Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, 448 pages.

Carol Drinkwater is passionate about the olive tree—she has an olive grove in Provence—and this book is about her search for its history around the Mediterranean through Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Malta, Tunisia, Libya, Greece, Crete, and Israel.

Drinkwater had intended to make the trip in September 2001, but couldn’t continue because of the 9/11 attacks and the conflict that followed. She finally made it in 2005, before the Arab Spring but after the Iraq invasion.

She starts in Lebanon, where she finds a plantation of 6,000-year-old trees. In Syria, she is assigned a driver and a guide who dictates where she can stop and what she can see. In Libya, she falls in (quite reluctantly) with Western men working on oil rigs. One of them lends her a driver and a car—the only way she can get around while avoiding the strictly monitored tourist tours. Traveling into the country, she notices the poverty—the immense wealth earned from oil certainly isn’t helping the people. She wonders whether Libyans will one day rise up against the corruption of Ghaddafi and his coterie. Prescient, indeed.

She makes friends along the way, often (but not always!) with people who are also passionate about the olive tree: she meets Maryam, a Druze from Lebanon, on a plane and they become close friends; Murat, her young driver in Turkey, who is a little bemused by her passion for all things olive; and Nat and Julia in Malta, who are trying to revive olive plantations on the islands. In Israel, she joins the Tu-Bishvat tree-planting ceremony with Israelis in Palestine. 

Everywhere she talks to local people, not only about olives but about their lives. She describes historical sites the way they must have been—sights, smells and sounds, providing a simultaneous glimpse of the modern and the ancient. I loved this because it emphasizes how things have changed, but how much remains the same—a sense of continuity we often miss in this “now” age.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.