Mirrors of the Unseen

"Given the history between the countries, it may be a bit of a travesty that I have picked an Englishman to tell us about Iran! The word “orientalist” has such unsavoury connotations these days. But I think of Elliot as an orientalist in the best sense of the word – an outsider guided by a deep curiosity about the Middle East, and devoted to understanding it better. He has also written an account about Afghanistan, An Unexpected Light . Mirrors of the Unseen finds him travelling through Iran over a period of three years. Ordinary Iranian lives set against a richly detailed history. As I mentioned earlier, an overwhelming number of books published about Iran tend to focus on the revolution and the Islamic Republic. Most of them offer scant insight into what brought the country to those moments. There is likewise little written about how people actually live under the regime. What I admire about Elliot is that he sets his timely journalistic dispatches on a broader canvas of Iranian history. He also inserts himself, minimally, into the stories he tells. There is just enough of him there to make a good companion for the reader, yet his story doesn’t overwhelm the greater story he is telling. Elliot has also studied Iran carefully, and is particularly adept at writing about its poetic, architectural and mystical traditions. The book is beautifully written. He manages to transmit his knowledge in an engaging, seemingly effortless manner. Elliot also moves his book away from Tehran, the capital, and writes to us from such places as Isfahan, Shiraz and Persepolis – sites rich with history. So for me the book offers a tremendous sense of immediacy, but also a far greater historical sweep than we ordinarily see in accounts about Iran."