In The Carrier, Jamal Mahjoub examines the nature of scientific knowledge and technological discovery within the context of the power struggles of history. That is to say, the novel exposes the ways in which science, far from being objective, is implicated in the power politics relating to issues of wealth, trade and colonialism.

The novel works through two protagonists, who live in different historical periods. The first is Rashid al-Kenzy, who we first encounter in the early seventeenth century in Algiers. The second is the twentieth-century man, Hassan, who is a geologist. The connection between the two men will emerge on an archaeological dig, to which Hassan has been sent by the museum in Copenhagen to solve a mystery in a remote corner of the Danish peninsula, called Jutland. The remains of a body have been dug up, and along with them, a ‘collection of odd items’ (42) including a brass case engraved in Arabic and which contains a device, whose purpose it is to enable the devout Muslim traveller to find the direction of Mecca in his prayers.

The body is not Rashid's, as we will find out, but the case is engraved with his name and a narrative thread throughout the novel is provided by Hassan's increasingly obsessive pondering over what could have happened in the past, with ‘the apparent arrival of a visitor from the Middle East at the beginning of the seventeenth century’ (251).