Verdict: carrot
Set in contemporary Central Asia, House Of War narrates the quest by Sebastian Burke – a gifted academic haunted by a childhood tragedy in Rhodesia (pre-independence Zimbabwe) – and Claire Finch – an experienced “bang-bang” journalist who has left part of her soul behind on the killing fields of Angola, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Iraq – to find the lost-lost “Royal Diaries” of Alexander the Great in the ancient city of Ay Khanoum (also known as Ai-Khanoum).
Although they are the novel’s main protagonists, Wende cleverly intertwines their trials and tribulations with those of Alexander the Great during his various campaigns across Asia Minor 23 centuries previously, and often dramatically so: just as Plutarch recounted how the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) burned down on the day Alexander the Great was born, Burke and Finch’s tale starts just as violently with the very public and very bloody assassination of two US Embassy officials by al-Qaeda in a Tashkent restaurant. From there, the story moves to Tajikistan and (ultimately) southwards to Afghanistan, while simultaneously retracing the steps of Alexander’s campaign of 328BC that culminated in the establishment of Ay Khanoum.
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