Last weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the assassination of arch-duke Franz Ferdinand that precipitated the First World War. In many ways we still suffer the aftermath of that war and the peace settlement afterwards. The peace treaties signed after the war sowed the seeds of future wars for the next three generations and many of the problems we have in eastern Europe, the middle east, and southern Asia are a result of that so-called peace. This reminded me of a book review I did a few years ago.
I rarely do book reviews since most people don’t like the type of books that I like. But I decided to do one on this novel I recently finished since its so poignant to our world situation and due to the writer’s easy style of writing that made it enjoyable to soak up history.
Dreamers of the day (by Mary Doria Russel) is a novel set just after World War I in Ohio. The narrator’s family had all just died of the massive flu epidemic of 1919.
Many people have all but forgotten how devastating that flu epidemic really was. This plague was easily as globally devastating as the war was and reminds us that as mighty as humans can be that nature can be just as mighty. Russel’s vivid descriptions of the disease itself and of all the deaths it caused really gave the reader a sense of the scope of this outbreak.
After she recovers from the flu and finds that her entire family is now dead she must decide what to do. Being left alone in the world she decides to take the money she has inherited from her parents and visit Cairo to meet a friend of her late sister’s that just happens to be Lawrence of Arabia.
She arrives just in time for the Cairo peace conference of 1921. The interesting bit (at least to me) is that this is the time and place where all the troubles and all the headaches we have right now in the middle east were created.
Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait. How the Europeans carved up the middle east into their own little kingdoms just for the hell of it. Never mind what the locals wanted or what was best for them.
I find it odd that nearly 100 years later were still paying for the mistakes made at one little meeting and not just paying for these mistakes but seemingly making things worse. It’s clear from the narrator’s descriptions that the main players at the meeting knew that what they were doing was wrong but they could not see beyond their self-interest to do something else. Unfortunately all too familiar and all too relevant in today’s world.
The ending of the novel is a bit of a let down and delves into the fantastical but overall it is a very enjoyable historical novel.
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