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I felt I ought to like this book more than I did. The setting, the subject matter, the plot should all be fascinating. The Middle East! Archaeology! Skullduggery! Spy stories! And yet it left me a bit cold.

The author has chosen as his theatre the fertile ground of Mesopotamia, where empires have risen and fallen, and the land is so rich with the black gold of the future that it seeps with lakes of bitumen and oil pushes up from under, creating new landscapes. The time is the eve of the First World War.

Into this unstable landscape Unsworth drops a carefully chosen group of characters. John Somerville is an archaeologist excavating a site that he hopes may be Assyrian, but a German company is building a railway that looks as though it will head straight through the centre of the site. Somerville asks his British embassy contacts to help negotiate a diversion to the route, and as a reward is saddled with the presence of Elliott, an American who under cover of the dig is investigating the region's petroleum reserves. The dig is visited by a motley collection of military men, reporters and missionaries, some or all of whom may be spies. The atmosphere seethes with international intrigue.

Land of Marvels is all about the narratives with which we construct our lives. The small narratives of work and desire, the bigger ones of science and empire. We are presented with the ironies of a palimpsest of empires, the fallen Assyrian Empire, the crumbling Ottoman, and the apparently triumphant British Empire. And Somerville's enterprise, to reconstruct the narrative of a dead empire, is presented as futile.

Some of the narratives are more successful than others but it is clear that all the characters are blinkered in some ways, either by their lack of understanding of the historical context in which they are situated or their lack of scientific understanding.

In many ways the book is a beautifully crafted artefact, but because the author keeps taking us out of the story to point out that it's a text, in the end it left me feeling quite dissatisfied. I just kept feeling that John le Carre would have done all the literary stuff unobtrusively and given us a cracking good spy story as well. Which is really my problem with modern literary fiction. Why can't a good novel tell a good story as well? Why do we have to be forcibly distanced from the characters? Unsworth does take the time at the end to tell us how the minor characters end up, but, to be honest, by the end I didn’t really care.