The Cellist a "New Cold War" Thriller

 

THE CELLIST (2021)

By Daniel Silva

HarperCollins, 458 pages

★★★★

 

 

 

Daniel Silva is a skillful writer of spy thrillers who usually situates his narratives within the ongoing struggles between Israel and their Arab and Palestinian enemies. In The Cellist though, he focuses on a different foe: Russia. It begins with the London murder of dissident Viktor Orlov. The stand-in Russian leader in the novel who ordered the hit–via packaged documents treated with a nerve agent–is clearly Vladimir Putin. British law enforcement has arrested Nina Antonova for the crime and the evidence looks airtig except that there is no logical motive. Nina writes for an anti-kleptocracy newspaper and is herself a dissident émigré.

 

This arouses the suspicion of Silva's hero, Gabriel Allon, a former super spy who now heads Israeli intelligence and can't fathom Antonova as a killer. It takes one to know one. Allon's the right man to investigate: erudite, a talented art restorer, an unapologetic defender of Israel, and (when need be) an efficient assassin. What he's not is a reckless cowboy; Allon operations are planned in meticulous detail. Silva's books are written with parallel care and intelligence. Not many writers would build a plot involving financial networks and Russian oligarchs with art, a cellist, and an apolitical philanthropist.

 

Allon touches base with Sarah Bancroft, a curator and business partner at London's Julian Isherwood Gallery. A painting, the Lute, comes to light that Bancroft thinks is a previously unknown Artemisia Gentileschi, a find that would send the art world into a frenzy. (Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter and is now recognized as the creator of works previously attributed to male artists.) Not coincidentally, Bancroft is a former CIA agent and her lover, Christopher Keller, an intelligence analyst.

 

 Allon also works on Martin Landesmann, a Zurich banker/philanthropist who heads an NGO, Global Alliance for Democracy. He's so pure that he has been dubbed “St. Martin” by admirers and critics alike. The final puzzle piece is the book's namesake, Isabel Brenner. Allon knows that if you want to catch a big fish you need potent bait. He's after a very big fish: Arkady Akimov, Russia's second richest man and the one who bankrolls Russia's leader. He happens to love art, classical music, and beautiful women. As one of the world's most accomplished musicians and a physical stunner, Isabel ticks the last two boxes very well. She also once worked for Rhine Bank (and with Allon).

 

It would be folly to try to get an agent close enough to kill Putin-not-Putin, so Allon’s plan is to send the Russian economy into a tailspin and somehow exonerate Antonova. The particulars are complex and need to be read to be appreciated, so suffice it to say things are done in steps via unwitting intermediaries. One of them is Rhine Bank, reportedly the world's most corrupt financial institution. Landesmann sets up a dummy investment group to breach Rhine Bank and its dealings with the Russian Laundromat, a pipeline for money to undermine democracy in revenge for the West’s role in the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

The Cellist features various intelligence networks and death-defying escapes. It is, admittedly on Silva's part, something of a revenge fantasy. If you read between the lines, in addition to the monomaniacal Putin stand-in, Rhine Bank is Deutsche Bank thinly veiled (which might actually be the world's most amoral credit/investment firm), and Arkady is a composite of numerous Russian sleazebags, one of whom is Putin's right-hand man Yevgeny Prigozhin. Silva has been outspoken in assertions that Donald Trump conspired with Putin to steal the 2016 election and that Trump and flunkies such as Q Anon, Paul Manafort, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and anti-Semite Mary Miller orchestrated the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Some of them appear in drag in the novel. Oh wait, they're already in drag! They masquerade as human.

 

The Cellist is a novel with many pieces. To be candid, Silva’s desire to expose real-world villains occasionally force-fits some of the pieces. Covid, for example, makes a guest appearance and is only tangentially relevant to the plot, though more so than the January 6 alt.narrative he introduces. Plus, if U.S. Intelligence was as good as Allon’s, Trump would be swaying from a gibbet by now. But give me a choice between a smart counterfactual approach and a cliché-riddled thriller and I'll go with the former.

 

Rob Weir