Montefiore, Simon. The Cauldron. Knopf, New York, 2026. NF; 11/26.
Like many readers from Europe and North America I’ve found past and present events and leading personalities in the Middle East bewildering. I know that some understanding would help me put current events and recent history of the rest of the world in perspective and I approached this book based on recommendations in the media. But I finished it with mixed feelings. The author is a 60-ish Jewish historian who holds a Cambridge PhD in history, has an impressive list of published academic works and has also written some fiction. I read his novel One Night in Winter but haven’t reviewed it.
Montefiore ambitiously sets out to tackle an important professional challenge, but like every writer he’s also looking to sell books. To do this he seems to me to plan to appeal to a wide range of readers, from ordinary folk like me up to academic experts. But I found instead that as he veers from piles of detail of characters and events to demotic chapter titles (“Two Kings and the Carve-Up of Palestine”) and juicy descriptions of violence (“The attackers killed 1139 people, mostly civilians (including 38 children). There were many cases of rape as well as mutilation and the parading of dead bodies through ecstatic crowds”) I wasn’t sure he would hold the interest all the way across that range of readers. Experts would probably know most of what he’s talking about anyway but might be put off by jumps from one set of events to another, sometimes in a single paragraph. Tiring of trying to keep track of hundreds of Middle East names and battles it didn’t feel to me like even serious thrill-seekers would be good with Montefiore’s condescendingly lurid attempts to capture their interest.
We do get a full and detailed story of 125 years of Middle East history. There’s some detail of the fading Ottoman Empire, we hear after World War I of the Arab revolts against world powers Britain and France (involving Lawrence of Arabia), and a carving up of the territory between the two powers. There is a declaration by Britain of the first “national home for Jewish people” and the League of Nations “mandates” to oversee new Middle Eastern countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia comes into being, and with the discovery of oil first-world nations’ interests intensify. The mandates are gradually withdrawn after World War II and Israel is established. Egypt’s Nasser wields power and influence, including over the Suez Canal but meets defeat at the hands of Israel. Much later, the Cold War powers enter the scene and the revolution in Iran, the Gulf War and U.S. invasion of iraq, Arab Spring, ISIS, and then U.S. policies varying from those of Obama and Biden to Donald Trump’s are described (this outline of mine is not intended to be exhaustive, far from it, in respect of how much detail Montefiore provides).
I found that detail and a presumption of familiarity with many names and events distracting. Middle East poetic epigrams at the start of chapters didn’t seem to help, looking instead like superficial pseudohumanistic decoration. Somehow I also expected an expert of Montefiore’s stature to give us more personal interpretation than he did. Beyond often bewildering narrative description of historic events, there were comments on behavior, personality, and at times stupidity and bad luck of leaders that for me didn’t inspire thoughtfulness or a sense of complexity, futility, humanity, or internecine ideologic struggle. If such things were present, they flew over my head.
I have no doubt that my failure to pay attention, ignorance of geography and history, and impatience contributed to this overall impression of strange incoherence, but as a reviewer I have to say that Dr. Montefiore didn’t for me capture much of the terribly complex and deeply human realities of this important part of the world. I still wonder what really has gone and is still going on there.
He does finish with a statistician’s summary of breathtaking death counts, and then an endorsement of academic learning which I found a bit vapid considering how complex and filled with conflict his topic is:
If one adds together all the dead of all the wars that raged in the Middle East between 1900 and now (125 years), the approximate toll is comparable to that of either Europe’s Western (5.5 million) or Eastern Fronts (5– 6 million) during the First World War, or the 1996–2003 Great Congo War (5.4 million), but it does not come close to the Asian theatre (20 million) or Eastern Front (30 million) in the Second World War.
Ignorance is the father of righteous certainty, hatred and slaughter; knowledge is the mother of respect for others, alliance, sharing and tolerance.
Better-informed and more tolerant readers might find this book useful. It didn’t help me much.
7.5/6.8
