Empty Quarter Book

This is some of the best travel writing that I have ever read. This book is not only informative but also amusing and exciting.

In 1928, the young author Agatha Christie was divorced by her first husband Archie Christie. Soon after this, she embarked on a trip to the Middle East, travelling mainly by train. Travelling via the Balkans and Turkey, she reached what is now Syria, and then went on to what is now Iraq. There, she met up with archaeologists working on the sites of ancient cities such as Nimrud and Ur. It was whilst visiting these sites that she met and fell in love with an archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was to become her second husband.

In this book, Andrew Eames sets out by the 8.55 train from Sunningdale in South-East England, where Agatha used to live with her first husband, in order to follow Agatha's train journey to Iraq. As he describes his fascinating journey, he gradually reveals what he has learnt of the great crime writer's life and how it meshed with the places through which he travelled. Along the way, he meets a range of fascinating people and visits many interesting places, some of which have connections with Agatha Christie. He describes all of these experiences sympathetically and vividly. Nowhere in his beautiful book is he condescending or humorous at the expense of his subjects, as some travel writers are prone to be.

I was particularly interested in his observations and views of the republics that were the legacy of the former Yugoslavia. They chimed well with what I have said in my book "SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ -Once upon a time in Yugoslavia", which I published just before discovering the "8.55 to Baghdad".

Eames's description of Iraq, which he visited near the end of his trip and during the last years of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, also interested me. The country, isolated from the outside world by international sanctions and under the threat of imminent attack by NATO, appeared to be totally bleak in many respects. Yet, it differed in one respect from the Albania that I visited in 1984 and described in my book "ALBANIA ON MY MIND" , during the period between the 1950s and 1991 when it had isolated itself from the outside world. Eames, who had to visit Iraq under the same restrictive conditions as I experienced in Albania in 1984, was able to speak, admittedly not without difficulty, to a number of 'ordinary' Iraqis. When I visited Albania, this was made completely impossible; ordinary Albanian citizens were obviously and determinedly kept away from us foreigners by an army of plain-clothed security agents.

Eame's journey that begins in Sunningdale ends in Ur, close to the Kuwaiti border with Iraq. It was on the site of that ancient cradle of civilisation that Max and his future wife Agatha first met. By that stage, she was already keen on archaeology, an aspect of life that Eames discusses in some detail. In addition to assisting with digs, she also wrote her books under the desert sun. A few of them apart from "Murder on the Orient Express" derive obvious inspiration from her frequent visits to the Middle East.

I strongly recommend this extraordinarily gripping, highly evocative travel book to any one with even the slightest interest in history or travel or archaelogy or even Agatha Christie.