The Desert: Land of Lost Borders

Expert reviewers have noted this book's breadth of learning and command of various disciplines. In this review, I want to praise its writing, especially its transitions. Other readers, feeling themselves transported, point to the craft and cleverness of what they several times call the author's "weaving." Let me count the threads.

First of all, most of all \- the characters\! Dozens, hundreds even, from heroic strivers and disreputed wanderers to walk-ons like Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin. It's like reading Dickens or Fielding. As much as those authors' plots are driven by the people inside them, Welland's exposition takes one narrative turn after another. One thinks of Raymond Chandler: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." Len Beadell (nuclear weapons testing), Michel Vieuchange (desert floor pebbles), Mildred Cable (Silk Road missionary), John Thomas North (the Nitrate King) \- each enters with a story, and each story carries knowledge, changing and advancing the subject while the reader marvels at their lives.

The structure of the book, I think, is most clearly visible in the illustration on page 326, by NASA: global aerosols, a world-crossing current of desert dust, wrapped upon itself and within itself, laden with nutrients, transformative. Where Welland's reliance on stories resembles Shahrazad's, his obvious fondness for his subject, his delight in its richness, reminds me of Burton \- not Richard Burton, translator of the 1001 Nights, but Robert Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy \- and of Thomas Browne (Faulkner's favorite) as well. Welland writes that he hopes the book "will be as full of surprises for the reader as it was for me." There are plenty, goodness knows, but there is also a contemplative savoring of knowledge, for the pleasure of knowing it and for the pleasure of its details. Not least in language: myrmecophagy, lixiviation, hypsodonty, a Homeric catalogue of Saharan soil types and another of Arabic names for dunes \- a grand pomp of words, treasures of the mind that knows them and the world that gives them substance.

Welland shares a 17th-Century pleasure in the sheer oddity of the world. Camels that served in the Crimean War. A mining town laid out as a British flag. The world's largest themed shopping mall, named for famed traveler Ibn Battuta. Because he has so much to offer, Welland lures readers onward not only with fascinating oddities but with simple promises of more: "and then...you will see another mountain." "...he was hardly the first to journey there." "...they were far from the only indigenous inhabitants." "...other peoples took a very different historical trajectory." Such a cabinet of curiosities, such an argosy of travellers' tales, is strong reason to turn the page, "cross the range to see." (Kipling's poem, "The Explorer," which Welland discusses with characteristic fond irony.)

And there are many other rewards. Chiefly, of course, the increase in understanding of matters so important and so complex in a world increasingly conscious of global systems. As valuable, amid that complexity, is the tone of Welland's voice and the quality of awareness it expresses, both of a Conradian stature. Note how effectively Welland deploys adverbs: sadly, frustratingly, infuriatingly.

The hope to avoid or at least mitigate such emotions, as Welland says, lies in teaching the reader "to celebrate the beauty and value of our planet's arid lands and their peoples." It is one thing to express the impact of the desert on the mind within it, another to explain the planet from without, and Michael Welland has done both here. More remarkably, this book makes it possible for the person in an armchair to feel the power of the deserts as deeply as that of the mountains or the sea. Welland summons to his pages "the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country." Read this book and be changed.

— Richard Bready