PAST IMPERFECT
The esteemed British novelist Barry Unsworth has been writing historical fiction for more than forty years and needs no lessons on its pleasures or its pitfalls. He is master of a comfortable form, having covered ground from the fourteenth century to the African slave trade to the frayed end of the Ottoman Empire and World War I—a terrain he returns to now, in Land of Marvels. Here he constructs his story around a somewhat defeated British archaeologist named Somerville, working in what is now, one gathers, western Iraq, unearthing traces of an Assyrian royal palace. Somerville is electrified