Review: Archie Henderson

The Cauldron – The making of the modern Middle East, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Jonathan Ball)

Sebag Montefiore (the preferred of his two first names) knows how to write a book.

And also how to sell one: he has been on countless podcasts, a guest on talk shows and in interviews at literary festivals.

All are wonderfully informative and hugely entertaining (you can find them on YouTube). The best is on Ask Haviv Anything, a history and current-affairs podcast hosted by Haviv Rettig Gur, an analyst at The Times of Israel, because Gur asks intelligent questions. The most entertaining, despite its tedious interlocutor who doesn’t give Montefiore a chance to punt his book, is from the Montreal Literary Festival.

That’s also because he’s on stage with Salman Rushie, who steals the show, especially with a marvellous line about President Donald Trump: “It’s difficult to respect a man who has bad grammar.”

Trump is topical in the Middle East and is just the latest of those with a messianic complex to appear on the stage of a show that has been running for millennia. The period of Montefiore’s history – readers might be relieved to know – is not that long; he covers the Middle East from 1900 to the present day. In that time, the area of the history has also expanded widely – from Turkey and Iran in the east to Morocco in the west.

So he covers a wide swathe inhabited by a huge cast. It’s one of Montefiore’s many strengths that he can keep a grip on events and the characters.

His index is invaluable for readers who won’t be able to easily distinguish between nine Muhammads, eight Mohammeds (not counting the Prophet), 11 Hussain/Husseins, six al-Asaads (all of them evil) and a single Selim the Grim, who is onstage only briefly, has no speaking part but has an intriguing title. There is also the “Fat Fucker”, which was the CIA code name for Egypt’s King Farouk. The CIA might not have been original; a review in the Literary Review also mentions it, noting that even President Franklin Roosevelt, more diplomatic than Winston Churchill, referred to Farouk by that code name.

With his wealth of knowledge, the author is able to contain his narrative to just over 400 pages, not counting acknowledgements (which establish his sources), an explanation on names (Qaddafi rather than Gaddafi or Kaddafi), an introduction and a prologue, the essential index, a bibliography and marvellous maps to show how the Middle East (Montefiore is not even sure if that description is still relevant) changed shape and rulers and borders.

And there is the writing itself. Amid all the bloodletting and bloodcurdling, it is joyous.

Here he is on Israel (currently the world’s villain of the piece and its evil enemy): “Israel is even more contradictory, both swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy. However superb its military, its way of war has become bombastic and bloody, yet – overdependent on its peerless, sophisticated air force and secret agency Mossad – inconclusive. Whoever leads it, Israel has no choice but to defend itself against Iran, its belligerent satraps and their destructive mission.”

So much for the current centrepiece. There are some sideshows in this drama that will have no effect on the outcome. Among these are the hypocrisies, such as South Africa’s parade of piety at the International Court of Justice. While millions die in a genuine genocide, South Africa allows Sudan’s Omar al Bashir, one of the perpetrators, to escape back to Khartoum where he lives in comfortable retirement.

South Africa and the African Union have turned a blind eye to Sudan, where millions have died in what Montefiore says is the greatest human tragedy of the century. In Darfur alone, about 300,000 people have died. There has been little more than a peep from Africa’s rulers, President Cyril Rampahosa included, never mind Ronald Lamola’s foreign affairs department, which masquerades under the anodyne title “department of international relations and co-operation”, with its cute acronym, Dirco.

Such are among the many contradictions of a history that Montefiore sets out in a brilliant book that will sell well, if only because it makes sense of the world’s current tragedy and whose accessibility helps us understand its many complexities and labyrinths.