Oliver Guez

Olivier Guez's "Mesopotamia" (Grasset, 2024, German translation "Die Welt in ihren Händen," Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026) reconstructs, in the form of historiographical fiction, the life of the British archaeologist and colonial official Gertrude Bell as a nexus of two intertwined narratives: the emancipation story of an extraordinary woman and the violent genesis of modern Iraq in the context of British imperialism after the First World War. The novel traces Bell's path from the scientific exploration of Mesopotamia to her pivotal role in the political reorganization of the region, weaving historical figures such as T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and Faisal I into a dense web of diplomacy, mythology, and power politics. Central to this is the poetic construction of Mesopotamia as a palimpsest in which archaic civilizations (Sumer, Babylon) and modern colonial interests overlap. This deep layering functions simultaneously as an ideological matrix of imperial legitimacy and as an ironic refraction of its hubris. The interpretation highlights that Guez's actual argument lies in the structural analogy between archaeology and colonial rule: both operate as forms of epistemic appropriation that translate knowledge into power and thus produce political orders whose fragility becomes evident in the postcolonial epilogue—from the fall of the monarchy to the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. The cyclical temporal structure and the mythical overcoding are interpreted as narrative strategies that make the British project appear as merely an episode in a longue durée of imperial repetitions; in doing so, the tendency to read the Franco-British rivalry primarily as a mirror structure is emphasized. Overall, the review shows how Guez stages Bell as a tragic figure caught between knowledge and complicity, thereby formulating a fundamental critique of the illusion of imperial power.