Unholy imagination’s focus on fantasy
Unholy Land
Tachyon, £10.99
Reviewed by Keith Kahn-Harris
IMAGINE IF the “territorialists”in the pre-First World War Zionist movement had won over the “holy landers” and the project to build a Jewish state focused on any available land rather than the holy land. Imagine if a Jewish state had been carved out of British East Africa and that, today, a landlocked “Palestina” existed next to Lake Victoria. Imagine that what we call today Israel was still simply an Ottoman province.
So far, so Michael Chabon. There is no shortage of available literary “what if” fantasies to escape into or flinch in horror from.
Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land, while it may at first seem to be counterfactual whimsy, is actually quite a different — and much more interesting — work. The Israeli-born, consistently interesting and now peripatetically located author’s fertile imagination has produced works that range between speculative fiction, scifi, fantasy and the unclassifiable. The plot of Unholy Land sees Lior Tirosh, an almost successful author of pulp fiction, return to his native Palestina for reasons that aren’t immediately clear.
A childhood friend tells him that his niece Deborah, who is active in radical politics, has gone missing, and is then mysteriously murdered.
Tirosh’s attempts to find Deborah lead him across the Jewish state, pursued by government forces and agents from a more mysterious power.
Tidhar has a lot of fun with Palestina. I particularly liked the bookshop owner who recounts “that Amos Klausner fellow” hunting for research material for his new novel.
Really, though, Tidhar’s Palestina is simply a mirror image of Israel, complete with suicide bombings, disputed territories and separation walls.
That, of course, is the point. As Unholy Land develops, it becomes clear that this is not in fact a novel of alternate history, but something stranger and more ambitious. This is a novel about borders, not just between states, but between times and dimensions.
Tirosh, and the agents who pursue him, are struggling to navigate through and repair breaches between multiple possible worlds that are at once utterly different and ever the same.
In his afterword, Tidhar reminds us that “there is only one world we live in”. Yet we see it in such different ways it is as though we live in multiple dimensions. His book is therefore a scathing satire of how fantasies of alternate realities cannot escape the fundamental boundaries of this one.
“Palestina” is simply a mirror image of Israel’
Keith Kahn-Harris’s latest book is ‘Denial: The Unspeakable Truth’ (Notting Hill Editions). He will be on a panel discussing ‘Is Humanity in Denial?’ at Jewish Book Week on March 7