Shining Through, by Susan Isaacs

Susan Isaacs’ book, Shining Through, has a bad reputation, primarily because the movie version–by most accounts–sucked. Even though I kind of liked the movie, I can only watch it when I’m sick or other wise not in a critical mood. I’ve always been kind of curious about this book, especially after I read on Wikipedia that the movie omitted about three-quarters of the book. I spotted a copy of this book in my library’s book sale items, which are kept near my work area, and asked to borrow it.

Shining Through is the story of Linda Voss, a half-Jewish, half-German native of Queens New York. The first three-quarters of the book shows the love affair between Linda, a bilingual legal secretary, and her boss, John. The last quarter of the book (the move bit, essentially), is where most of the action is. Because of her accent and knowledge of German and Germany, Linda manages to become a spy for the OSS. It’s still over the top, but it’s a fun, mindless read.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this book (because it’s fluff), but I will say that having read the first three-quarters of the book doesn’t really add the to the story I knew. It does, however, make me like Linda a lot more. In the movie, Linda’s a bit bland. She’s brave and quick, but in the novel she’s wonderfully snarky and full of personality.

The Secret Servant, by Daniel Silva

Another long awaited sequel came out this summer: The Secret Servant, by Daniel Silva. This series follows part of the career of art restorer-Israeli assassin, Gabriel Allon, and is another book I recommend that you start at the beginning. There are two sort of trilogies in this series. Books 1 and 5 to the most recent deal with fighting Islamist terrorists. Books 2-4 are about what Silva called “the unfinished business of the Holocaust.”

The Secret Servant finds Gabriel again fighting Islamist terrorist seek to attack Israel and the United States. And, truth to tell, I find these books harder to read than the Holocaust novels. Maybe it’s because the Holocaust ended so many years ago and we’re currently engaged in fighting terrorism. More likely, though, it’s the way the terrorists are portrayed in the novels. While Silva gives a couple of sentences to saying that not all Muslims are terrorists, he spends an awful lot of time showing how ruthless, bloodthirsty, and uncompromising Islamists are. I’m not going to argue with anyone. I know there are groups in the Islamic world that want to kill Americans and Jews, and impose sharia on significant portions of the world. But I keep finding myself asking, where did all this hate come from?

I’ve been thinking about this question on and off in the week since I read this book and every time I find something to point to as a root cause, I think of something that happened earlier. It’s an endless cycle of violence all the way back to the Palestinian Mandate and there’s no end in site. Silva is very good about pointing out that the current cycle of violence is actually breeding a more violent generation of terrorists. And thoughts like this make me despair of there ever being peace, because it seems like there’s no way to make it stop.

The Messenger, part II

Pacing. When a writer does it well, you may not even notice. But when something it wrong with the pacing, you can tell. Either the story drags by or it sprints by so fast you might have to re-read passages to figure out what the hell just happened.

In the case of The Messenger, I felt a little of both. The novel started out at a good pace, with the plot just humming along. But around the middle, I felt like I was starting to get bogged down as the characters set up and executed their operation. As I got further and further into the book, I kept waiting for things to start to pick up like they usually do in thrillers. And, as usually happens with a book that takes too long to set up, the ending felt like Silva rushed it to make all the loose ends come together. Good book, but I couldn’t help but wonder why Silva would take such care to set up the main plot and then have the ending feel like an “Oh-shit-I-have-to-get-this-to-my-editor-tomorrow-where-did-all-that-time-go” ending.

Overall, this was a really good book that could have been better if the pace had been more even and the ending drawn out a little more.

The Messenger, by Daniel Silva, part I

The Messenger is the latest installment of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series, now six books long, about an art restorer who is also a counterterrorism agent and assassin for the State of Israel. I love this series, because its always about more than just danger and thrills like many espionage novels. Above all things, I think, these books are about the history of Jews and Israel. Books one, five and now six have been about the increasingly violent and seemingly eternal fighting between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East. Books two through four were about, as Silva describes in the author’s note of A Death in Vienna, the “unfinished business of the Holocaust” (p. 397 in the hardback version).

So far, I am really enjoying The Messenger and am on tenterhooks about what’s going to happen next. However, I am also hearing a lot of the recent political discussion about Iraq and Israel coming out of the various characters’ mouths. This makes it hard to enjoy the book just for the sake of its plot and characters, but I also think this book does a great job of showing all this sides of these debates. No doubt some critics, professional and otherwise, will take issue with this, and say that Silva sacrificed a great book to get these agendas across.

I think he did, too, at least a little bit. But I think that these issues are so important for the world we live in now that we need to stay informed anyway we can. And fiction has always been a great vehicle for political commentary. (Jonathan Swift, anyone?)

I am also impressed at Swift’s ability to write about things that are so relevant now, when surely he must have had to finish this book many, many months ago. His last book, Prince of Fire, suffered a little when the world changed just after Silva wrote it. (I have a short review I wrote last year that talks about this in more detail.) It’s an unavoidable problem for books, that they often become out of date as soon as they’re published.