March Not Fiction Book Discussions

As its title indicates, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson tells the origin story of today's Middle East. As Melik Kaylan points out in a review in The Daily Beast, Anderson uses the storytelling genre of history writing, with colorful protagonists, narrative momentum, shocking facts, and an us-and-them divide between the West and the East. He uses these storytelling devices to good effect to show us how a handful of adventurers and bureaucrats were instrumental in ending the Ottoman Empire and dividing up the spoils into the Middle East that is the site and source of so much conflict today.


Our enigmatic hero is T. E. Lawrence, who led the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 during World War I. Anderson characterizes Lawrence as almost a mythological trickster:

A supremely private and hidden man, he seemed intent on baffling all those who would try to know him. A natural leader of men, or a charlatan? A man without fear, or both a moral and physical coward? Long before any of his biographers, it was Lawrence who first attached these contradictory characteristics--and many others--to himself. Joined to this was a mischievous streak, a storyteller's delight in twitting those who believed in and insisted on 'facts.' . . . Earlier than most, Lawrence seemed to embrace the modern concept that history was malleable, that truth was what people were willing to believe.

Anderson asks readers to consider,

How did [Lawrence] do it? How did a painfully shy Oxford archaeologist without a single day of military training become the battlefield commander of a foreign revolutionary army, the political master strategist who foretold so many of the Middle Eastern calamities to come?

Also in the cast of characters are three other men with double lives and complicated motives: Curt Prufer, a German spy in Arab disguise who hoped to incite jihad against Britain; William Yale, an employee of American Standard Oil searching for new oil supplies while pretending to be on a Grand Tour of the Holy Lands; and Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish agronomist, Zionist, and head of a Jewish spy ring hoping to secure Palestine for a new Jewish homeland. Lawrence himself called the Middle East during World War I "a sideshow of a sideshow." How did these four men and their personal agendas, in a secondary arena of the war, set the stage for the modern Middle East, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for the Arab Spring, and for the terrible bully powers of ISIS, that is in many ways the central world conflict of our times? While Anderson focuses primarily on the events in the early 1900s, he does help readers understand the causes and conditions that led to the modern Middle East. As Kaylan notes in his review in The Daily Beast,

[Anderson] doesn't set out systematically to explicate the post-Ottoman origination of the region's enduring woes, a primary attraction for any potential reader. And yet we learn all we need to know and more without any of it being telegraphed as the narrative bowls along. Anderson carries his erudition lightly, but there's enough scholarship there to make an academic proud. As with the best kind of yarns, you don't realize what you've learned until the narrator goes silent.

Part of the interest of any good story is wondering what might have happened if things had gone otherwise. Anderson says,

Part of the enduring fascination with T. E. Lawrence's story is the series of painful 'what if?' questions it raises, a pondering over what the world lost when he lost.

What do you think of Anderson's tale? After reading it, do you understand Lawrence and his motivations? Do you think he is a hero? And what about the Middle East? Do you have a better grasp of the daily news coming from the modern Middle East? Does Anderson provide a balanced portrayal of all the political and cultural groups involved, or does he sacrifice objectivity for the sake of a good story? Was it a good read?


We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, March 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, March 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.