(This review refers to the UK edition. High Tea in Mosul will be released in the US and Canada August 1st, 2007.)

“The true story of two Englishwomen in war-torn Iraq” is the subtitle of this fascinating and often poignant narrative. It’s another excellent book that seeks to tell a personal story from inside a conflict zone, and in the process forces its readers to see the realities of war for everyday people. While covering the Iraq war in 2003, Australian journalist O’Donnell stumbled across two ordinary Englishwomen who had extraordinary stories to tell.

Pauline and Margaret, from Lancashire and Durham respectively, each moved to Iraq from their native England with their Iraqi-raised and English-educated husbands about three decades before O’Donnell met them for the first time. “Pauline and Margaret came to call this country home in similar ways,” says O’Donnell, “meeting and falling in love with Iraqi men who were studying in … England in the 1970s. In those days, Iraq was among the wealthiest and most modern of the Middle Eastern states.” From cross-cultural meetings of minds in industrial England to the women’s nervousness about acceptance by their husbands’ extended families and ancient traditions, O’Donnell tells the women’s stories with care and meticulous detail, integrating interview-style pages and a little drama with straight narrative.

It’s the details that make the book. While Pauline and Margaret both expected cultural differences and traditions, little things like the inability to find good potatoes — a staple of the English diet — never crossed their minds. O’Donnell uses her journalistic and research skills to their fullest in this book, taking her time to tell the women’s stories, including their thoughts and opinions about the choices they made and the challenges they faced. They both claimed luck as being on their side in initially adjusting to life in Iraq: the marriages of many of their Western friends failed, sometimes because the men changed when they returned to Iraq, reverting to stricter, religious-dictated traditions, sometimes because the family wouldn’t accept the newcomers, and sometimes because the women simply found the differences in habits, expectations, and little things like plumbing too hard to adapt to.

Pauline and Margaret’s candid tales of their lives under Saddam Hussein can do much to re-balance the world’s view that Iraqi life pre-US invasion was always stunted at best and horrifying at worst. Their honesty refuses to gloss over life in a dictatorship, but it also refuses to magnify its personal effect on them.

But Pauline and Margaret are only part of the story. Given equal weight is Mosul itself — a city often overlooked in the daily updates from war-torn Iraq — and the impact of war on its population. From Biblical days through the Ottoman empire, to the wealth of oil and the rule of Saddam Hussein, and finally through the appallingly short-sighted mistakes made by the US occupation, O’Donnell presents a city that is beautiful, proud, rich in ancient tradition and culture, educated, and finally almost completely destroyed by war.

For centuries Mosul was a center of religious culture in the Ottoman empire. Its growth and stability was often threatened, but never destroyed, by power struggles and invasions. During the 1980s and into the 1990s it grew into a modern city until, like most of Iraq, its basic supply chains were crippled by economic sanctions. But it wasn’t until 2003, post-invasion, that power lines were consistently cut, hospitals and schools closed, and professionals fled the city in droves, leaving a frightened and helpless population. Like much of the country, Mosul had fallen not to a foreign power, but to a vacuum that gangs and religious fanatics rushed to fill. Kidnappings, especially of professionals and their families, became common, as did execution and extortion. As of the book’s end in 2006, Pauline and Margaret had both left, and the city had little to hope for.

O’Donnell’s journalistic tone sometimes halts the flow of High Tea in Mosul’s narrative, but her expertise becomes invaluable when chronicling the descent of Mosul into anarchy and violence following her initial visit in 2003. She’s an outsider, and so can’t give Mosul life the depth and richness that a native or long-term ex-pat could, but the native couldn’t untangle the mess that followed occupation as well as this clearsighted journalist did. And she uses insiders’ knowledge to make some sense of the situation:

“‘The governments in the West, in London and Washington, thought it would be just like Desert Storm, quick and easy and all over in no time,’ Pauline said as she looked back on how the debacle developed. ‘Everyone in Iraq knew it would end up like this, with people coming from abroad to exploit the chaos, and people here fighting each other … Everyone here could see it. … Those who wanted to come back from overseas and become the new government couldn’t see it because they didn’t understand the nature of the people, they’d been gone for so long and didn’t know what Saddam had made of people here, how they hated him, hated each other, hated themselves. … It was people who didn’t know taking advice from people who didn’t know.’”

O’Donnell watches the deterioration of the city and people’s lives from a distance, but she can’t help inserting a personal note of anger and despair. In the end, she, like any native, is left asking only ‘why’: “Like most Moslawis, Saleh and Khalid [Pauline’s neighbors, vegetable sellers anonymously warned to stop buying vegetables in a nearby town or face death, no reason given] have left the dictatorship of Saddam behind, wishing it good riddance. But now they live in a society terrorized by the anonymous, for reasons they cannot be sure of. … Every second of every day entails precaution and forethought. … Today the people of Mosul are yoked by another tyranny, but this one goes by the name of freedom.”

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 5:55 am and is filed under Antonia projects, Middle East travel, travel books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.