The Doomed Oasis

Rating:
Summary: Thriller with an interesting historical background
Review: Hammond Innes (1913-98) is a name that conjures up the memory of dog-eared paperbacks around the house during my childhood, to be read on a rainy day. He's a writer very much in the tradition of John Buchan. The Doomed Oasis, dating from 1960, is about oil in the Persian Gulf and the attempt to save an oasis in the "empty quarter". The oasis is named Saraifa in the book, and it's fed with water by ancient "falajes" or aqueducts which are gradually crumbling away. The real-life location is almost certainly the Buraimi Oasis (on the border of the Trucial States, Trucial Oman and Saudi Arabia), which was the subject of a border dispute during this period, as described in the book. Innes always made a point of traveling to the locations about which he wrote, and went to the Persian Gulf in 1954 with one of the earliest oil exploration parties. The book is focused around the fractious relationship between Colonel Charles Whitaker (said to have been based on Lawrence of Arabia), and his son David. It's not a perfect book, but it's an accessible introduction to the history and geography of that region during the 1950s.