Category: Novel Grade: A
When I was in junior high, we studied Texas history. I've read a lot since then about the early days in Texas and about the Alamo, San Jacinto, William Travis, Sam Houston, Davey Crockett and the other heroes of the War of Independence from Mexico. Back to junior high, I remember coming home one day and Mom asked me what we had studied that day. I was excited about the stories of the revolution. Mom got kind of a funny look on her face. You see, she grew up in Mexico and, to her, having received her early education in Mexico, the revolution I was so proud of was a rebellion; the heroes I thought were so cool were criminals, even terrorists. This was my first introduction to perspective as a major part of history. Usually, only the winner's perspective survives to become history, but widely different perspectives can create huge difficulties in trying to solve the world's problems.
And so, we come to Exile, Patterson's latest book. Let's dispose of the easy part first. Patterson is a great writer of what I'd call political thrillers. I've enjoyed every one of his books and this one is no exception. As a storyteller, he's terrific. This book is well paced, covers a lot of ground and has enough twists to keep you glued. Purely as a novel, I'd recommend this book.
A brief plot summary - the primary character in the book is David Wolfe, a well connected, Harvard-educated lawyer in San Francisco who is on track to enter politics within a few years and who, before ever running for anything, is already being talked about as possibly the first Jewish President. He's engaged to Carole, the socialite and politically active daughter of a Holocaust survivor with whom David has also become close. The skeleton in David's closet is a law-school affair with a beautiful Palestinian woman, but that's been over for almost 15 years. Carole and David host a small dinner for the visiting Israeli Prime Minister - a man who is the main backer behind striking a "land-for-peace" deal with the Palestinians. The day after the dinner, the PM is assassinated in a suicide bombing in the streets of San Francisco. A few days later, Hana, David's law-school paramour, is charged with complicity and David ends up representing her, effectively ending his political career. All of this takes place in the first 10% of this book so I haven't given away much that you couldn't get from the jacket cover.
To this point, it looks like Patterson has a good shot at bringing home another of his interesting, but not terribly important books. It'll sell well and everybody will love it. However, Patterson is looking for more this time. He's done painstaking research on the issues of the Middle East, traveling throughout the region and, obviously, listening closely to everybody who would talk to him. And here we get back to my junior high lesson on perspective -- we learn pretty definitively that common perspective is something that just doesn't exist there. The obvious variances are between the Israelis and the rest of the region, but what we see here is also the wide differences within the communities that make achieving a lasting peace so difficult. Both sides have groups that see the need to accommodate each other -- among the Palestinians there are those who are willing, supposedly, to leave Israel in peace if granted a country of their own; in Israel there are those who are, supposedly, willing to accommodate a dual state solution in order to secure Israel's borders. However, both sides also have the "God's will" groups - in Palestine, groups like Hamas, whose goals are built around the destruction of Israel, while in Israel, the right-wing groups that believe that God granted "Greater Israel" to the Jewish people and the needs of the Palestinians are irrelevant to that right.
What makes Patterson's book so affecting is that, rather than preach at the reader, Patterson sends his protagonist to listen and let's the reader overhear. By doing so, he personalizes all of the various perspectives. He listens to Israeli's who have lost loved ones to suicide bombers. He listens to Palestinians who have known no life outside of a refugee camp. He listens to settlers who will fight before they will abandon homes they believe are gifts from God. He listens to terrorists who believe they are fighting an occupying army. Frankly, it leaves the reader with very little hope of seeing a Middle East peace in our lifetimes.
I almost never use quotes from the books I talk about, but I'm going to here. Fairly late in the book, David is meeting with one of his Israeli contacts and summarizes what he's learned:
- "You know what amazes me, Zev? It's that so many Jews and Palestinians don't give a damn about one another's stories. Too many Palestinians don't grasp why three thousand years of death and persecution makes Jews want their own homeland, or how suicide bombings alienate Jews and extend the occupation. Too many Jews refuse to acknowledge their role in the misery of Palestinians since 1948, or that the daily toll of occupation helps fuel more hatred and violence. So both become cliches: Jews are victims and oppressors; Palestinians are victims and terrorists. And the cycle of death rolls on."
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