The Source by James A. Michener
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
These sprawling, Michener historical novels are really not novels. They’re a whole different form of literature. It’s like sixteen half-finished novellas strung together. None of the hundred plot lines finish in a way that gives any kind of satisfaction or sense of aesthetic wholeness.
Still, the set design and costumes and customs are pretty convincing. Michener is quite the scholar, and he draws the cultures realistically, at least at the surface level. There are only a couple of time periods he touches where I’ve read what they wrote about themselves, but for those periods, I can confirm that his characters do seem to believe the things about their lives and situations that people at that time would have. I appreciate that; too many historical fiction characters think like moderns.
I think I would have rather read a non-fiction book discussing the same times and places. I guess the idea is that the dramatization will give the book enough interest to keep you reading, in a way a non-fiction book wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to work for me.
It’s pretty cool to get an outline of the history of the people of that part of the Middle East. So many empires have conquered it, over and over and over, each overthrowing the last. It lends weight to the discussion at the end of the book of the Palestinian-Israeli problem. Which it is not the purpose of this book review to discuss, except to note that a non-fiction book would have had the same virtue, except more.