Dreamers of the Day
Dreamers of the Day is the fourth novel by Mary Doria Russell,
who has already cemented herself as one of my favorite authors. I'd
heard this book wasn't as good as her previous three and almost avoided
it for this reason. I'm really glad I didn't. While it's true that it's
not as good as The Sparrow, Children of God, or A Thread of Grace, it's still an incredibly good book.
Dreamers of the Day is part romance, part historical fiction. The narrator, a forty-year-old school teacher named Agnes Shanklin, inherits a large amount of money that allows her to take her dream vacation to Cairo. By a twist of narration, Agnes happens to meet T. E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill who are in the process of redrawing national boundaries in the Middle East following the Great War.
Agnes finds herself on the outskirts of these talks as she spends some time with Lawrence, Churchill, and various other players. Although she doesn't participate them, she filters the consequences with a surprisingly modern sensibility.
This book was published in 2008 and I think it's almost impossible to separate the Cairo peace talks from America's current wars over there and, really, from everything that those talks set in motion. Because of this, Russell made an interesting choice that I think works really well for the book. Despite being forty in 1921, Agnes speaks directly to the reader in 2008. Russell accomplishes this by allowing Agnes to narrate from beyond the grave. There are hints to this throughout the book, though it isn't officially revealed until the end. But I think the book reads better if you understand that this is what's happening.
Alongside the politics, Agnes pursues a romance with a German man staying in the same hotel as her and tours some religious sites, including Jerusalem. All of these pieces are interesting, and they comment on each other well. You can't separate the politics of the region from the intertwining Abrahamic religions. But they don't tie together quite as seamlessly as the themes in Russell's other books.
Still, this was a good book and I ended up dog-earing a number of pages so I could go back to passages. (I've gotten more comfortable doing this in the last year or so.) I learned a lot about the time that I didn't know and that I think is important to really understand a lot of what's happening right now in the Middle East. I imagine I'll be digesting this book for a while.
Dreamers of the Day is part romance, part historical fiction. The narrator, a forty-year-old school teacher named Agnes Shanklin, inherits a large amount of money that allows her to take her dream vacation to Cairo. By a twist of narration, Agnes happens to meet T. E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill who are in the process of redrawing national boundaries in the Middle East following the Great War.
Agnes finds herself on the outskirts of these talks as she spends some time with Lawrence, Churchill, and various other players. Although she doesn't participate them, she filters the consequences with a surprisingly modern sensibility.
This book was published in 2008 and I think it's almost impossible to separate the Cairo peace talks from America's current wars over there and, really, from everything that those talks set in motion. Because of this, Russell made an interesting choice that I think works really well for the book. Despite being forty in 1921, Agnes speaks directly to the reader in 2008. Russell accomplishes this by allowing Agnes to narrate from beyond the grave. There are hints to this throughout the book, though it isn't officially revealed until the end. But I think the book reads better if you understand that this is what's happening.
Alongside the politics, Agnes pursues a romance with a German man staying in the same hotel as her and tours some religious sites, including Jerusalem. All of these pieces are interesting, and they comment on each other well. You can't separate the politics of the region from the intertwining Abrahamic religions. But they don't tie together quite as seamlessly as the themes in Russell's other books.
Still, this was a good book and I ended up dog-earing a number of pages so I could go back to passages. (I've gotten more comfortable doing this in the last year or so.) I learned a lot about the time that I didn't know and that I think is important to really understand a lot of what's happening right now in the Middle East. I imagine I'll be digesting this book for a while.
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