Upon arriving in Tehran, Jason Elliot—fluent in Farsi and impressively learned—expresses his shock at finding it to be an “ordinary city”. “Perhaps the traveller, seeking to affirm his otherness, requests a toll of unfamiliarity from his surroundings,” he ventures; one could forgive him for feeling somehow cheated, having reached a city only superficially removed from his native London after travelling across a continent in search of a country that seems as complex and inscrutable as it is geographically distant.

Yet Iran, as Elliot discovers, is a country that defies such temerarious judgement. A veneer of religious conservatism barely stretches over a highly complex—and at times highly contradictory—social order. The state’s overtly anti-Western sentiment, for example, is both aggravated and tempered by its population’s desire for both sovereignty and domestic reform; from the bustling, modern metropolis of Tehran, to the staggeringly beautiful Safavid city of Isfahan, to the conservative heartland of Qom, it is this tension more than any other that seems to underpin the very fabric of Iranian society.

Elliot’s book, then, is less a piece of travel writing than a wholesale attempt to understand Iranian society. Faced with a social structure “permeated with Janus-like traits”, Elliot instead turns to the country’s art, its history, and above all its architecture in an attempt to understand its mores. It is a journey that has mixed results; Elliot learns much of these arguably superficial elements, but remains—to his frustration—largely distanced from what he sees as the true Iran, as if the complexities of its societal order were anything less than a lifetime’s work.

His quest is perhaps hamstrung further by his own attitude. Like many travel writers before him, Elliot combines a great passion for his subject with a curious irascibility; perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of the enforced solitude of the professional traveller. Still, I’m not sure how many times one can relive anecdotes of a frustrated Elliot tearing apart a taxi driver for having charged him “foreigners’ rates” without beginning to suspect the problem lies not with Iran’s cab-driving fraternity but with our humble narrator.

It’s impossible to disapprove for long, though: Elliot’s insights into Iranian art and especially architecture are incredibly informed and well-considered, reinforced by a historical knowledge that at times borders on the intimidating. His enthusiasm for the tiniest details—a calligraphic flourish here, a particularly well-proportioned muqarnas there—is thoroughly infectious, and his explanations are detailed without straying into condescension.

At one point, with an ersatz compass made out of kebab-skewers, he discovers that the proportions and layout of the famous Naqsh-e Jahan in Isfahan conform exactly to the so-called “divine section”, his palpable excitement increasing ever-further with each swing of his compass as he reveals yet another instance of the magic number. His reaction is the sort of childish glee that one cannot help but share, and the result is a band of readers with an interest in the geometric precision of Persian architecture that they never knew they had.

It is in this enthusiasm, and in the imparting of this enthusiasm, that the book’s triumphant success can be found: if you didn’t have an interest in Iran before picking it up, you will by the time you put it down. While I’m sure Elliot would not profess to be either an historian or a political analyst, and while this is fundamentally a work of travel writing, I can think of no better work than this from which to learn the unique way in which history and politics have shaped Iran.