Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell ***

Historical novels range from fiction with a few historical characters/events to history with a few fictional characters/events. My novel (Kitane, Bull Jumper) is necessarily of the former type as little is known about the Minoans and the Bronze Age. Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell is of the latter type. Fictional protagonist Agnes Shanklin observes the 1921 Cairo Conference socializing with Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Gertrude Bell. I expect Russell’s goal was (in her words) “scholarship…so easy and exact, so deep, but so unobtrusive.”

Protagonist Agnes Shanklin’s backstory includes World War I and her family dying during the Spanish flu epidemic leaving her with the independence to travel to Cairo in 1921. Agnes had been the responsible daughter. Her brother left home to join the army. Her sister to marry and be a missionary in Lebanon. She had stayed to take care of her mother. Now she has purchased a flapper wardrobe and is off to an adventure. Often the history overshadows the adventure.

The book is full of prescient predictions of how actions of the Cairo Conference sow the seed of conflict a century later, like this comment in a political discussion, “you cannot simply draw a line around Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra and declare everything inside a nation!” The novel intertwines the action where political discussions predominate and Agnes’s interior monologue about her romantic adventure. The two are barely related and often the politics seem to dominate.

If you are interested in the history of the Middle East and the events that have brought us to the current situation, this is an enjoyable way to learn the history.