Wages of Empire
Cooper focuses on the beginning of World War I, 1914, especially the developing conflict in the Middle East. The central fictional character is young, precocious Evan Sinclair, son of an Englishman, raised in Utah, who wants no part of his father’s plans for his college education. Evan runs away from home to seek adventure in the explosive war.
The novel follows several important real-life people as they experience the conflict: T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Faisal bin Hussein, Chaim Weizmann, Anna Spafford, and Winston Churchill. Its most riveting personality, however, is Kaiser Wilhelm, who is obsessed with creating a German state in the Middle East, asserting his authority as the Holy Roman Emperor and Germans as the superior race.
While the historical personalities and intrigues in the novel are fascinating, this book is not successful as a work of fiction. Chapters are brief and skip from one geographical location to another, one personality to another. The novel is overly crowded with talking heads: None of the characters is developed emotionally or psychologically to engender sufficient interest or compassion in their fates. Dialogue is superficial, unconvincing.
Cooper plans a sequel, Crossroads of Empire. One hopes that he will concentrate on a less expansive history to explore more complex nuances of a few key characters in this second work.
