Reuven Shiloah - the Man behind the Mossad Book

I am long of frame and grumpy of disposition. Thus, when wedged into a bus seat during the inevitable holiday trip to the family, I find a well-done novel set during the grimmest moments of modern history really hits the spot because such a novel of this type can be both diverting and can pointedly remind that, however long and congested the New Jersey turnpike seems to be, it is not nearly as bad as European capitals were immediately after World War II.

So this year I read City of Thieves (set in Leningrad) on the way towards the ancestral homestead; this novel (Berlin) passed the time very satisfactorily on the way back.

The novels starts a bit of the busy side, what with the swift introduction of a dead mobster-spy-dwarf in a steamer trunk, a gang of feral youth, a pet monkey, and sundry intelligence operatives and prostitutes, shoved onstage pretty quickly to get your attention focused. But soon things settle down a little and we're off on a nicely-plotted adventure in search, eventually, of the inevitable microfilm.

I read somewhere that, if a playwright mentions a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the last act. The monkey served that purpose here. In the last act, the monkey goes off, metaphorically speaking.

There's some nice post-modern writerly tricks in here too, including shuffling time back and forth and starting with a narrator who seems at first third-person omniscient but in the end turns out to be a character in the story.

Worth a read if a grim story is your thing. Of course, it's not really any grimmer than holidays with the family.