with the reaction earned by Stark and her companions in the excerpt above!

Many of the characters and locations appear in two or even all three of these books. Between them they chart a heartbreaking story of the decline of an indigenous way of life, albeit – and this has to be stressed – from the somewhat Eurocentric perspective of a motley band of explorers and outsiders. Their value thus exceeds their individual conceits; these are more than just travelogues or historical diversions. They are records of a way of life that has deteriorated over the course of a single lifetime.

In that capacity, Stark’s work immediately stands out as the most successful. The human warmth and compassion that she has for her Yemeni and Bedu hosts is apparent on every page (“We cannot be completely isolated, like European delicacy in cold storage”), and her relationships with the people that she encounters transcend the vignette. In an early passage, she returns to one of the sites of her earlier journey, and “wonder[s] uneasily which of the many delicate causes that ruin eastern relationships could possibly have ruined my friendship with those two, Sa’id and Husain;”when, a few pages later, they reconcile, there is a sense of human connection that overcomes cultural barriers.

For me, this was a wonderful, nostalgic read. As an account of an a culture that has long since passed on, it’s stimulating. But what makes the words jump off of the page is the lucid, witty prose of Stark, and the character that lies behind it.

There was an excellent interview in last weeks’ London Review of Books with Tony Judt, the American historian of European history. As I said, it was in last weeks’ magazine, but the whole thing’s available online, so you should read it before I fisk it.

There’s quite a lot here, so I’m going to speak to general points rather than specific lines or paragraphs. Firstly, I think that there are a number of ways in which events have quite rapidly played out to undermine some of Judt’s points. He early-on makes the point that Barack Obama is a compromiser, a consensus-builder – a common criticism that is balanced out by the counter-charges that he is a “machine politician” (FiveThirtyEight did a fine elaboration on that theme way back in 2008). On the whole, I think that the later group has the right of it. Obama is not a bridge-builder, he’s just someone with an acute and subtle understanding of how the machinery of power and legislation works. Sometimes, that requires him to at least appear to seek compromise. At others, it requires him to screw his party to the sticking point and ram legislation through Congress by brute force. The recent passage of healthcare exemplifies that, and should silence those who chirp about Obama’s lack of courage in the face of intransigence, at least for a little while.

Judt later observes that courage is unheard of in today’s politicians; that it is, in fact, a negating virtue. It should be noted that the passage of healthcare was considered by many to be courageous. I’m not convinced that it was – the Dems had a majority in the House, and once they’d been talking about it for a year, passing it was more or less the path of least resistance – but I do think that some individual politicians displayed considerable courage.

His comparison of the US President with the position of his European counterpart, however, was on the nose. Although it should be noted that the UK, tepidly, held out for a much more powerful and robust holder of the mandate, by and large the actions of the EU’s leaders have been exemplified by a stark lack of spine. It’s fair that the leaders of France, Germany, Spain and Britain fear an eclipsing of their individual national clouts, as a robust EU Presidency would do exactly that; but it’s a hit that’s worth taking, because the individual national clouts of France, Germany, Spain and Britain are slight and diminishing by the day. Relinquishing some local power in order to gain access to much greater, wider-scale influence should be an easy decision to make, but it takes courage, and Europe’s leaders are trained to be some of the most risk-averse in the world.

But the internal politics of Europe are thus in most regards. Judt also talks about Europe’s relationship with Israel, correctly observing that:

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time… However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East [...]They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage.

This is largely correct, and indeed economically and politically it has largely succeeded. Most international companies who divide their regional operations by continent will have Europe and MEA (Middle East & Africa) – with Israel firmly in the former camp. This is largely a practicality; a sales rep or local manager with an Israel stamp in her or his passport will struggle to cross Arabic borders. But it is also a reflection of a broader truth, in which the state of Israel is culturally divorced from the land upon which it lies, even as its claims of legitimacy depend on that land for their historical vigour. Should Europe start to push back – making political and economic ties incumbent on the observation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example – then Israel would be faced with a choice that has the same outcome either way: one that forces it to reconcile itself with its neighbours and the contested land upon which it is built.

Judt asserts that Europe resists the impulse to use this economic and cultural leverage out of a misplaced sense of historic guilt; that many European states continue to treat Israel with kid gloves as a way of continuing to atone for the events that it either perpetrated or failed to prevent. I think that this relies on too many assumptions and thus fails to meet the standards set by Occam’s Razor. Treating Israel as a member of the club of civilised nations, when it already has America’s robust backing, is simply a continuation of progress along the path of least resistance.

That this multinational spinelessness must be rooted in a domestic system that encourages and perpetuates a venal political elite seems like the next logical conclusion, and to an extent, Judt makes that link persuasively. He talks robustly about the “bad use of fear” that has taken hold of Europe’s social democratic model:

There is the demagogic exploitation of fear of outsiders and strangers, which culminates in putting up barriers against immigration, refugees or exiles. The sense that things are out of control, that we may lose our jobs next year because of competition from China or India, or that some farms may become unworkable in five years’ time because of climate change, has been intensified by globalisation, and it has given rise to large, unspecific fears which are played on [...] in Denmark by the anti-immigrant party, or in Switzerland with the referendum against minarets [...] Britain has more closed-circuit television cameras, which keep a record of almost everyone’s movements everywhere at all times, than any other democracy in the world. In the old days we would have seen this as an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedoms, yet today it’s accepted because people are frightened of crime, outsiders, terrorism. We no longer have a choice of a wonderfully happy and prosperous, secure and stable future: this isn’t Sweden in 1965.

Again, this can be explained in many forms, and socially it makes a lot of sense, but politically it’s only rational if most or all of the actors are acting in a narrow, cowardly self-interest. Acquiescing to these fears breeds nationalism, patriotism, preventive wars and repressive anti-terrorist legislation. These trends can be satisfying for a population in the short term, but the ugly truth is that in the end it’s just excessive state power. They have no power to combat or limit terrorism; they don’t strengthen our economy or our cultural vibrancy; they limit our international political power and tarnish our model of governance with claims of hypocrisy; and in the long run, they make the local population less comfortable and less free. But the European politicians with the courage to make these points and argue forcefully against the encroaching illiberality of the state are noticeable by their absence.

If the cause of this trend is understandable then the ways of fixing it seem daunting. When asked how and why we have reached the point where mass protests are ignorable by political elites, Judt talks about the disconnect between the people and governments; and as he correctly observes, in the span of a nation’s transition to democracy from an earlier state, the window of opportunity – where a political system is sufficiently unstable that it has to listen to popular will – is quite narrow (although it can be artificially extended). In late-19th Century Britian, he remarks,

They felt very vulnerable. Elections could remove them from power and if elections didn’t work, then the masses on the streets might achieve the same result.

This isn’t a state that lasts, however, and one of the weaknesses of democracies is that as democratic structures become more entrenched and social continuity becomes more normalised, the threat of actual consequential popular uprisings recedes. It doesn’t help that much of today’s European political activities are quasi-undemocratic, being run from bureaucracies and unelected bodies (such as the European Union, haw haw).

When I did my degree, we learned about a process called “incorporation,” by which subcultures are amalgamated into the mainstream. It’s a two-stage process; first, superficial and somewhat challenging aspects of the subculture are embraced by society at large; then, the remaining aspects are rejected as extremist and ignorable. This was presented as a process affecting the subcultures that surround musical genres (for example, clothing and some of the musical trappings of punk were assimilated, while the broader political and social aspects were attributed to anarchism and discarded), but it can also be clearly seen as affecting non-artistic philosophical and social movements – in feminism, for example, in which superficial aspects of female empowerment are embraced and prominently displayed as virtuous while the wider complaints of inequality and rape culture are dismissed as excessive and extremist.

I mention this because, to some extend, it corroborates the earlier discussion of cowardice in Europe’s political ranks. Courage is, after all, collocated with threat, but the political determination of the populace has been largely incorporated into modern mainstream politics. Elections and mass-media provide some semblance of what can be referred to as direct democracy, but the wider, more effective trappings of people power are dismissed as extremist – protest, worker collectivism and engagement with party politics. Against this backdrop, modern politicians lack a serious threat and thus have very little incentive to be courageous. The truth is that, no matter how easy and tempting it is to blame the electorate for Europe’s malaise, the power to reverse it has been removed from them.

Temporarily, though. The problem with Judt’s analysis is simply that it’s too pessimistic. It treats the status quo as a final state; it assumes that cowardice is a feature that Europe is doomed never to escape. It is this underlying assumption that is shown up by the one encouraging sign that comes from across the water, where Barack Obama – the machine politician – has demonstrated that courage, or the appearance of it, can be its own political virtue. The marvellous thing about democratic systems is that they have the potential to be self-renewing; that in a time of cowards, the courageous man is valuable simply by dint of his courage, let alone the effects and intentions that lie behind it. The era of loud, brash direct mass involvement of populaces in politics may well be over, and that may not be a bad thing, but a population can still make its will felt in terms of broad themes, if not entirely on matters of specific policy.

All of which is to say: if you value political coherence and courage enough, and vote accordingly, then it will come. In the meantime: please write to your MP and demand proper debating time for the Digital Economy Bill. It’s a dreadful piece of legislation and an accelerated period of debate won’t help that.

I used to do far more of this, but inspired by K-Bax and the incomparable Jen, I felt like it was time to do a quick round-up of January’s reading.

Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski was a gift from my aunt Gaynor. She gave me The Emperor, The Shah of Shahs and The Soccer War when I was a teenager, and I was blown away. Kapuscinski was a fascinating man and a personal hero of mine. It was said of him that he had personally witnessed or reported on no fewer than twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed forty times or more, and had survived four different death sentences. The Emperor narrated the fall of Haile Selassie; Shah of Shahs told of the Islamic Revolution and the last days of the Pahlavi dynasty. Questions have been raised about his depictions of Africa and about the authenticity of some of his details, but one dirty secret of journalism is that the odd fabrication can be excused, especially in the interests of revealing a greater truth. He is not an academic; he was a poorly-educated boy from behind the iron curtain, plucked almost at random and hurled into the world with scarcely any preparation at all. And in the end, when it came to the collapse of empires, Kapuscinski was the twentieth century’s foremost authority, a primary witness of unimpeachable experience.

Travels is more of a memoir, and is thus somewhat unsatisfying. To give this slight tome a hook, Kapuscinski grounds it in the battles of ancient history, focusing his narrative on the copy of Herodotus’ Histories that he was given as upon departing for his first assignment. The subtext is clear;  one gets the uncomfortable feeling that, by overlaying the story of the ancient traveller, narrator and seeker of truths, Kapuscinski – old and dying – was using his last work to try to frame his own epitaph.

If so, this book is affected detrimentally for it. Gone is the piss and vinegar, and the lonely sense of alienation and abandonment, and the sheer uncompromising fear that formed the combustive fuel for his earlier work; this is a mellow, peaceful, reflective book, still beautifully written and gently humorous, and lacking the insight and power of his documentary works. The real star of the show is Herodotus, whose stories of the clashing armies of Persia, Greece, Scythia and Egypt caught the imagination in a way that Kapuscinski’s slightly parochial descriptions of revolutionary China and post-war Khartoum did not.

It’s a good book, but not a great one. If you want to see a truly fitting testament to the talent and verve of one of the world’s greatest reporters, though, then you should read him at the height of his powers – in Iran in 1979, Angola 1975, and Ethiopia as Sellassie’s power erodes beneath him. When you are truly great, your epitaph looks after itself.

Sunnyside by Glen David Gold

Carter Beats the Devil was another firm favourite from my university days. A richly detailed prewar setting mixed with the exoticism of the life of the professional stage musician, infused by the inherently fascinating story of Charles Carter, the book was exciting and enjoyable – an adventure story for the more refined palate.

Sunnyside is exactly the same book, except that it has Charlie Chaplin instead of Charles Carter, and isn’t as good.

Let’s be fairer than that; it may well be that I am glamourising my memory of Carter, and that it’s actually just as accomplished. But if that’s the case then neither of them are very good, and this write-up becomes more complicated, so let’s stick with the facts at hand: Sunnyside is, simply, not all that good.

Its problems are several. Firstly, of the three interweaving storylines, only two actually interweave and only one is really worth your time. The first is the story of Hugo Black, a private in the section of the American army which – for no very justifiable reason – continues fighting World War One well after the Armistice, against the Russians, from their own city of Archangel on the north coast. It’s mostly divorced from the rest of the plot, being almost entirely tacked on, and doesn’t really resolve in anything like a satisfactory manner.

The second concerns Leland Duncan, whose story arbitrarily links in with the third story but which is much more thematically sound. Leland Duncan was a real person; in the first world war, he rescued two dogs in a bombed-out barn in Normandy, one of which would go on to become Rin Tin Tin, movie dog extrodinaire. As a slightly more likeable character, Leland carried his plotline in a way that Hugo simply fails to do.

The third plotline is by far the strongest, and on its own would have made a lighter, but much more compelling, book. It’s the story of Charlie Chaplin as he seeks to avoid the draft, find a mode of working that he can take pride in, and stave off the machinations of a Hollywood aligning itself against him. It includes several well-written passages, including a couple of fascinatingly ornate set pieces. These sections reveal Gold at his most comfortable, and somewhat work to the detriment of the weaker storylines that surround them.

Another problem that besets Gold’s work across all of the plotlines, however, is Gold’s lack of talent at writing for female characters. The females in Sunnyside are jarringly mannequin-esque – and are almost all reduced to romantic interests for the three male leads. It remains disappointing to me that male writers, as a class, seem to be incapable of overcoming this single, basic hurdle to narrative believablility.

Sunnyside is not a total failure. It has some charm, some adrenaline-inspiring passages, and some almost touching moments. But at its heart, it’s still not very good. It’s too long, and the quality is too diluted. Perhaps I’m just too old for this?

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

African literature is a hard market to excel in. On the one hand, there is no shortage of stories to be told; from the cradle of life and the birth of civilisation, to the war-torn and fractious borders of today, Africa deserves voices who are prepared to represent it in its totality. On the other, it must be acknowledged that the main audience for African literature is, and remains, white Europeans and Americans (not to mention their publishers and editors), who will happily apply and enforce their own – often arbitrary – benchmarks of quality and authenticity. To be an African author who can successfully balance those competing demands is a nontrivial task.

Ngugi wa Thion’o is one such. This latest book gives some hints as to his approach; it is defiantly anti black universalism, proudly feminist, and as celebratory of the individual as it is of the crowd. This is a remarkably warm, human novel, despite being born out of an impossibly sad event – in 2004, Ngũgĩ ended his exile to return to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa, but during the trip, robbers broke into his apartment: they stole money and a computer, brutalised the professor, and raped his wife.

This is not a novel of recrimnination, however. The Africa of Wizard Of The Crow is an Africa on the cusp of a renaissance, held down only by the infinite venality of its ruling class. With one hand, Thiong’o paints a vivid picture of the benefits brought to African society of the possibilities generated by affordable Indian advanced education, the richness of the intellectual awakening of Africa’s own dissent, and the small ways that populations can, in their own fashions, make dictators accountable. On the other, though, he excoriates the political elites, with their absurd modes of deference to power, their “white-lust”, and their ever-more ornate and elaborate ways of deflecting attention from their true activities.

The story is that of a fictional African nation called Abruria, which exists under the heel of an otherwise-unnamed Ruler. Meanwhile, the heroes of the piece – Kamiti and Nyawira, each foreign-educated, each poor and shiftless – adopt the identity of the Wizard of the Crow. Tales of their magical healing exploits proliferate amid a fog of rumour, mythmaking and political spin.

In the New Yorker, John Updike called it “too aggrieved and grim to be called satire” – but I found it to be full of hope and remarkably free of bitterness. At more than 700 pages, its flaws, of obsessive reiteration and prolixity, arise partly from its bold experimentation with oral forms, and from giving rein to the pathologies of the corrupt at the expense of the more intimate dilemmas of those who challenge them. But the poisonousness of its targets never infects the author’s vision, nor his faith in people’s power to resist. Perhaps that in itself is a triumph.

Samarkand by Amin Maalouf

I will be up-front about this book and freely admit that this is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. There’s a degree of inbuilt bias, there – it’s a book about the height of Persian culture and civilisation, and it’s a book about books; my interests rest perfectly in the venn overlap of these themes. But there’s also a lot of objective truth in it, too. This is an excellent book at any speed and deserves to be read.

The story splits into two parts. The first tells the story of Omar Khayyám, the 11th-and-12th Century Persian  mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician, poet, mechanic, geographer and musician. Khayyam is a fascinating subject to begin with; a disciple of the great Avicenna, he was a celebrity in the royal and imperial courts of the Islamic world at a time when most Europeans were living in dung huts. He lived his life in the intellectual, cultural and political capitals of the world – Nishapur, Samarkand, Merv – and, in a relationship that forms the centrepiece of this novel,  was part of a set that included two men who influenced their world possibly more than any others. On the one hand was Nizam al-Mulk, the vizir of the Seljuk Empire, author of the still-famous Siyasatnama (The Book of Government), and probably the most powerful single man in the world at that time. On the other, however, was Hassan i-Sabbah, master of Alamut and the founder of what would come to be known as the sect of Assassins.

Not that it matters overmuch, but while this section of the book deals somewhat with fact, it remains heavily fictionalised. There is no actual evidence that Khayyam, al-Mulk and Sabbah ever met, other than an apocryphal story often linked to Jorge Luis Borges; but in this book their relationships are close and personal. The bare bones of the historical narrative are true – the movements of Khayyam can be traced fairly closely, the foundation of Alamut is a matter of record, and the relationship between al-Mulk and his King have, at the very least, the ring of truth – but Maalouf’s skill is in putting flesh on those bones. This book is absurdly successful in this aim. The symbiosis of the fascinating characters and the alluring, evocatively described settings make for gripping reading.

The second part of the book moves to turn-of-the-Century Iran, and somewhat more towards the wholely fictional. We now follow a young American who is on the trail of Khayyam’s Rubaiyaat – the supposed original document in which Khayyam transcribed his quatrains, rather than the speculative and heavily editorialised FitzGerald anthology and translation. This quest lead him into the political imbroglio of 1900s Iran, an era of revolution in which democracy briefly flourished, only to be ruthlessly crushed, in one of Europe’s more shameful moments, by the colonial powers of Britain and Russia. The main characters in this section are somewhat less absorbing than in the first; they’re not bad, and a lesser book (like, say, Sunnyside) would be better for their inclusion, but they lack the draw of Khayyam and his coevals. But the themes remain compelling.

The grand sweep of history has Iran, once again, chafing under the yoke of enforced tutelage. The book speaks with an empassioned voice about the limits of nationalism, religion and fanaticism to drive change, but also stands as a paean to human spirit under oppression. It’s a book about art and culture, and the enjoyment of life’s pleasures. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read.

From Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels With Herodotus:

Herodotus was therefor a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wonderers – citizens of the world. It depends how the blood got mixed, and what spirits settled in it.