In less-exciting news, I wasn't terribly keen on Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair and doubt that I will ever read another book by him again. Granted, thrillers aren't my usual genre but I picked this one up when I saw the plot hinged on a favorite subject of mine, looted art (and the controversies that often lie behind it). But in the end, I felt like this was just a poorly disguised politics masquerading as fiction - and if I wanted to read a one-sided view of the Middle East crisis, I would have picked up something that said it on the cover. Just say what it is, you know (ahem, Skinny Bitch)?
Apparently the hero of previous Silva thrillers, Gabriel Allon is a now-retired Israeli spy and assassin who is happily living in Cornwall, resting after whatever awful thing happened in the last book (something with Russian arms dealers, I gathered). However, as these things happen, he gets sucked into a new case when a sort-of former rival is murdered, and Allon's friend, art dealer Julian Isherwood, confesses he's on the hook for $45 million after not insuring the Rembrandt painting that the murderer stole. So Allon goes looking for the painting, finding a Dutch Holocaust survivor whose father owned the painting, which leads him to the son of an SS officer in Argentina, which leads him to a grand conspiracy puppeteered by a noted humanitarian-financier in Switzerland.
None of it was very suspenseful, partially because Silva has this really weird narrative technique of reassuring the reader that everything will be fine before a big event. “She would never be told, however, they were the former and present chiefs of the Israeli secret intelligence service” (322) is one tiny example but in context, I knew at the outset that the "she" in question would survive her task and live to be debriefed...which seems to take away the thrilling aspect of the thriller. Silva used this calm, detached voice multiple times so I never questioned that everything would work out just fine. Come to think of it, I don't there were any casualties in this book, aside from the initial victim.
But mostly, this just felt like a PR tract about Israel, a very simplistic rendering of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. I think the Author's Note at the back supports this interpretation; Silva harrangues the entire nations of Germany and Switzerland in this almost sarcastic voice. And I'm sorry, but it’s just not that easy - and frankly, I'm getting a little tired of these really simplistic renderings of a very complex issue that have infiltrated the general understanding. At his point in time, there are no clear-cut heroes or villians in the Middle East conflict; both sides have done some awful things. Whatever else you believe, this is a fact. I think it's fine for Silva to advocate for his point of view - it's essentially the tack Dan Brown has taken towards the Catholic Church - but this seemed less out in the open, and I resented it. With Dan Brown, I think you at least know what you're getting, and that's all I really ask.
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