UNSETTLING REALITY
Writer shaken by terrorism
House of Spies Daniel Silva HarperCollins
These were jarring moments for Daniel Silva.
His latest thriller, House of Spies, was nearing publication when terrorism struck the United Kingdom. And these reallife horrors came uncomfortably close to the fictional mayhem he had created in the new book.
So there was good reason why the May 22 bombing of Manchester Arena and the June 3 terrorist attack on London Bridge left the 57-year-old novelist shaken. Silva had this eerie sense of fiction morphing into fact, given that the opening pages of House of Spies feature a horrific eruption of terrorist violence in London’s West End.
But he also knows that what occurred in Manchester and on London Bridge was inevitable.
“I was very saddened to see something happen that frankly I knew was going to happen,” says Silva, bestselling author of 20 novels that have shown an unsettling prescience about the convulsions afflicting the world.
“I had used the United Kingdom as the jumping-off point for this story because anyone who follows this material as closely as I do would know that ISIS had quite literally painted a bull’s-eye on the United Kingdom. They desperately wanted to get the U.K. — and the head of MI5 had basically told the British people there would be attacks.”
Even so, Silva was unnerved by what actually did happen, especially on London Bridge. “This notion of running down people with a vehicle and then jumping out and slashing and stabbing people — well, I have to say that I could never even contemplate writing something like the London Bridge attack in a fictitious work. I thought it was so barbaric and horrible …”
Nevertheless, the opening chapters of House of Spies still administer a jolt. ISIS terrorists strike London’s theatre land, with prime target the St. Martin’s Theatre, hallowed home to Agatha Christie’s long-running The Mousetrap. Armed with AK-47s and wearing explosive vests, 12 suicide bombers attack various West End landmarks at precisely the same hour before embarking on a rampage of extermination through the area’s bars and restaurants. More than 900 die before it’s over.
In the novel, the clockwork precision of the attack is the trademark of a shadowy ISIS mastermind named Saladin who becomes the target of a revenge mission involving the combined efforts of several Western intelligence agencies.
Spearheading the action is art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon, making his 17th fictional appearance as one of the contemporary thriller world’s most compelling characters. Here, he is now head of Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service, his top priority the elimination of the elusive Saladin.
Silva, a former Middle East correspondent, is under no illusions about the continuing threat of ISIS. He scoffs at the notion, voiced by some pundits, that the recent capture of Mosul, its Iraqi stronghold, will finish off this terrorist group.
“To think it will suddenly go away because it lost Mosul is just naive,” he tells Postmedia by phone from New York.
In an afterword at the end of House of Spies, Silva insists the book is “a work of entertainment and nothing more.” But then he spends the next several pages warning readers of the continuing threat of ISIS because of its transformation into a new and disturbing form in which “the physical caliphate is being replaced by a digital one where virtual plotters recruit and plan in the security and anonymity of cyberspace.”
And, he says, “the blood will flow in the real world, in the rail stations, airports, cafés and theatres of the West. The global jihadist movement has proven itself uncannily adaptable.”
Considering that he writes fiction, Silva has acquired an unsettling reputation for prophecy. Earlier books accurately predicted the birth of the Arab Spring and the fall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt. But with Black Widow, the novel immediately preceding House of Spies, Silva even frightened himself.
“I had started Black Widow before the Paris attacks of November 2015, and what happened was so similar to what I had written, including the terrorist links to Brussels, that I actually considered setting aside the novel. It was like writing a book about airplanes flying into the World Trade Center before 9/11 actually happened.”
Silva finally decided to complete the book, but also attached a note to readers explaining the dilemma he faced in writing it.
And he realizes now how “prescient” Black Widow was.
“What it really predicted was that ISIS, which had really begun as a really local group, dedicated to establishing a caliphate in the Middle East, was now going global and attacking the West.”
He argues that the West should have realized long ago what was happening in an area still suffering from the consequences of European-imposed First World War settlements that carved up the Middle East in a manner defiant of geographical, sectarian and cultural realities.
“When I look at its future, I see a huge growing population of young people with no jobs, no future, who are purely educated in a changing climate and with the end of oil approaching. I see a land in terminal decline, and I think ISIS-like groups are going to be given opportunities to make mischief for a long, long time.”
But at least Silva’s thrillers offer the reassuring presence of Gabriel Allon, hailed by more than one critic as the most popular spy since James Bond. The irony is that his creator never intended Allon to become a series character.
“He was supposed to appear in one book and one book only,” Silva says with a laugh. “I really had to be talked into putting him in a second one. But he would not be denied. Now, here he is, in book 17. I really can’t put my head around that number.”