New Titles by Emily St. John Mandel, Rawi Hage, and Other Must-Have Books of 2022

Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century

by Christina Riggs (Public Affairs, February 1)

On November 26, 1922, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, British archaeologist Howard Carter opened a small opening in a door sealed for more than three millennia and looked inside by candlelight. “Can you see anything?” asked his patron, George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon. “Yes, wonderful things.” Or so says the family account of the most emblematic moment in the history of archeology, the discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun a century ago.

As Riggs, a former Egyptologist and museum curator who is as interested in the history of her ancient profession as she is in ancient civilization, points out, the story of King Tut’s discovery and its lasting aftermath is as encrusted with myth as Ancient Egypt. itself. He was no more than 19 years old when he died of unknown causes, despite numerous claims on the internet to the contrary, Tutankhamun was a minor ruler in the 14th century BC. C. and a prominent figure in the twentieth century. He, Carter and Carnarvon together form a narrative, Riggs writes, that established “various things we take for granted,” from mummy movies and mummy curses to UNESCO’s World Heritage program and blockbuster exhibits. And famous archaeologists, especially of the fictional variety: not Tut, not Indiana Jones.

There is no loss to Riggs. “The archaeological heroes of movie and television documentary plots are descended from excavators whose work was an integral part of western colonialism and empire building in the 19th and early 20th centuries, systems that were based on racism from beginning to end. “, writes.

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Museums around the world – most spectacularly GEM, the huge and expensive Grand Egyptian Museum due to be completed quickly by next November – will mark Tut’s centennial with an emphasis on the events of 1922 and the most extraordinary of the 5,600 objects found in its grave. But Riggs takes a very different approach in his engrossing and insightful book. Between Carter’s gaze by candlelight and the transfer of a colossal 14-meter-tall statue of Pharaoh Ramses the Great to GEM exactly seven years after the Arab Spring protests began, to divert attention from the By means of that anniversary, the author suggests, geopolitics (and capitalism) continually ruled Egyptology. They were crucial, he writes, in making Tut more famous than Ramses, although it was Carnarvon’s death in April 1923 in a Cairo hotel room from an infected mosquito bite that secured the Curse of the Mummy in the pop culture.

After a detailed dive into the Egyptian contribution to Carter’s British triumph, and Tut’s first eruption in Western consciousness in the Jazz Age, Riggs explores the pharaoh’s second career as a cultural, that is, political, ambassador in the decade 1960. Pharaoh was indispensable to the UN’s cultural arm, UNESCO, in its efforts to prevent Nubian temples from drowning under the stagnant waters of the Aswan High Dam.

Objects from his grave toured the US and Canada to draw attention to the crisis, and then across Japan to raise the funds needed to move the temples to higher ground. Over the next decade, US public funding used Tut as a way to portray Egypt, a key player in the oil-rich Middle East, as “a friendly and worthy ally,” Riggs notes. However, in the late 1970s, when Tutankhamun’s treasures He ended his North American tour with a two-month stay in Toronto – a glamorous exhibition that is still remembered in the city – the proceeds went to the exhibiting institutions and to support archeology in Egypt, by the Egyptians.

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There will be more tours in the wake of the centennial, but Riggs is more interested, in terms of decolonizing Egyptology, in the possibilities posed by better access to exhibits for Egyptian children through the GEM. After all, it was the North American tour of the 1970s that drew Tut to the captivated attention of a 10-year-old schoolgirl in Ohio in 1983, and set Riggs on the professional path that led him to Treasured.

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel (Public Affairs, February 15)

This powerful book on what the authors call an unstoppable “new industrial evolution” is as ingrained in human yearning as it is in scientific advancement, colored by American Webb’s miscarriages and Canadian Hessel’s own fertility problems. Technology is now on the cusp of wholesale genetic rewriting, and the possibilities for reducing individual suffering are spectacular. The pitfalls, especially in a looming – and perhaps inevitable – divide between the genetically enhanced and other humans, are severe. The irrefutable argument of the authors is that the genie is out of the bottle and humanity must be prepared for what lies ahead.

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A hero of our time

by Naben Ruthnum (McClelland & Stewart, January 11)

A protagonist whose main redeeming feature is to become inclined toward sharply and cruelly expressed observation of himself makes for a novel with a built-in hill to climb. Ruthnum manages it spectacularly. Osman Shah’s other gift, Machiavellian cunning, turns his fight with the heartless Olivia Robertson into a wildly funny satire on contemporary diversity politics.

The Far Land: 200 Years of Murders, Manias, and Riots in the South Pacific

by Brandon Presser (Public Affairs, March 8)

In 1790, nine British mutineers and their fellow Tahitians arrived on uninhabited Pitcairn Island, where 48 of their descendants still live. The mutiny itself, aboard the Royal Navy’s Bounty, is famous, but it’s the aftermath, a microcosm of violent colonial racial and sexual exploitation that killed most of the mutineers in three years, and its lasting effects that do. make Presser’s book so fascinating.

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Stray dogs: stories

by Rawi Hage (Knopf Canada, March 1)

It’s the stray humans, like the American-educated Jordanian from the main story in Tokyo, who actually abound in this magnificent collection. In a genre perfectly adapted to Hage’s elliptical and hypnotic style, the acclaimed Montreal novelist moves his sets around a world now bent on closing borders and minds, where his characters, strangers in strange lands, experience growing rejection of their hosts.

Sea of ​​tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel (HarperCollins, April 19)

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There are hallmarks, from the tiny to the expansive, that immediately identify an Emily St. John Mandel novel. There will be recurring characters (Vincent from 2020’s The Glass Hotel makes an appearance), someone will carry a name that resonates with the author’s (this is English money sender Edwin St. John St. Andrew), and Vancouver Island (where St John Mandel was born and raised) will play a role. There will also be a large number of characters in a multi-voice story, with minimal gradation between major and minor figures.

Most will wander a lot, physically, emotionally, and temporarily, wondering how they got here from there. And anywhere, anytime: St. John Mandel’s has expanded steadily since 2014’s Station Once, set in the Great Lakes region; both the characters and the author will refuse to accept what appears to be the undeniable randomness of life. Or, to be more exact, that randomness matters.

St. John Mandel’s latest novel offers all of that, on a hugely fast-paced level. The scenes move between Earth and its lunar colonies, one located within the Moon’s Sea of ​​Tranquility. There are both literal and memory time travels, spanning years from 1912 to the early 25th century, during which a Time Institute agent meets a long-deceased novelist whose most popular work provided the name he gave him. the agent’s mother.

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Unless, of course, a chance encounter with a stranger gave the writer the name in the first place. (Is there, Sea of ​​Tranquility asks in passing, ever a first place in human affairs?) Society here is not a post-plague dystopia on the way to Station Once, but rather St. John Mandel, who wrote the last novel years before COVID. -19, has long focused on the inevitability of pandemics, lockdowns, and psychological damage. Several pestilences, including Ebola X and SARS 12, affect the five centuries of Tranquility.

But the author’s exploration of the randomness of life goes far beyond the waves of mass death predictable all the time. As the characters begin to intersect in space and time, the possibility that the simulation hypothesis (the idea that reality is simply an unimaginably sophisticated computer simulation) may prove to be true begins to depress some characters. , while others construct, or feign, a defensive indifference. The fundamental question in this luminous novel is whether a life lived in a simulation is still a meaningful life.

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This article appears in print in the January 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the title “Reading Later”. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.