By Michael M. Rosen
http://www.tabletmag.com/
July 19, 2012
Trouble seems to follow novelist Daniel Silva like a chase car, hot on the trail of his favorite protagonist, the globe-trotting Mossad agent and ace art restorer Gabriel Allon. In The Fallen Angel—Silva’s latest thriller, released this week (HarperCollins)—trouble follows Allon home to Israel itself.
In addition to being fun, Silva’s novels have the virtue of being prescient: Several key developments in the realms of diplomacy and espionage have been presaged, if not outright predicted, in Silva’s work—a trend the author obliquely attributes to his “good contacts” inside various intelligence agencies. Take, for instance, the moment in Portrait of a Spy—written in 2011, during the throes of the Arab Spring—when Gabriel falls into the hands of arch-terrorist Rashid al-Husseini. “The Arab world is changing,” Gabriel defiantly declares. “Your time has passed.” Rashid, smirking, lays down the gauntlet. “Surely, Allon, a man such as yourself is not so naive as to think this great Arab Awakening is going to produce Western-style democracy in the Middle East,” he retorts. “The revolt might have started with the students and the secularists, but the Brothers will have the last word.” Sure enough, with last month’s election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi as Egypt’s next president, the Brothers have indeed prevailed.
In hindsight, Rashid’s (and Silva’s) prediction may seem obvious. But a year ago, earnest and optimistic foreign-policy elites here and abroad had convinced themselves, like Gabriel, that the Islamists’ time had passed.
Similarly, the previous summer, just weeks after Silva released The Rembrandt Affair, which depicts a complex international scheme to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, the first leaks began to emerge about the Stuxnet virus, which at least temporarily crippled the mullahs’ push for a bomb.
So, when Silva—himself a convert to Judaism—writes a novel about unrest in the Holy Land, as he has done in The Fallen Angel, it is worth taking note. “In the near future,” the author told me during an interview last week, “the Arab world will be more populist and more Islamist at the same time. Eventually, I can’t imagine that the focus of this enormous energy that’s sweeping the region is not going to find itself in Israel.” In particular, Silva observed, “as the entire region becomes more Islamic, it’s only natural that the conflict is going to become more overtly religious than it already is. If that is the case, then Jerusalem, this symbol of the navel of the world, this place that all the three Abrahamic faiths hold sacred, is going to be a flashpoint for the future.”
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Jerusalem is an unusual setting for both Silva and his fictional alter ego. Yanked out of the Holy City’s Bezalel Arts Academy and tasked with eliminating the Palestinians who oversaw the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Gabriel Allon traversed Europe for several years locating and executing the murderers. After the operation ended, the character winds up living on and off in Europe, pursuing his cover-vocation as an art restorer. “Gabriel started his career as a European operative, and it’s where he’s most comfortable, and where I’m most comfortable,” Silva told me. “The hallmark of the Allon series is that they’re bifurcated, they deal with art and intrigue in almost every book.”
Gabriel is scarred and flawed, but not brittle—and never broken. “I was determined to turn Gabriel Allon and those around him into serious characters,” Silva said, “not the Hollywood version of this guilt-ridden Israeli who carries this heavy conscience around about what he’s doing for his country, and is always conflicted over the morality of his conduct, whether the Jewish state should continue to exist, etc. I was not going to do that because that’s not who these people are.”
Instead, Gabriel and his colleagues believe they’ve been entrusted with a sacred mission, and while they bicker among themselves and espouse a range of opinions on the Arab-Israeli conflict, they never waver in their commitment. “They see it as their personal responsibility that there never ever be another Holocaust,” Silva noted. “I know American Jews don’t like to think about this, but [Allon and company] see themselves as guardians of Jews worldwide, including in America.”
And yet, the vast majority of the work these operatives perform takes place in Europe, often to the great chagrin of Swiss, Austrian, Italian, and other authorities under whose noses Gabriel saves the world. “The settings are chosen very carefully to serve as a backdrop for the kinds of stories that I want to tell and to make the Allon series work for a broader audience other than just people who want to read about the Middle East and Israel,” Silva told me. In addition to enhancing the books’ commercial appeal, the European milieu enables Silva to broaden the conversation to include hunting for hidden Holocaust butchers, punishing malevolent Swiss bankers, and unraveling Vatican intrigue.
But for the first time in the 12-book series, in The Fallen Angel the action shifts significantly to the Jewish state itself. His latest offering, Silva explained, is “set along the Jerusalem-to-Rome historical axis, and it actually moves backward. Gabriel goes from the Sistine Chapel, built to the scale of Solomon’s Temple, and he moves backward through time.” Unforeseen events lead Gabriel and his team back to Jerusalem, where archaeology, politics, religion, and espionage intersect.
“There’s a theme that runs through the book about antiquities and truth being lost to looters,” Silva said. In Rome, Gabriel tracks a mobbed-up antiquities ring at the request of high-level friends in the Vatican, and in Israel, the spy squarely confronts the disturbing new trend of what he labels “Temple Denial.” As his senior colleague Eli Lavon—part-time archaeologist, full-time counter-surveillance specialist—intones to Gabriel from his dig near the Western Wall:
“It’s a first cousin to Holocaust Denial, and it’s now just as widespread in the Arab and Islamic world. The calculus is quite simple: No Holocaust, no Temple …”Lavon’s fictional plaints closely align with those of his inventor. “There’s an international campaign under way to delegitimize the state of Israel,” Silva told me. “Part of that campaign is an effort by Palestinians—and I feel comfortable saying it as a blanket term because it’s accepted by the entire leadership of the Palestinian authority—that there was never any Jewish Temple of Jerusalem.” The implications of this campaign are quite significant, Silva believes. “Absurd as that sounds,” he argued, “it has a reason, a political purpose. If you say there was not a Holocaust, which is now sort of accepted widely, unfortunately, throughout much of the Islamic world, and then you say there was never a Jewish Kingdom or temple in Israel, then why is the state here now?”
“No Jews in Palestine.”
“Precisely. But it’s not just talk. Using the religious authority of the Waqf, the Palestinians are systematically trying to erase any evidence that there was ever an actual temple on the Temple Mount. We’re fighting an archaeological war here in Jerusalem every day.”
The problem also persists on a larger scale. “One of the things I wanted to talk about in this [latest] book,” Silva told me, “is to look at the arc of history in that part of the Mediterranean, and all the great powers that have come through that patch of land, and how tenuous their grip has always been, how tenuous the Jewish home is in the land of Israel. When I was in Israel last summer working on the book, I encountered this animation ‘Maps of War,’ about all the great powers who’ve ruled the Eastern Med, starting with the ancient Egyptians, and it’s a reminder that history does not come to an end.”
Both Gabriel, the character, and Silva, the author, are somewhat cryptic about their views on the peace process. “Regarding Gabriel,” Silva said, “I’ve never sat and pinned him down. But I don’t think there’s a lot of daylight between us. I think if Gabriel were put under oath, he’d say he’s a two-stater. He would willingly give away virtually all of the West Bank to a reasonable Palestinian government that had forsworn violence and given up the dream of driving the Jews into the sea. But he’s not at all confident that there is this possibility for peace.”
And if life imitates art, the very end of The Fallen Angel suggests some ill omens for the region. In particular, there’s an apocalyptic Iranian regime dedicated to making the Temple Mount squabble look like a trifle. And while Silva said he was gratified that Stuxnet and related attacks have “worked, to some extent,” there’s a long way to go before Israel and the world are safe.
As for where future books in the series will take Silva and Gabriel, the author’s keeping mum: “I learned long ago never to comment about books that haven’t yet been written.” But he does note the increasing difficulty—for him, and for his protagonist—of operating elsewhere in the Middle East.
“It’s not so easy for Gabriel Allon to work in the Arab world,” Silva said. “He has gone to Cairo [in Prince of Fire] and Dubai in Portrait of a Spy. It’s not so easy for me to go to the Arab world anymore.”
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Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in San Diego.
Dallas-bound espionage thriller author Daniel Silva’s evil muse? Reality
By DAVID MARTINDALE
The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/
July 17, 2012
No need for Daniel Silva to invent eccentric James Bond-style supervillains in his best-selling espionage thrillers. Not with what seems to be an endless supply of real-life bad guys out there for him to write about.
Last year, in Portrait of a Spy, Silva — a former journalist and CNN producer who has written a string of best-sellers since 1997’s The Unlikely Spy — addressed the changing nature of al-Qaeda in a post-bin Laden world.
His latest, The Fallen Angel (Harper, $27.99), pits Israeli art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon against Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group that Silva describes as “the A-team of terrorists.”
“We would be wise to remember that, before al-Qaeda, there was Hezbollah,” says Silva, whose book tour brings him to Dallas on Saturday. “Its list of successful terrorist attacks is long and deadly. And it is far more capable now than al-Qaeda ever was.”
The Fallen Angel opens with Allon conducting an under-the-radar murder investigation at the Vatican. That puts him on the trail of a black-market antiquities ring, a Hezbollah plot to bomb a historic synagogue in Vienna and an even bigger plot to destroy one of religion’s holiest sites.
Silva talked by phone from his home in Washington, D.C.
In the book, Gabriel discovers that Hezbollah is financing worldwide terrorist activities by dealing in the lucrative stolen antiquities market. Is that really happening?
I cannot say for certain whether terror groups are involved in that trade, but I would be surprised if they weren’t. What I do know is that Hezbollah is heavily involved in global crime of all kinds: drugs, pirated DVDs, black-market cigarettes, the illicit diamond trade, you name it. They need a lot of money to carry out their operations in Lebanon and elsewhere, and they are earning a great deal of that money by a global crime spree.
Do real-world events often affect your books as you’re writing them?
It certainly did in Portrait of a Spy. Bin Laden was killed after I finished writing the book. And there were daily developments with the Arab Spring. I quickly rewrote all the relevant passages. It was a big challenge, but it made that book so timely.
Your characters travel the globe in your books. How in-depth is your research? Do you visit every historic building, stand in front of every famous painting, explore every cave?
I know that all you have to do is push a few buttons on your computer, type a word into a Google box, and you can do a lot of your research without leaving home. But I still prefer to do it the old-fashioned way. If I’m going to set a scene in caves and tunnels under the old city of Jerusalem, I go there and I see what it’s like down there. I think readers can tell the difference.
President Bill Clinton is quoted inside the book jacket as saying, “Gabriel Allon is my favorite fictional character.” How did you feel when he made that declaration?
Very proud and humbled. Here’s a guy who spent much of the final months of his presidency trying to bring peace to the Middle East. He is a serious student of the Middle East. He knows more about this topic than any other political leader in the world. If there’s a real-life Gabriel Allon, I’m certain that Clinton knows him. So the fact that he likes my work, that it rings true to him, that he recognizes the people and that it keeps him engaged as a reader, that’s just an enormous compliment.
David Martindale is an Arlington freelance writer.
Plan your life
Silva will appear as part of Arts & Letters Live at 7:30 p.m. Saturday (7/19) at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood St. Tickets $25; discounts for seniors and students. www.tickets.dallasmuseumofart.org or 214-922-1818. He will sign The Fallen Angel at 2 p.m. Saturday (7/19) at Barnes & Noble, 7700 W. Northwest Highway, Dallas.
