I’ve recently been asked: where did my novel Marshlands come from?

In 2008, when I first began to think seriously about writing a novel about the excesses of modern empire, we were 5 years into the military occupation of Iraq, with no real end in sight. We were also 5 years into the battle to suppress the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. A troop “surge” early in the year had boosted the American presence by 80%.

Some of us were already fiercely opposed to these foreign adventures, which had been paid for with so much American treasure and blood; it seemed the recent financial meltdown had helped the rest of the nation finally come around.

There was a certain optimism in the air in 2008 — a sense of, “how much worse can things get?” It seemed to me that the American people had reached a kind of limit. Call it “story fatigue.” No one really wanted to hear about these conflicts. War had reached the status of the “unmarked state;” that is to say, it had become the normal state of affairs, like the endless war that plays so vividly in the background of George Orwell’s 1984.

One of the most powerful books I encountered in my early research was Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise, which details the Nazi occupation of France with a kind of Tolstoyan sweep and grandeur. But the thread of that story led directly to the catastrophe of European Jewry. Némirovsky was a Jew; despite having converted to Roman Catholicism, and being something of an anti-semite herself, she perished at Auschwitz in August of 1942.

I knew I didn’t want to write about the victims of occupation. Americans have the historical advantage — an amazing anomaly, really — of never having had their country occupied. Unless you count the burning of Washington, D.C. by the British in 1814. Or unless you’re a die-hard Confederate, and think that Reconstruction after the Civil War was actually an occupation by a foreign country.

In this country, we are not the occupied; we are occupiers. This is hard for most Americans to keep in mind. The prevailing narrative since September 11th, 2001 is that we are everywhere under attack; that we are fighting every day, in many lands, for our freedom! Freedom from terrorism; freedom from violent ideologies; freedom to pursue happiness, which is, after all, one of our unalienable rights.

The cost of this freedom, in terms of the foreign lands we occupy, became the central question for me. The problem was how to dramatize it.

The answer came, as it often does, by accident, in the form of a book called The Marsh Arabs, which was written by the English explorer and adventurer Wilfred Thesiger. This name may be new to some of you, so let me take a minute to introduce you to Sir Wilfred, whose work was to be so influential to mine.

Thesiger was a very high product of his civilization. Son of a diplomat, nephew of a viscount, grandson of a Lord, he was born in 1910 into a British Empire that the sun had yet to set on. He attended Eton; went on to Magdalen college at Oxford, and turned his attention, after graduation, to the geographical exploration of Africa. When World War II broke out, he served in Africa with great distinction, rising eventually to the rank of Major, and ultimately acting in the role of political advisor to the Crown Prince of Abyssinia.

After the war, Thesiger explored the Arabian Peninsula, traveling twice by foot across the so-called “Empty Quarter,” the largest sand desert in the world, an expanse considered lethal even by the native bedu tribesmen he came to know and love. His experiences in the Arabian desert let to his book Arabian Sands, which is considered a classic of the travel genre, but might also be considered a masterwork of amateur anthropology.

Thesiger returned to England from time to time, but his own countrymen didn’t really interest him. He hated comfort. He was much more at home traveling in brutal conditions, far from the sound of the nearest engine, sleeping in the rough, and sharing in the close camaraderie of the native men — always the men — who instructed him in the time-honored arts of survival in extreme conditions.

His other masterwork, the Marsh Arabs, which was published in 1964, came out of the years he spent with the Ma’dan, the Shi’a Muslims who live in the drainage plain of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq.

You may remember that Saddam Hussein drained these marshes in retaliation for the 1991 uprisings against him, effectively destroying the ecosystem that had supported one of the oldest civilizations on earth, most likely dating back to the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia.

It was this direct and unbroken link to the cradle of civilization that fascinated Thesiger, and also caused him to rail against the modernity that was encroaching even in the late 1950s, in the form of oil exploration by multi-national corporations.

The Iraqi marshes have since been partially restored, and the ecosystem is showing some signs of recovering. But it may be too late for the Ma’dan, most of whom found refuge in the cities, and are understandably reluctant to return to subsistence farming and fishing, not to mention the rigors of living in one of the least hospitable places on earth, in terms of heat and insects.

Once I had found Wilfred Thesiger, a man who, for deeply personal reasons, came to prefer the company of so-called “primitives” to the sophisticated pleasures of London, I knew I’d found a model for my protagonist.

The rest flowed from there.