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The Fallen Angel (2013)
Daniel Silva
Harper ISBN
9780062073129
* * * *
Gumshoes used to be fairly uncomplicated. They were guys
down on their luck and just a cut above the thugs they stalked. To the degree
that they had back stories, they involved bouts with the bottle, letting down
their partners, and dames that jilted them. Not these days. Modern detectives
have complicated biographies and they spend less time getting info from street
rats than in using computers and having adventures more akin to James Bond than
to Sam Spade. Even by today’s standard, though, Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon
stands out. He also happens to be an art restorer and a longtime Mossad agent
who first came into view for helping track down and assassinate the Black
September scum that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
Islamists, in turn, murdered his own son and brutally disfigured and disabled
his first wife. Gabriel, like his archangel namesake, has delivered some
messages, though few receivers are likely to confuse them as having come from a
deity of choice.
Flash forward to sometime in the very near future, albeit a
dystopian one recently marred by a major Islamist terror attack that, among
many others, killed the pope. Gabriel finds himself living in Rome with his
second wife, the younger and seriously sexy Chiara, and he’s weary of Israel
and Mossad’s blood-soaked crusades of vengeance. He wants to retire and devote
all his time finishing the restoration of a Caravaggio painting, which he finds
transcendent. His daily trips to the Vatican also allow him to spend time with
an old friend, Luigi Donati–now Cardinal Donati, a key advisor to Pope Paul
VII. All goes according to plan until a Vatican Museum employee, Claudia
Andreatti, is found splattered upon the marble floor of the Vatican sanctuary,
after hurling herself off a catwalk just below Michelangelo’s famed dome.
Donati doesn’t think it’s a suicide and asks Gabriel to investigate, though he
tells him not to expect much cooperation. “Rule number one at the Vatican.
Don’t ask too many questions.”
Such a statement in a detective mystery is, of course,
Chekov’s gun. Naturally, Gabriel is
going to ask questions, and the answers he seeks will take him from Michelangelo’s
dome to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock by way of Berlin, Denmark, and Vienna. It
will also take him inside the shady finances of the papal curia, the dangerous
world of antiquities smuggling, the raw wounds of unrequited love, the
sanguinary lusts of both terrorists and the Mafia, and the labyrinthine folds
of paranoid minds. And it’s all bigger––much bigger––than the death of Claudia
Andreatti.
I have not read Silva’s previous Gabriel Allon novels, of
which this is number twelve. Luckily, that’s not a prerequisite, though past
readers will be more familiar than I with secondary characters such as Allon’s
mentor Ari Shamron, or his archaeologist friend Uzi Navot. The Fallen Angel is a true page-turner that’s about art,
archaeology, religion, and history–all set against the simmering backdrop of
hatred that is the Middle East. Several reviews have compared the book to The Da Vinci Code, though it should be
noted that Silva introduced Gabriel Allon before
Dan Brown dusted off Robert Langdon. It is fair, though, to note that Silva,
like Brown, often relies upon unlikely leaps of last-second logic and even less
likely escapes from certain doom in order to advance the plot and resolve
problems. I wonder, though, if such criticisms have much validity. Do we read
detective novels for accuracy, or for an adrenaline rush?
If you care about 100% accuracy, there has as yet been no
Pope Paul VII, nor have all the Black September operatives been assassinated.
Silva is right, though, to associate Black September with Fatah, though the
latter vigorously deny it. If you really want to critique Silva, it’s not that
he’s a Dan Brown wannabe or that he plays too loose with historical facts, it’s
that he clearly thinks most of what is coming out of the Muslim world is
dangerous and anti-Western to the core. He may not be wrong about that
either––I happen to agree that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and
Fateh are all peas from the same poisonous pod––but there are definite earmarks
of bias in that he always sees Israel as the aggrieved party and colors
passages with a convert’s zeal. (Silva was born and raised Catholic, but
converted to Judaism.)
The book’s faults notwithstanding, The Fallen Angel is such a good yarn that it’s easy to understand
why it spent such a long time on the New
York Times’ bestseller list. I have come late to the Gabriel Allon series,
but this one has inspired me to play catch up.
––Rob Weir
To get a sense of Seán Tyrrell’s latest, think Woody Guthrie
rated R. Like Guthrie, Tyrrell’s voice will never invoke adjectives such as
“mellifluous,” but it’s choked full of emotional honesty. Unlike Guthrie,
Tyrrell is far more direct and dark in discussing the seamier side of life. His
musical treatment of the Oscar Wilde poem “Reading Gaol” is so downright creepy
that when he sings, “each man slays the thing he loves” you envision Tyrrell
hovering in the shadows with a knife. There are lots of sanitized versions of
“Ringsend,” but Tyrrell unabashedly opens with the original words: “I will live
in Ringsend with a red-headed whore.” Then there are the songs that quake with
righteous anger, like his cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” and
“Black Hole,” Tyrrell’s take down of phonies. Yet, there are also moments of
unexpected tenderness–a delicate instrumental of “The Derry Air” (“Danny Boy”),
his clipped brogue rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” and the title track,
originally a late Victorian poem from Charles Dawson Shanly and one Tyrrell
picked up form his collaborations with Davy Spillane. Walker of the Snow is an album of many moods and much of
it–including a rendition of “On Top of Old Smokey”– feels like a throwback to
the days of the Folk Revival. One wonders, in fact, if eighteen tracks aren’t too
many in an age in which music is often purchased a la carte rather than by the
platter, but at least there’s something for everybody. Rob Weir
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