Book of the week

EVACUATION RAPHAËL JERUSALMY TEXT, $24

Evacuation is a novel which was written by Raphaël Jerusalmy, as he says, “in Tel Aviv, sitting outside the café A Consolation and a Half, not far from the Rothschild Boulevard”. It’s a book filled with wide cityscapes and the enigmatic incidents of missile warfare.

Jerusalmy is a French-educated writer who made his career in the Israeli military intelligence services before becoming an antiquarian bookdealer and novelist in Tel Aviv. It’s a distinctive resumé which he puts to good use in his unsettling second book – although not in the way a reader might expect.

Evacuation is a bright, light-struck novel, set in a near-deserted Tel Aviv, at some time slightly in the future. The city has been largely evacuated in face of threats from rocket-bombardment and the possibility of germ warfare.

As any observer of Middle Eastern politics will observe, it is a scenario right out of present day headlines.

Naor is driving with his mother through Israel and recounting the events that happened during the “Emergency” when he was in Tel Aviv with his artist/painter girlfriend, Yaël, and his grandfather, Saba, who is a writer.

The book is punctuated by typographical versions of highway signs along their route.

The trio had just boarded a bus amid the chaos of evacuation, when Saba, clutching a novel (Molloy by Samuel Beckett) gets off unexpectedly. He refuses to return to his seat. The bus leaves without them.

They find themselves in a city largely emptied of people. Once the news crews have gone, then the intermittent missiles start coming in – falling from the sky on shops and government offices. Despite this, they decide to remain.

It is a surreal experience. Lack of water for washing mean it is easier to raid shops for new clothing. Hyenas begin returning to the city from the countryside. Yaël begins painting. Naor plots a movie he shoots on his iPhone using the empty buildings and streets as a huge set.

Readers of the early fiction of James Ballard, the author of The Wind from Nowhere and

The Burning World, will find themselves perfectly at home with the juxtapositions of an abandoned metropolis and the forces of creation and destruction.

Evacuation is an apocalyptic story told in a series of distanced intensely visual instants. Despite its air of emergency, it is a languid novel. Danger comes lazily but when it does, the results are final.

Ultimately, Jerusalmy reveals all the strangeness of an emblematic place torn by political, artistic, and religious currents. It is a crisp and oddly memorable book.