In his latest book, Prince of Fire, Daniel Silva has revived the spy thriller and written a novel that describes the pain felt by both Arabs and Jews.
What hast thou do with peace?
— The Bible, Second Book of Kings, 9:18
****
In that scintillating genre, the “spy-thriller,” John Le Carre was unsurpassed. Of course, that was before he became a bit politically unhinged, and went around the bend on us. Given Le Carre’s pronounced gifts it is a shame, because I remember with a certain fondness devouring Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Smiley’s People. The man can tell a story and turn a phrase.
Oh yes, those were the good old days, when the Cold War raged, when surrogates fought our battles and the enemy’s as well. A writer could dig deep in the verdant, rich, loam of colliding super powers. Right and wrong was a bit murky, superceded by a heavy dose of situational ethics, and Le Carre, ever the master of moral ambiguity, exploited the theme mercilessly. Indeed, his besotted MI5 people were always being caught in some “honey trap” and betraying Queen and country. Perhaps, he was being honest. Human nature has always been something of an enigma, though for background he had that nasty business with Kim Philby and his cadre of deviant traitors who spent way too much time at England’s “public” schools.
Sadly, the “spy thriller” took it on the chin with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Le Carre was drawn into the miasma of his own virulent nihilism and produced work that seemed half-hearted and mechanized. To be honest, I tried Joel Rosenberg, Robert Ludlum, and Vince Flynn, and they are fine novelists but, for me, there was something missing in their work. Perhaps, their plots lacked a fundamental realism, or they came up a bit short when it came to a grasp of human nature; perhaps, their protagonists are just too pretty or clever.
When I was just at that point of giving up on the “spy-thriller” my wife came to my rescue (it’s not the first time).
“Here,” she commanded,” read this,” as she handed me a copy of Daniel Silva’s Kill Artist, procured from the dusty shelves of the local library. From the first page I realized that I had found someone who would re-ignite my old affections for the genre.
Silva’s literary style is reminiscent of Le Carre’s, because they both share a decided mastery of description and the ability to lure the reader into the scene. Silva makes you believe you are treading along a cobble-stoned boulevard in Marseilles; or meeting a “contact” in some hashish bar in Tangiers; or witnessing a brilliant sunset in the Negev desert. His writing is mature, eschewing all but the most elementary electronic gadget, preferring, instead, to allow the plot to carry the work, in the manner of Graham Green. Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, is the leading character in Silva’s latest offering, Prince of Fire. Gabriel possesses a certain hauteur, dislikes physical confrontation, and would prefer to out-smart his antagonist. More importantly, he would prefer to be restoring the paintings of the Masters.
In a recent interview provided by his website, Silva describes his epiphany, a maturation, “When I introduced the Gabriel Allon character in The Kill Artist, he was cast in the unlikely role of safeguarding the life of Yasir Arafat, who was then engaged in the Oslo peace process. Of course, everything changed shortly after that novel was published. Yasir Arafat rejected the peace deal he was offered at Camp David and then launched the second Intifada. In a way, I felt obligated to write this novel. The Kill Artist was written in a time of hope, Prince of Fire in a time of despair and terror…”
Who, but the most hopeful, had not realized for decades, that the Arab/Israeli conflict would only be settled by the most horrific of conflagrations? And so, Silva, given his epiphany, his significant literary gifts, and his understanding of the Arab/Israeli conflict gleamed, perhaps, from his experience as a UPI Middle East Correspondent in Cairo and a student of those sanguinary events, has written a unique novel that describes “the pain felt by both Arabs and Jews.”
In that he has succeeded.
The beautiful, young, Arab girl, Fellah, a member of the terrorist cell that is plotting against Gabriel, says, “My Holocaust is as real as yours, and yet you deny my suffering and exonerate yourself of guilt. You claim my wounds are self-inflicted.”
And, Silva has Ari Shamron — his George Smiley — delivering a homily that echoes across the timeless wilderness, “Tell me something, Gabriel. Do you think that if the Arabs had won the war that there would be any Jewish refugees? Look at what happened in Hebron. They brought the Jews to the center of town and cut them down. They attacked a convoy of doctors and nurses heading up Mount Scopus and butchered them all. To make certain no one survived, they doused the vehicles with gasoline and set them alight. This was the nature of our enemy. Their goal was to kill us all, so we would never come back. And that remains their goal today. They want to kill us all.”
Further, Silva weaves into the fabric of his work an outline of the Arab/Israeli conflict. He explains that at the beginning of the Cold War and following the collapse of Nazi Germany, the newly created United Nations established the nation of Israel. A decade earlier, Mandatory Palestine had been dissected with four-fifths being set aside for Trans Jordan. So Israel was defined as ten per cent of the remaining lands; “the Coastal Plain and the Negev.” But the Arabs refused the partition and commenced hostilities.
Thus, began the modern version of a conflict whose roots lay smoldering in the desert lands of the Patriarch, Abraham, and his sons Ishmael and Isaac.
“There will never be peace in this place,” Ari Shamron says, “but then there never was. Ever since we stumbled into this land from Egypt and Mesopotamia, we’ve been fighting. Canaanites, Assyrians, Philistines, Romans, Amalekites.”
Who would not die defending their homeland? Who would not die fighting for the only place you have to live?
Prince of Fire is available on Amazon.com.
robertcheeks@core.com
Read more articles by Bob Cheeks
