THE BLACK WIDOW (2016)
By Daniel Silva
HarperCollins, 517
pages
★★★
This is the 16th book in Daniel Silva's Gabriel
Allon series, though you need not have read any of the others to appreciate it.
For those who don't know Allon, he's an urbane, sophisticated, and deadly
Israeli master spy—think a more compact and domesticated version of James Bond.
In this novel, Allon is rumored to have been killed in his last assignment.
Actually, he's trying his best to be retired and is living a secluded life—a
necessity for a man every Muslim terrorist would love to murder—with his
Italian wife Chiara, recently born twins, and his other passion: art
restoration. He has no desire to
get back in the game and, frankly, he's getting a bit long in the tooth for
such activities.
Gabriel's plans go awry when he inherits a Van Gogh—the hard
way. An ISIS bomb explodes in the Marais district of Paris and kills dozens of
people, including the woman who entrusted her priceless Van Gogh to Gabriel.
French intelligence is paralyzed and Israeli intelligence wants Allon to
takeover for longtime head Uzi Navot, whom they view as past his sell-by date. This
sets the stage for a sprawling novel that takes us from Paris and Israel to
Beirut, Syria, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Washington, DC. Israeli intelligence
knows that something much bigger is afoot and Allon's job is to bring down an
ISIS cell headed by a mysterious figure known by his nom de guerre, Saladin.
This time, though, Allon needs information, not a daring
assassin. Little is known about Saladin except his penchant for recruiting
revenge-seeking "black widows," women who have lost husbands,
boyfriends, fathers, and brothers in the terror wars and blame Israel for their
heartaches. In short, Allon needs an insider. To that end, he recruits Dr.
Nathalie Mizarhi, a multilingual French Jew, and transforms her into Dr. Leila
Hadawi, a Palestinian black widow. It's a dangerous game for many reasons:
Mizarhi sees herself as apolitical, she'll be beheaded if caught, and even if
she's not, Saladin likes to turn female recruits into suicide bombers.
Allon is clever and his network strong, but is Saladin his
Professor Moriarty? The book's drama is gripping, Silva masterfully builds the
suspense, his characters have depth, and he throws in many unexpected twists
that take you places you wouldn't expect. For many readers, though, Silva's
politics will cause as much anxiety as his plot. In an afterword Silva pulls no
punches when asserting that that ISIS and much of the Muslim world is engaged
in a literal crusade against the West. The novel's U.S. president is clearly
modeled on Barack Obama, and Silva sees him as a naive fool who thinks the US
can ignore ISIS and disengage from the Middle East. The French are hogtied, the
British are inept, and the Dutch and Belgians are clueless about the severity
of the threats in their midst. Where analysts see dozens of terrorists hiding
in places such as the Molenbeek section of Brussels, Silva sees thousands. To
put it bluntly, The Black Widow is an
apocalyptic warning masquerading as a novel.
Is he right? I happen to share Silva's view that Obama's
worldview was/is overly optimistic, but it's also easy to tar Silva's as
hysteria bordering on paranoia. I'll get back to politics, but for review
purposes, how good is this novel? The answer, in my view, is that it's a mixed
effort—an assessment that is surely open to the charge that my own take on
terrorism lies between those of Barack Obama and Daniel Silva. Silva is a
skilled writer whom we must take seriously within the suspense/spy/thriller
genres. Past Gabriel Allon novels work very well in part because the dance
between heroes and villains operates within the relatable intimacy of personal
encounters-even when broader networks are involved. ISIS is a different lump of
gefilte fish. Saladin has a personality, but ISIS does not—it's more akin to
the swarm mind of the Borg in Star Trek.
Its objectives are nihilistic and annihilistic. Saladin aside, The Black Widow has too many villains
without faces. In addition, critical parts of the novel seem like something out
of the movie Independence Day.
Readers ultimately face questions of whether this is a work
of fiction, or a screed—a novel, or a call to arms. Silva tries to have it both
ways, but I am torn as to whether he has chosen the right forum to promote
mobilization. But then again, I am also torn between the feeling that Silva is
overly alarmist and the gnawing fear that maybe he's not.
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