Head of Zeus, 2022, 558 p

The author has previously displayed his middle Eastern background in a couple of books, Central Station and Neom, and his Jewish heritage in A Man Lies Dreaming but as far as I know he has not up till now examined the state of Israel. As I was typing it I intended that that last sentence contains a pun. Because here we have a kind of history of Israel from 1974 to 2008 – of its existence as an entity and of its situation as a nation. For as much as it is anything this is a “condition of Israel” novel, or at least the condition of Israel between those dates. Then again, it seems from the outside that its circumstances as depicted here have only been exaggerated in the times since.

In a series of incidents taking in a set of beachside rapes and murders, forced confessions, observations on venal or predatory (or both) politicians and army high-ups, kidnappings, extortions, drug running from Lebanon’s Bekaa valley with the apparent connivance of the Israeli Defence Force, networks extending to Colombia and the US, accompanied by a host of murders/executions, a varied cast of flawed characters, Chief Inspector Cohen, who talks in quotations – usually biblical but sometimes Shakespearean – fellow cop Eddie Raphael, small-time crook Benny, budding journalist Sylvie Gold, cop’s son Avi Sagi plus Nir Yarom, navigate their ways through an underworld of violence, mayhem and exploitation of the surrounding land. All is interspersed with details of prevailing styles of music on the radio or TV and underpinned by the overwhelming presence of drug dealing and gangsterism.

As it says on the backcover, Maror is a Jewish ceremonial dish of bitter herbs which is eaten during the Passover, symbolizing the bitterness of the Israelites’ enslavement by the Egyptians. The long history of the Jews since has emphasised that they have little need of a ceremonial dish to remind them of persecutions through the ages; engendering a natural desire to return to their roots and have a homeland of their own – with all that that means.

At one point Benny thinks of the quote from Ben Gurion, “We shall only have a true state when we have our own Hebrew thief, our own Hebrew whore, our own Hebrew murderer.” Maror indicates Israel has those in spades, a bitter harvest indeed.

Towards the end of the book Avi hallucinates a man saying, ‘In every time and in every place there must be someone to speak for the soul of their nation.’ The overall narrative here might imply that the utterly compromised character of Cohen is actually that man. (Or is it Tidhar who in this book is trying to fulfil that role?)

The epigraph to the last chapter, as if said by Cohen, is, “Fashioning a new nation demands sacrifice.” Here there are sacrifices aplenty. Maror, the novel, could be read as a warning to be careful what you wish for.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian. “‘What this?’” (‘What’s this?’,) “‘Did you use to do that, too?’” (‘Did you used to …’,) non-descript (one word; nondescript.) “He felt hands envelope him” (envelop him,) “Esther Landes’ private diaries” (Landes’s.) “‘What did you do with?’” (‘What did you do with them?’.) “The clock on the well” (on the wall,) Yitzak (Yitzhak,) Offer (elsewhere it’s spelled Ofer,) Genghis’ (x 2, Genghis’s,) “attached to it was brand new Brutalist building” (attached to it was a brand new…) “I’ve had gun pointed at me before’” (‘I’ve had a gun pointed at me before’,) “the sound of mortar” (of a mortar, or, of mortars.) “Then then car slowed down” (Then the car slowed down,) “laughing at though the idea was absurd” (laughing as though,) “official stationary” (stationery,) “plate of humous” (x 2, plate of hummus,) Yosef (elsewhere always Yossef,) Pincohet (Pinochet,) “in a dark clouds” (in a dark cloud.) “She folder her notebook” (folded.) “Even in in the Soviet Union” (has one ‘in’ too many,) “back in Israel had had detested that time between two and four when the shops closed” (has one ‘had’ too many.)

Tachyon, 2018, 264 p, plus Mem>iv p Preface, 3 p Historical Afterword, and 2 p Afterword by Warren Ellis.

Taking as its inspiration an expedition by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and Nahum Wilbusch into Africa in 1904 seeking out a possible homeland for the Jews, and Herzl’s own utopian novel Altneuland (Tel Aviv in Hebrew: and yes it did give its name to that city) which he set in a peaceful Jewish state in Palestine with equal rights for Arabs, Unholy Land imagines what it could have been like if both had come into being. It is also a meditation on the treacherous call of home.

Here, that homeland in Africa, on the borders of Uganda and Kenya, came to pass. It is called Palestina and viewpoint character Lior Tirosh, a writer of crime novels, was brought up there. When the novel starts, he is making the journey from his present home in Berlin, on the suggestion of his agent with the hope he might write something on the political situation there. Unlike in the similarly (though unhistorically) inspired The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, there are tensions between the Jewish settlers and the original inhabitants, paralleling the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Israel of the reader’s reality. A wall is being built to keep terrorists out. (Of course, as one character says, it serves equally well to keep Jews in.) Tirosh himself witnesses a suicide bombing of a bus.

This aspect of the novel is an Altered History where the Holocaust never happened and (in an aside) Hitler was assassinated in 1948. There are too, allusions to stories Tirosh either has written or might write which, in our universe, Tidhar has actually written – Osama and one featuring Hitler as a private detective. The sections following Tirosh are told in the third person but it soon becomes apparent that these passages are being written by a Special Investigator Bloom who also contributes first person sections to the book. To complicate things further there is a third strand, written in the second person, describing the calling back to service of a special agent, Nur Al-Hussaini, who, like Bloom, has travelled between various realities via what Bloom calls a crosshatch and she a sephirot, places where the boundaries between the worlds blur and crossover can occur. Depending on which reality you inhabit the city Bloom ruminates on can be thought of as Jerusalem, Ursalim or Yerushailam.

Of this unsteady landscape Bloom says, “people think of reality as immutable: solid and reassuring, that it is true merely because it is there.” But, “The world is the sum of what it could be, what it might have been and how it could have been.” Of his calling he says, “There are always borders, and there are always those who guard them lest they fracture.” Tirosh experiences the blurring slowly, in the end all but forgetting his connection to his world and agent in a quest to find Deborah, a niece who has gone missing from Palestina.

It is a measure of Tidhar’s skill as a writer that this all makes sense as you read it. Jewishness is obviously of salient importance to him (naturally enough, since he is an Israeli.) The place of Jews in this world is problematic at best. He puts this into Bloom’s thoughts, “That is the condition of being a Jew, I sometimes think – to always be one thing and another, to never quite fit. We are the grains of sand that irritate the oyster shell of the world.”

As well as being an intensely readable thriller if you care to look at it that way, Unholy Land pleads the case for somewhere, in one of the realities, being a place where that last sentence no longer holds.

Pedant’s corner:- “a row of cars … were queued up” (a row was queued up,) “for the people seek retaliation” (for the people to seek,) “and its fruit were skulls” (its fruit was,) “the lay of the land” (lie, it’s ‘lie of the land’,) “over an irritant embedded it in the host body” (no need for that ‘it’,) “when a different peoples had to share the same land” (omit the ‘a’,) “‘you are nought but the ephemera’” (nought = zero, the number, and is not equivalent to ‘nothing’: ‘you are naught but the ephemera’,) “body wracked with painful coughs” (racked.)

Tachyon, 2016, 277 p.

Central Station is a giant spaceport situated between Arab Jaffa and Jewish Tel Aviv. The incidents of the book occur under its shadow but the station itself is curiously absent from the narrative, we do not see inside it as such, it is merely a backdrop.

The book is filled with a multitude of Science-Fictional concepts, a kind of mind-vampire known as strigoi; robots yearning to be human; characters with augmentation; a third essential component of a human along with sperm and egg, the node seed, enabling people always to be in connection; a family, the Chongs, with memories passed on from generation to generation. The text is also sprinkled with references to previous works or authors of SF. There is an Elronite Centre for the Advancement of Humankind, mentions of Louis Wu, Jubjub birds, sandworms, the Up and Out, Mother Hitton, Shambleau, Glimmung, all of which will be decoded easily by aficionados. And the cover is not without its button-pushing charms.

The setting is a welcome antidote to the mainly US-centred concerns of the genre up to recent times and Tidhar deserves appreciation for championing SF from outwith the usual sources.

However, there is something disjointed about the book as a whole, no ongoing narrative drive, as there is little by way of plot. This is perhaps due to the book’s prior incarnation as a set of stories sharing the same milieu (and characters,) published in different outlets between 2011 and 2013 – with two original to these pages. This is not an objection that could be levelled at the same author’s Bookman Histories nor the other novels of his I have read, Osama and A Man Lies Dreaming, but it is a hindrance to full engagement with the text. There is, perhaps, just too much going on, not enough exploration or development of the individual ideas to give a completely satisfying whole.

He is an author to look for though.

Pedant’s corner:- On the map at the beginning; chryogenic (cryogenic.) Otherwise; Mama Jones’ (Mama Jones’s,) a missing full stop at the end of a piece of direct speech, automatons (strictly, automata,) Venusian Fly Trap (this being SF it might be Venusian but the earth-bound version is a Venus fly trap.) “She had hid” (she had hidden, plus a later instance of “had hid”,) sunk (sank,) a greengrocers’ (a greengrocer’s,) moyel (I’ve only seen this before as moyle,) “could convert food and drink into energy” (um; no. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; only transformed from one kind into another. Food and drink already contain [chemical] energy, bodies convert that to heat, movement, electricity etc as required,) lacrimal apparatus (lachrymal,) “a simulacra” (one of these is a simulacrum, several instances,) a full stop where a question mark was required, “reversed engineered” (reverse engineered,) mazal tov (several instances yet later is in the more familiar form “mazel tov”.)