From My Review Desk
Review of Lovely War by Julie Berry
Greek mythology combined with WWII. Here’s a review I wrote for the May 2019 Historical Novels Review. I did a giveaway of this book through my newsletter and discovered this wild premise is popular.
In Lovely War’s opening, Hephaestus traps Aphrodite and Ares in a golden net and puts them on trial for infidelity, a Homeric story, now set in WWII. Aphrodite offers as defense two pairs of lovers in WWI, Hazel and James, Aubrey and Collette. Aphrodite demonstrates through mortal stories how essential vicissitudes are to love, and hence, how she, perfect, cannot be loved. The deathless gods are shallow because death’s deadline gives life meaning.
At first, these divine narrators, with voices enjoyably clever but tinged in sarcasm, create problematic distance, except that soon, human feelings permeate the story with page-turning engagement. There’s a counterpoint between godly voice (“Hephaestus would almost worry for the Fates, but they’re tough old cookies.”) and mortal, visceral depth.
Love in time of war could fall into clichés. Berry’s doesn’t. She’s masterful with dialogue of people falling in love—revealing flashes that show how well-suited they are. Hazel, a classical pianist, reveals her feelings for James, “You’re a brand-new piece of sheet music…for a song which, once played, I’d swear I’d always known.” He responds, “A piece of sheet music, am I? …Makes me rather flat, doesn’t it?” She retorts, “I prefer gentlemen who are sharp.” They “get” each other, James’s bad jokes, her affinity for music. Repeatedly, Berry reveals genuine connection.
Berry is skillful portraying war, from German-destroyed villages to trenches, as well as racial hatred within the Allied side (Aubrey’s Black). Suffering is essential to the novel’s emotional resonance. Love must endure despite the abyss of war, perhaps because of it. Berry’s historical details are compellingly accurate. Grab tissues. Happiness is tempered with nuanced reality, but the warm feelings are richer for that. Even the gods get a final twist.
Lovely War on Amazon (affiliate link)
Archaeology I Enjoyed
The Collapse of Tel Kabri
Inhabitants abandoned the Bronze Age palace at Tel Kabri around 1700 BCE. The question has been why. There are no signs of weapons or burning to indicate violence, no mass graves to indicate plague, and no signs of drought to make the site uninhabitable.
Now Eric Cline and the other Tel Kabri archaeologists have taken a new comprehensive approach to the question and concluded the cause was an earthquake. In the past, the conclusion of earthquake has often been dismissed as a sort of easy excuse, but the archaeologists applied a recently developed systematic way of evaluating the question. The extended article is intriguing for its methods and evidence, and I recommend it as worth a read, but I’ll also give you their short version below.
The question of why people leave a particular place is always compelling. This approach to locking down a genuine answer is immensely appealing to that inner “need to know” that such ancient sites bring out in many of us. Eric Cline has thought a great deal about cultures in demise. I recommend his book 1177 BC The Year Civilization Collapsed.
From their summary abstract: “The current study uses micro-geoarchaeological methods to show that the demise of the palace was rapid, with walls and ceilings collapsing at once prior to abandonment. Macroscopic data (stratigraphic and structural) from five excavation seasons were reexamined, showing that at least nine Potential Earthquake Archaeological Effects (PEAEs) are found and associated with the last occupation phase of the site’s palace. All lines of evidence point to the possibility that an earthquake damaged the palace, possibly to a point where it was no longer economically viable to repair.
This conclusion is compounded by the discovery of a 1–3 m wide trench that cuts through the palace for 30 m, which may be the result of ground shaking or liquefaction caused by an earthquake. This study shows the importance of combining macro- and micro-archaeological methods for the identification of ancient earthquakes, together with the need to evaluate alternative scenarios of climatic, environmental, and economic collapse, as well as human-induced destruction before a seismic event scenario can be proposed.”
Max von Oppenheim’s Tell Halaf
An article focused on international cooperation and one man’s personal dream of exploring the ancient Near East. I enjoyed this lively history of Max von Oppenheim and his excavations at Tell Halaf in modern Syria. The post-excavation history of his finds is as fascinating as the story of his activities. Grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and have a read. Then tell me what you think of this remarkable tale.
Click here for Ancient Near East Today “Max von Oppenheim and His Tell Halaf”