There seemed to me to be two sides to this novel. The first was the actual archaeological dig in all it's fascinating initial explorations and meticulous excavation and the second, less successful was the personal relationships between the various characters involved. I felt that the description of the dig itself to be surprisingly exciting, and the methods of exposing the ship to be exceedingly well explained. I liked the way that Brown found the hard crust in the sand where the wooden ribs of the hull had been.
However, the character driven drama is pretty average literary writing. But there are the odd moments of humour, Ellen the maid is described as "not a gossip, but a natural curiosity about people". The author seemed as if he wanted to build up a fractious relationship between the original team, that included Basil Brown and Reid Moir of Ipswich Museum, and Charles Phillips of Cambridge University who hijacks control of the dig on behalf of the British Museum.
I did think that the story told by the three narrators was clever, especially as I did feel they conveyed something of their different characters, especially in the way they wrote their story. So much so, that the narration by Peggy Piggott was superb. There is also a great feature on the National Trust website: "Digging the dirt: The True story behind The Dig" and a Netflix preview on YouTube also called "The True story behind The Dig".
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