Olivier Guez’s latest novel, “Mesopotamia” allows us to rediscover the heart of the Arab world, present-day Iraq, and the great geopolitical maneuvers of the 19th century. At the helm is a Victorian British woman, Gertrude Belle, who participates in the emancipation from Ottoman rule. Forgotten today, she was nevertheless nicknamed “Queen of the Desert in London.
Who has ever heard of Gertrude Bell? Unknown today, this young lady of Victorian high society, daughter of extremely wealthy industrialists, polyglot archaeologist, mountaineer, diplomat, spy, head of intelligence for the British administration in Baghdad, was one of the most powerful women of the Empire and the architect of modern Iraq.
It is on the trail of this forgotten heroine – unlike her good friend and soul brother Lawrence of Arabia – and whose life is so closely linked to the fascinating and eventful history of the region, that the writer and former journalist Olivier Guez, winner of the Prix Renaudot for The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (2017), focuses his latest novel, Mesopotamia. Cradle of civilizations between the Tigris and the Euphrates, it was eclipsed for centuries before becoming, in the 19th century, the scene of great geopolitical maneuvers, for better and for worse.
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1917: The passionate orientalist comes to take refuge in Basra, Iraq, after an unhappy love affair.
In 1917, Gertrude Bell, a passionate orientalist, has just taken refuge in Basra, Iraq, after an unhappy love affair. Very quickly, she makes herself indispensable to the arid Indian officer Sir Percy Cox, chartering caravans, crisscrossing the territory on camelback, setting off to meet the thousands of Bedouin tribes who make political machinations so subtle, and finally becomes one of the crown’s most skillful emissaries in a land that the Ottomans have allowed to rot, and where the discovery of immense oil deposits has suddenly aroused the covetousness of Westerners. Her aura spreads so much that the English will call her “the queen of the desert”.
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Between the fictionalized biography and the historical narrative
The Great Game, the Sykes-Picot agreements, the enmities between Delhi and Cairo, the instrumentalization of jihad, the Prusso-Turkish alliances, the decaying splendor of Baghdad[…]
- challenges.fr
