A Palestine Affair (Paperback)

The year is 1924, and the setting is Jerusalem. Mark Bloomberg, a disillusioned London painter, has just arrived in Palestine with his wife, Joyce, an ardent Christian Zionist sympathizer. Like so many new immigrants to the British mandate, they are thrown headfirst into their volatile surroundings when they witness the murder of a prominent Orthodox Jew near their Talpiot cottage.

When suspicion falls on an Arab boy by the name of Saud, Mark is spirited away on a painting commission to the wonders of Petra in Transjordan, and Joyce is left, literally, in the arms of Robert Kirsch, the British policeman investigating the case. The novel thereby adopts the double entendre of its namesake, and its plot develops amidst the cultural, religious and political tensions between Jews, Arabs and the British.

"A Palestine Affair" plays out not as a detective story, but as a collage of character interactions against the swirling browns, pinks and reds of one of Bloomberg's paintings. As a Washington Post review said, "the book's real center isn't 'whodunit?' but 'what am I doing here?'" In the end, the reader might just ask the characters exactly what they were doing in Palestine in the first place.

What's good about the novel? Its depictions of British Mandate Jerusalem, where you can easily envision the Sudanese doorman at a Jaffa Road hotel, and smell the raw sewage flowing above ground near Meah Shearim. What's bad about the novel? Its overabundance of embarrassing sex scenes and the feeling that you will have after reading 257 pages, wondering if there shouldn't have been better closure for the characters and the story they told.

Despite this though, The Palestine affair, is still an interesting and exciting mixture of three part love affair, espionage thriller, and murder mystery, using the history of Jews, Arabs and the English occupation of Palestine as a vivid backdrop - there is no doubt that Wilson has an immense passion and cultural understanding of this part of the world and it shows in his work. And like the artist Mark Bloomberg, Wilson writes as though he is painting a scene, and he really succeeds in bringing the sounds, smells and gorgeous visual imagery of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas to life, just Mark tries to do in his paintings. Some of the descriptions of the desert are stunning, lushly detailed and incredibly cinematic - just beautiful to read.

This story also does a good job in evoking the kinds of troubles and religious conflicts that were facing Palestine at the time of the British occupation, and it does a fine job showing the "culture clash" between the Jews, Arabs and the occupying British, and the British's almost flippant attitude towards the different cultures of the area. You can see how many of today's troubles between the Israelis and the Palestinians have been festering for years and also how they both seemed to seethe under British rule. If you really want to have a cultural escape and by educated about this part of the world, you should read this book. But The Palestine Affair also works as a good, solid piece of work and a first rate literary thriller.

Michael