Life, under ordinary circumstances, is challenging enough as it is. Its roadblocks and digressions, pitfalls and pratfalls, at best, require years to be disentangled and, at worst, allow us never to recover from their terrible grip. But what of those among us who are ahead of their time? What of those who devote themselves to ideas and pursuits that seem perfectly sensible to them but to the rest of us seem senseless? If life, to us, is a series of obstacles, then, for them, it must be a mountain up which ones full span on this earth must be spent in the climbing. The summit might someday be reached, but at what cost, to them and to those who love to question, to challenge, to take a different road? In examining the life of one of Victorian England's most adventurous heroines, Ms. Wallach asks this very question. The answer is decidedly bleak.
The eldest daughter of a British steel magnate, Gertrude Bell was born in 1869, at the height of stodgy, Victorian England. Possessing a keen mind and a determined disposition, she rejected the narrow life of a stayed and dignified British lady to excel at Oxford University before ambitiously embarking upon a series of gruelling travels through the Middle East. Supported by her family's wealth, she was free to indulge her passion for adventure, be it climbing the Swiss alps or traipsing through Arabian deserts, without ever having to settle down, much less marry.
Until the First World War, she was a creature of more social than political consequence. A position in the civil service denied to her because of her gender, she explored in obscurity until the Ottoman Empire signed on with imperial Germany and entered the Great War by attempting to conquer Arabia. Starved for intelligence on the area, the British government turned desperately to their citizens in the region, hoping that they might sufficiently understand this tangle of tribesmen and blood feuds in order to fashion from them a workable alliance. One of their primary sources of information, Gertrude Bell was effectively admitted into the British civil service, beginning a career that would not only last a decade, but make her a prime mover in the creation of both Iraq and Jordan, modern nations drawn out of the sands of Arabia. In this, she became a shaper of the policies of the world's most powerful empire, a startling achievement given the patriarchal nature of British society at the time.
Though somewhat bloated at over 500 pages, The Desert Queen is a fascinating glimpse of a most complex life. Gertrude Bell was, at once, both a maverick and a conservative. For even while she was busting the chains of propriety that threatened to enslave her own existence, she was staunchly patriotic. An imperialist and a royalist, she was a traditionalist who believed so deeply in the fundamental myths of the empire that birthed her that she was willing to side with them against her own gender, rejecting the suffragette movement in favor of the benefits and privileges of her class. In this, she is a messy creature, defying easy categorization. Rather than shunning this reality for a simpler narrative, Ms. Wallach embraces the contradictions of Ms. Bell's life and, in doing so, does her the justice this largely forgotten heroine deserves.
Though this tome is, in the main, a biography of the life of Gertrude Bell, it is also, necessarily, a history of the creation of the modern Middle East. Ms. Wallach ably walks the reader through the process by which the British drew up these nations on a map, providing the work its central tragedy. For in this, we watch, with nearly a hundred years of hindsight, the arrogance that lead these imperialists to believe they could re-shape an entire region of the world without grave consequences. They, and the world, would eventually pay dearly for this presumption, as it helped to fuel tribal clashes that would eventually result in not only distrust towards the West, but revolution, war and terrorism across the greater Levant. And this is perhaps why Bell is hardly remembered. For this act of creation was her life's primary political achievement, an act which is now looked upon with, at best, bemusement and, at worst, scorn.
In the end, Gertrude Bell was a mirror for the Iraq she loved. She possessed the best of intentions, but these were overtaken by narrow mindedness and stubbornness, qualities which prevented her, and her British kin, from measuring the cost of their actions. Thanks to Ms. Wallach's fine work, we feel all of this acutely, mourning the opportunity lost as much as the life uncelebrated. (4/5 Stars)
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