daniel silva's
THE BLACK WIDOW
reviewed by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
ISIS doesn’t
crucify only because it is cruel.
It crucifies because, according
to the Koran,
crucifixion is one of the proscribed punishments
for the enemies of Islam.
It crucifies because it must.
We civilized Westerners find this almost impossible to comprehend.
The Black Widow
ESPIONAGE
WRITER PAR EXCELLENCE
Daniel
Silva is among the finest and most compelling writers in the
suspense/intrigue/espionage/thriller genre in modern fiction,
which has its share of brilliant or engaging practitioners—Ian
Fleming (of course), John LeCarré, David Baldacci, Jo
Nesbo, James Rollins, Kathy Reichs, Steve Berry, Donna Leon,
Tom Clancy, Jonathan Kellerman, Mons Kallentoft, Louise Penny,
P.D. James, Michael Gruber, John Burdett, Trevor Ferguson (aka
John Farrow) and, yes, Dan Brown, to name a few of the most
prominent. Silva is a charter member of this elect fraternity,
one of the genre’s best-selling authors, whose area of
expertise is the Middle East, the Palestinian terror machine,
Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Russian involvement in the
region, the ambitions of Islamic jihad around the globe, and,
of course, the efforts of Israel’s intelligence agency,
the Mossad, to counter these manifold threats.
Indeed,
Silva’s knowledge of the Middle East imbroglio is second
to none and his plots are invariably timely, impinging on the
cultural, political, and military realities of the present day.
His most recent offering, The Black Widow, may well
be his most topical and profoundly analytical work. All the
salient elements of the international arena, real and imagined,
are there: ISIS and the caliphate; drone warfare; the dissolving
border between Iraq and Syria; the disintegration of Lebanon;
the collusion of Turkey; a succession of catastrophic attacks
in Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington, the latter on the scale
of 9/11; a feckless and narcissistic American president plainly
inadequate to the burden of high office; the dysfunctional character
of American and European national security; and the comparative
effectiveness of the Mossad. The book and the world intersect
at every point.
It
is interesting to note that Silva’s novels are tailor-made
for the Hollywood film industry, yet not one has appeared in
the theaters. It is not difficult to see why. As in real life,
his terrorists are Muslims, members of a socially protected
species. When it comes to the entertainment industry, a toxic
amalgam of abject pusillanimity and leftist sympathies, along
with dark infusions of Arab cash, has had its predictable effect
on filmic integrity and patriotic sentiment. One recalls that
the movie version of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears
transforms the novel’s villains, a sect of actual
Palestinian terrorists known as the PFLP, into a collection
of Austrian fascists—safe, acceptable bad guys. Given
their inseparable interweavings with geopolitical reality, Silva’s
plots are thankfully immune to such deceptive meddling. Timorous
and morally compromised, Hollywood will not violate the shibboleths
of the day or offend its twin masters: progressivist culture
and Islamic money. As usual, the iron grip of political correctness
is, well, iron.
The
same wariness is true of our literary critics who are often
careful to hedge their bets. Robert Fulford, for example, a
belvedere eminence for the National Post, penned a
laudatory review of The Black Widow, but could not
help pressing the right virtue-signaling buttons. Silva’s
fascinating hero, Israeli operative and future head of the Mossad
Gabriel Allon, may be “the James Bond of Israel.”
Nevertheless, though sympathetic with Allon’s fight “for
his country’s future existence,” Fulford considers
it necessary to comment in passing that we “see everything
from the standpoint of the Israelis,” as if we didn’t
see everything from the standpoint of the British in the Bond
novels, or from the perspective of the Americans in Berry’s
works, or of the Thai in Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep
series, and so on. He plainly would not have felt obliged to
qualify his approval had there been any other national polity
in play.
This
sort of tut-tut catering to the anti-Zionist crowd is merely
a self-protective utterance, a sop to the unconvinced who might
take issue with Fulford’s favorable review. The novel
may be a marvelous read but, after all, what can we expect of
a parochial and, for many, a pariah state like Israel. These
Israelis are so self-involved!
Moreover,
Fulford’s statement is also dead wrong. For one thing,
the Palestinian outlook is put forward with proxy-like understanding
as something the enemy is passionately convinced of. This act
of projection, of identification with an adversarial narrative,
is quite astonishing. For another, Allon works closely with
his European and American counterparts, as well as with Jordan’s
GID, and, in this story, does his utmost to prevent the jihadist
killing spree in Washington, D.C. We see things quite intimately
from the point of view of the French, the Belgians, the British,
the Jordanians and the Americans, not only the Israelis.
To
imply, as Silva does, that the Mossad is superior to the security
agencies in the other countries is not a form of pro-Israeli
advocacy; it is manifestly true. The Mossad (“the Office,”
as it is called in the novels) is by no means perfect and has
experienced its setbacks from time to time, but it remains the
best in the business. The Belgian intelligence service GISS
watches helplessly as ISIS establishes its European headquarters
in the Molenbeek district of Brussels; the French DST is scarcely
better (remember Nice); the Dutch AIVD is a joke; Britain’s
MI6 is marginally more effective but has not been able to impede
the gradual Islamization of the UK; the blundering of the CIA
and FBI, two organizations that might have nipped 9/11 in the
bud, is a melancholy fact of political life. To see things from
“the standpoint of the Israelis” is rather to concede
the weakness, incompetence and ruinous intramural rivalries
of these intelligence services and to find a way to compensate
for their failings, to everyone’s advantage. This is one
of the messages of the book.
As
mentioned, Silva’s plots are more than a work of imagination;
they touch viscerally on events in the real world. He is not
expressly dissecting the Byzantine convolutions of diplomatic
negotiations with Iran or contemplating the imminence of nuclear
Armageddon, as does Noah Beck in The Last Israelis,
who believes with his fictional Israeli prime minister that
“we are fast approaching the [Iranian] zone of immunity.”
Silva does treat the Iranian question in The Rembrandt Affair,
but his focus in The Black Widow, perhaps that most
contemporaneous in the visionary pageant, is on the destructive
machinations of the caliphate and Western impotence in the face
of the menace.
The
Black Widow is a riveting and complex tale, not without
a number of plotting flaws that tend from time to time to derail
the suspension of disbelief necessary to reader immersion in
the story: a phone conversation hacked by the mysterious ISIS
mastermind who goes by the sobriquet of Saladin, suggesting
the improbability that ISIS technology trumps Israeli vigilance;
the serendipitous fact that Gabriel Allon and Saladin happen
to cross paths at the same hotel in Washington; the oddity that
an Islamic recruiter is shot in revenge rather than pumped for
information; and other such instances. It is also curious that
a Washington restaurant frequented by Silva and his family is
blown to smithereens in the course of the narrative. One hopes
Silva had prior permission from the proprietor.
Notwithstanding,
as columnist Barbara Kay writes, “Foreign-policy hawks
will admire the author’s firm grasp of geopolitical realities….Like
the hawks, Silva takes a hardheaded view of a patient, triumphalist
Islamism that neither sleeps nor wavers in its obsessive jihad
against Israel and the West. He seems to think Europe ‘might
be dying,’ and definitely thinks America and Israel are
in the fight of their lives for the foreseeable future.”
Kay
is right on all counts. I would add only that one need not be
a foreign-policy hawk to appreciate Silva. Those concerned with
the real causes animating Islamic terror, which impacts our
everyday lives, or interested in the intricate transactions
among the intelligence communities combating the sprawling jihadist
networks, or who happen to be Middle East history buffs contemplating
the bloody farce of the so-called “Arab Spring,”
or willing to acknowledge the embattled heroism of tiny Israel
and its disproportionate contribution to defending not only
itself but the security of the West, or simply fans of top-tier
espionage fiction, will find a primer and guide in Silva’s
dramatic cycle.
It
appears that a TV mini-series may be forthcoming, which is a
modest start. We are still waiting. Movie rights have been discussed
from time to time but no deal has yet been consummated. Until
this changes, it is Hollywood’s loss. The cloud of anti-Israeli
animus in elite, academic and entertainment circles is a factor
that Silva can weather. The Silva lining in that cloud is that
the novels’ protagonist Gabriel Allon, who is not only
a master spy but a world-class art restorer, and the groundwork
of international intrigue that closely consorts with the daily
news, are sufficiently engrossing to ensure Silva’s popularity
for years to come. A bonus for the reader will be Gabriel’s
coming elevation as director of the Mossad, which will open
a new chapter in Silva’s ongoing saga of the People of
the Book.
