“Your good and my good, perhaps they are different, and either forced good or forced evil will make a people cry with pain. Does the ore admire the flame which transforms it?”

I finished this book and completely forgot about reviewing it! Which doesn't happen to me often. Gosh, this was a long one. And I mean, I've read way longer books than this, but this actually FELT really long. I was musing about it, about why this particularly felt so long and a little painful in parts, when I was sure that I would enjoy it. I've read and enjoyed non-fiction books about war before, and I don't mind dry-ish historical fiction. I was prepared for all the racism, intentional and unintentional both. But I think ultimately what made this kind of a slog for me was all the technical details and minutiae and the intricacies about war itself. I just wasn't very interested! T.E. Lawrence's writing is genuinely flat out beautiful, and I loved the bits where he talked about interpersonal relationships, cultural things he learned, some things about travel, his feelings about his own duplicity/complicity, and just any time we got insight into the man himself. He isn't as mired in the conservatism of the era, and some of his views were a pleasant surprise. He also had other views that were just racism dressed up as kindness/concern, but that was expected. It was also really interesting how he talked about his body, how he viewed it, how he was often repulsed by touch.

But yeah, the war/revolt itself was a little hard to get through. Like, it was interesting reading about how it came about, the goals of the Arabs and the different tribes, but having Lawrence take us through it step by step was not as engrossing as I'd have hoped. It was... a little boring! There were a few descriptions of battle/skirmishes that were interesting, but I can't really remember them/differentiate from all the others. It was also insightful to get a look at how warfare was carried out in the desert, but it was mostly such a slog. Sooooooo much travel time, sooooooooo many characters that I couldn't keep straight, soooooooooooooo much minutiae about things that I instantly forgot. We got some personal connection, but I needed ten times as much, because this really didn't capture my attention. 

Listened to the audiobook as read by Roy McMillan, which was pretty good. Because of my  wandering attention, I kept having to rewind and relisten to different sections, but that was the fault of the book, rather than the narrator. This is a historic figure I've always wanted to read about, and there was enough good in this book that I'm glad to have had the experience. I just wanted a bit more from it.

Content warnings:

Spoiler

war, death, descriptions of illness and grievous injury, beatings, torture, sexual assault