‘THE JAMES BOND of ISRAEL’
DANIEL SILVA’S SPY SERIES TAKES US DEEP INTO ‘ THE SECRET BATTLEFIELDS OF THE MIDDLE EAST’
NO ONE, NOT EVEN THE BRITISH, TRAINS THEIR SPIES AS WELL AS WE DO.
The Black Widow by Daniel Silva HarperCollins 517 pp; $34.99
Abuilding blows up in the Marais district of Paris. Vengeful Palestinians are knifing Israeli civilians at random. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is charging across the landscape. This is the torn- fromthe- headlines background where Daniel Silva locates his most recent thriller featuring an Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon.
Once a year since 2000, Silva has written a new novel about the exploits of Allon as a soldier on “the secret battlefields of Europe and the Middle East.” The 16th in the series will not surprise his followers. Like the earlier books it takes us deep into Israeli intelligence as Silva imagines it and into the life of the remarkable Allon, a spy so good that all other spies measure their careers against his.
He’s the James Bond of Israel, but more talented and deeper. Like Bond, he chases villains into every remote corner where they hide. Like Bond, he often gets into life- threatening predicaments at the hands of his enemies. In fact, a recent attempt on his life was so credible that Israel decided to announce his death just to confuse the would- be killers and give him time off- the- grid to recover from his injuries.
Allon has an alternative career that he keeps alive in between assignments. He was a talented student in art school when Israeli intelligence recruited him and now he’s developed into an expert restorer of paintings, one of the best in the world. The first time we meet him in The Black Widow he’s finishing the restoration of a badly damaged Nativity by Caravaggio, owned by the Vatican. Till it was rediscovered, it was the world’s most famous missing painting. Earlier, Allon brought back to life a deteriorating Van Gogh.
Unlike most fictional spies, Allon can double as an administrator. He’s slated to become head of what Israel calls the Mossad, which Silva’s characters never call anything except the Office. Resigned to becoming a big wheel, Allon says, “I am a boardroom hero now.” But Silva’s readers have been hearing about that promotion for so long that we can’t believe it will ever happen.
Certainly not at this moment. A woman killed by the car bomb in the Marais, a Jewish district of Paris, was a friend of Allon, so he’s interested in seeing the bombers punished. Moreover, France has asked that he be assigned to this case, an unusual choice. French and Israeli intelligence services do not like each other but in this case both sides agree to make an excep- tion. Allon reflects that he has often served on French soil in the past, though not usually with French approval. There are other services that he can consult. Israel and Jordan, in this story, co- operate in an atmosphere of mutual wariness.
It turns out that the bomb-setting was supervised by a mysterious figure, allied with ISIL. All we know about him is that he’s so arrogant he’s chosen Saladin as his nom de guerre, the 12th- century Saladin having been the first sultan of Egypt and Syria and the leader of military campaigns against the Crusaders.
To identify Saladin and expose him, Allon must reassemble his crack team. From previous assignments there’s Eli Lavon, “the finest street surveillance artist the Office ever produced,” and a shrewd financial investigator who singlehandedly tracked down the location of a collection of Nazi- looted art. Then there’s Yossi Gavich, who studied classics at All Souls College, Oxford. He plays the cello and speaks Hebrew with an English accent. Dina Saris, a researcher, carries in her brain the details of every act of Islamic terrorism against the West. This inner database lets her make connections where others see only a blizzard of names and dates.
Allon will make a new agent of a French woman doctor who speaks Arabic as if she were born to it. The team will try to insert her into Saladin’s unit.
They’re a competitive lot. They like to see themselves as superior to the CIA and the British. Allon tells us that “No one, not even the British, trains their spies as well as we do.” A researcher is told to find something important in a file. She’s challenged to discover the answer sooner than the CIA, which has the same file. She will, she says. “I usually do.”
Sil va is an American who worked as a wire- service foreign correspondent and as a producer at CNN before becoming a novelist in the 1990s. He writes the details with the confidence of a journalist, piling them up until they become a world all his own.
We see everything from the standpoint of the Israelis: their disasters, their triumphs, the terror they feel as they deal in secret with vicious killers. And we get to know Allon’s life ( and his Italian- Jewish wife, Chiara, and their children) so well that we can grasp his passionate feeling about fighting for his country’s future existence.
That’s crucial to the long- running success of Silva’s series. Dealing with events far beyond the experience of his readers, he achieves a sense of intimacy that makes his imaginings feel a lot like reality.