Treachery In Turtle Bay Book

"Where does history begin?" Less than ten chapters into Richard North Patterson's Exile, this question looms poignantly over the entire thesis of the book. To be up front, I must be one of the last people in the country to read a book by this author. To be even more up front, I have been avoiding his books because I had him confused with a very mediocre book by James Patterson called The Beach House. I realize that is tantamount to confusing a book on politics by the late Woodrow Wilson with my book on Sid Meier's Civilization, but I'm confessing so that you can feel my surprise.

Even when this book was given to me with an "I know you'll like it" affirmation from someone who knows my taste, I placed it far to the bottom of my "to read" pile and rotated it to the bottom on several occasions. Did I really want to read a thriller so close to the kind of terrorism that impacts us every day from color-coded threat alerts, allegedly foiled terrorist plots, invasive airport searches, and the like? There was a time when I had a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and even hosted a student in my home over the holiday break when his institution's dorms closed for Christmas (probably inexplicable to him, though he heard about the real meaning of Christmas from me and participated as much as he wanted with our family). But that was decades before 9/11 and a place in my heart has hardened since those events. There is no trust, no fundamental assumption of integrity or even humanity. Oh, to be sure, I meet plenty of Muslims in my work and I have no mistrust of them as individuals, but my entire political persuasion has changed. I do not trust them as a political entity.

Okay, bias accounted for. Now, on with the show! Exile does a marvelous job of touching on the very emotional underpinning of the Israeli-Palestinian situation from both sides. One character struggles with his secular Jewishness while seeking to understand, even love, another character that can never forgive either the Americans or Israelis for atrocities committed in 1948. A supporting character whispers in tears that if Israel ever ceases to exist, all Jews will perish (p. 58). A major character complains that her family was converted overnight into an Arab minority in a Jewish state of the outside world's creation (p. 18). For one group of characters, history began at Auschwitz ("At that moment, I knew that the most important thing that would ever happen to me had happened before I was born." (p. 61). For another group, it began in 1948 ("For Hana, the date was the flight of her family in 1948'as with Carole, she was marked by events she had never witnessed." (p. 62). He touches on the former news media bias toward Israel as a potential terrorist said, "Even our deaths were about Jews and their feelings." (p. 66). Patterson does a terrific job of balancing sympathy and keeping the events in perspective from an emotional level.

I also resonated with the idea that Arabic culture is a "shame" culture as opposed to Jewish (and Christian) culture which is a "guilt" culture. Think about that for a while and it will blow your mind. Does this suggest, as Patterson implies, that the public ethic and faith is more important than the private or that the public ethic presupposes the private faith? I'm sure most Arabs would assert the latter, but Patterson's book suggested (and some of my personal observations suggest) the former. This is far more than I expected from this book.

On another level, I was very intrigued by the premise of the book. Patterson could have simply made this a "torn between two lovers" book (as it is in many ways), but it seems like the human relationships, particularly the man and woman relationships, ring very true. I have read in the pop psychology books that one leaves/keeps something with every sexual partner'not only biologically but emotionally. My wife is even more hard-nosed in her observation. She says that every person you've slept with or wanted/want to sleep with has power over you. By saying this, she didn't even refer to Jesus' warning about "adultery in the heart" that caused presidential candidate Jimmy Carter so much grief, but she was certainly congruent with Jesus' statement. Sexual relationships have power and power can be used for good or evil. In Exile, the protagonist's university affair had already had significant consequences well before the events portrayed in this thriller. To me, that was a very honest aspect of the book. I particularly liked the expression toward the middle of the book (p. 260) where the lovers were said to have had fingerprints left all over them.

Some of my favorite lines from the book (those that do not provide spoilers) include the following.

First, the speech by the Israeli prime minister who (I don't think it's a spoiler if it's written on the book cover) is later assassinated to progress the plot. He said:
"There are some Jews who are so consumed by the tragedies of three thousand years that they cannot see the sufferings of Palestinians. There are some Palestinians that are so blinded by the suffering of sixty years ago that they cannot acknowledge the suffering of Jews. Today, Palestinians call the day of Israel's founding the 'day of catastrophe,' marking it with the moment of silence with which we, on our Day of Remembrance, recall the victims of the Holocaust." (pp. 98-99)

Second, when describing the fundamentalists of the so-called Christian right and their attitude toward Israel as a catalyst for the "end-times," Patterson described Israel as "the canary in God's mineshaft." (p. 208)

Third, describing the impact of the trial on the attorney protagonist: "I don't want to talk about myself…as though I'm some spare part. The world is filled with spare parts. But also with families, some of whose members see each other for who they are, and even tell the truth." (p. 556)

And, of course, I can't resist revealing a funny typographical error: "Under federal law, killing a foreign leader is publishable by death." (p. 110)

If there is any room for criticizing this book, I suspect that it would come under that old canard of predictability. Sometimes, one feels that the main mystery or the mysteries in a book are far too easy to solve. In this case, there are multiple mysteries: identities of handler(s) and security leak(s), motivations (personal and public), and opportunity (a vital part of any case). I will confess that I figured out the identity of the handler and the main motivation fairly early, but that (as I would contend is the case in any good mystery) I was caught up in a myriad of alternative possibilities that kept me in doubt through about two-thirds of the book. I believe that was definitely sufficient and should mitigate the accusation that it is a very predictable book. Yes, overall, Exile is predictable, but within its episodic sections there is sufficient unpredictability that it seemed alive to me. In many ways, it reminded me of those times as a teenager when I blitzed through geopolitical thrillers like Fail-Safe and The Ugly American.