Surprises are the most surprising thing about Phillip Kurata's new novel, The Israeli. You can never predict the plot twists. In a nutshell, to paraphrase the song from Nat King Cole/Natalie Cole, the book is unforgettable.
The Israeli, based loosely on the true story of a spy for Israel, Eli Cohen, takes the reader through a hair-raising ride through Egypt, Israel, and Syria, among other places. The book is 506 pages long. And it is long. It's full of minute details about the early life of Cohen in Egypt and how he eventually is assigned to spy for Israel against its bitter enemies in the Middle East.
Because of its length, it serves as a reminder of Leo Tolstoy's 1,174-page opus, War and Peace. When War and Peace was about to be published, Tolstoy suddenly remembered, "The yacht race! I forgot to put in the yacht race!"
That won't happen with The Israeli. In this book, the author doesn't appear to leave anything out. Like a Russian novel where the reader is introduced to its many characters, you have to remember at first who's doing what with who.
What's exceptional about The Israeli is though it's based on ancient mutual tribal hostilities between Arabs and Jews, it has a universal application to ask why and how enemies around the world have learned to hate each other. Kurata's novel traces the source of the Arab-Israeli divide and whether that hate can ever be healed.
One surprising turn about the book is that Cohen, working undercover in Syria, becomes great friends with those he's asked to spy on, almost to the point he's more comfortable with them than with his own countrymen in Israel.
What's clear about the book is the author's intimate knowledge of Middle Eastern mores and customs, having lived and worked in the region for a number of years. Though the action takes place in the 1960s, it feels as contemporary to today's hostilities in the Middle East. Unfortunately, nothing much has changed since then.
The enemies still want to kill each other, even if they might not even remember why anymore. It's like the American version of the Hatfields and McCoys, who on the Kentucky-West Virginia border share an age-old grievance against each other even when the descendants of the two families have forgotten the original source of their bitter feud.
As you continue reading through the book, and without giving away the plot, the tension begins to mount. The reader starts to wonder--will Eli Cohen's real identity be unmasked? You root for him and his new wife, and later his children, that they will stay safe. But if his spy role is exposed, what will happen to him?
The only reservations this reader might have about the novel is its slow start. It might try your patience. But if you stick with it through the formidable early chapters, you are rewarded for doing so. The tension builds to the point you viscerally feel it in your own body. If only for my blood pressure not to rise, I had to sometimes take a five-minute break from the book to calm down. I was almost afraid of what was going to happen next. As they say, a page-turner. A real thriller leaving you drained and emotional.
I rate the book a 4.8 on a scale of five. Not a perfect five, only because you have to wade through the book's aforementioned complicated and detailed beginning. It's a story you can't easily forget about even if you wanted to erase it from your memory banks. For this reader, that was the real surprise about The Israeli.
