The Cellist, Daniel Silva

Note: Spoilers follow for The Cellist, as well as some minor spoilage of The New Girl and The Order. Should this review have readers, they are cautioned about such.

Daniel Silva's master Israeli spy and assassin Gabriel Allon had an initial career as an artist and premier art restorer before being recruited into his nation's project of vengeance against the terrorists who kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As a restorer, his job is to clean and repair great works of art in such a way that they look as they did when first displayed, with no one the wiser that another's hand has touched them. As Silva has written him, Gabriel brought the same mentality to his espionage missions -- when things went catastrophically wrong for Israel's enemies the disasters appeared to have no origin or perpetrator. Perhaps the targets of his efforts -- those who survived, anyway -- knew their malefactor's name and steady green-eyed gaze. But no one else did, at least not in any way that could ever be proven.

Silva's style helped enhance this quality. Though Gabriel's missions may have featured violence, vehicle chases and episodes of high tension, he writes with a spare elegance that suggests a refined after-action report. Readers might have the impression they are reading the precise and carefully written mission debrief that ordinarily would have been seen by almost no one before being quietly tucked away in the vaults that hold the secrets of nations.

His two most recent outings were clearly subpar -- the ugly onstage fridging of a 12-year-old girl in The New Girl and the Dan Brown-wannabe plot of The Order might be acceptable output from lesser writers, but Silva readers had become accustomed to better work. Up through about chapter 60, he gives them reason to hope that The Cellist may be a return to form.

When Allon friend and Russian expatriate Viktor Orlov is found murdered by nerve toxin, suspicion eventually alights on the journalist who was passing him incriminating evidence that a large German bank was not only crooked through and through, it was a main player in Russian government officials' efforts to launder the profits of corruption and safely store them in the West. Eventually Gabriel, working with counterparts in other intelligence agencies, discovers not only the real actors behind the Orlov assassination but also the source of the insider documents. That source, Isabel Brenner, is turned by Gabriel and his team into the point person of a scheme to disrupt the flow of money into the west and block Russian efforts to destabilize Western economies. The title The Cellist is taken from Isabel's superb talent on that instrument, which she uses to open the door to the inner circle of the Russian schemers and oligarchs. Though Isabel will have the chance to aim at the very highest levels of the Russian government -- and Silva all but names Vladimir Putin -- the danger to her will be exponentially greater. Gabriel and his team will have to wield all of their skills to complete their mission and protect Isabel, and the dual tasks may yet be too much for them.

Over the course of the Gabriel Allon series, Silva has developed his most regular collaborators as a kind of Mission:Impossible squad whose operations write large the former Mossad motto, "By way of deception shall you make war" (a loose translation of Proverbs 24:6). In the onion-like layers of the Allon team's schemes, their foes' own faults burrow them in too deeply to escape -- and when they turn to confront the enemy that brought them there they find only air. The Cellist sets up such a scenario, although repeating some very similar earlier missions involving Sarah Bancroft and Natalie Mizrahi. Still, Silva helps keep the interest in what would otherwise be a familiar plot by exploring Isabel's character and developing her so that readers care about what happens to her. And then it all falls apart.

The first 3/5 of The Cellist cover Isabel's actions as Gabriel's inside agent in the Russian financial scheme. Silva drops in snide drive-by shots at "the American president" who is unnamed but clearly Donald Trump. Spy thriller authors usually create fictional leaders for nations, either to give them the characteristics needed for the plot or to avoid outdating their novel, or to prevent the sometimes jarring comparison between their depictions of events and the way those events are known to have unfolded. Silva's use of Putin as the actual Russian president doesn't really weaken his plot, since the main target and antagonist is a fictional associate. And his turned-up nose at the former president appears intermittently and might slow the narrative, speed-bump style, but only briefly before accelerating back to cruising speed.

But once Isabel's mission is resolved, Silva turns to the real-world events of Trump's loss in November, his unseemly and increasingly unrealistic attempts to prove he really won the election, his ghastly and unpresidential behavior on January 6 and the fever-swamp conspiracy of groups like QAnon. He mixes them to create a second storyline about Gabriel's discovery of a plot to assassinate the incoming president -- an unnamed longtime politician who just happens to be a senator from Delaware "called upon to heal a sick and divided nation" in the "twilight of his life" -- spawned by Russian agents and secret schemes. This choice wrecks The Cellist and moves it from the middle of the Allon books in quality to the bottom tier. It's akin to taking an unspectacular but well-done piece of art and setting it before a class of pre-schoolers while still wet and encouraging them to do whatever they wanted with it.

In his acknowledgments, Silva says he "resolved to include the near death of American democracy in my story of Russia's relentless war on the West" after the January 6 Capitol riots. He replaced his existing ending with an extensive rewrite finished over six weeks, and it shows. It's not impossible to create a story with identifiable but disguised stand-ins for actual politicians and leaders that interprets known events and facts but still entertains while it enlightens. Whether that can be done by Daniel Silva in six weeks or less remains unknown, because it didn't happen in The Cellist. Our narrative of Russian oligarchs and political leaders spinning webs of financial corruption and self-enrichment in exclusive hotels and resorts is suddenly invaded by Silva's assertions of QAnon's machinations and snickering put-downs like "a universally loathed and poorly groomed senator from Texas who had attempted to overturn the results of the election." I have no idea how many people dislike Ted Cruz although I suspect it's a sizable figure and I agree his beard has been a bad look -- but so what? He has no relationship to the story I started to read when Sarah Bancroft happened on Viktor Orlov's body, and neither does any of the other clumsy mix of reportage and speculation that Silva trowels on his modestly successful story of Isabel Brenner's clandestine ensnarement of the Russian kleptocracy.

When we get to the place where Silva broadly insinuates that the unnamed-but-obviously-Donald-Trump-President of the US personally called the unnamed-but-obviously-Vladimir-Putin President of Russia to inform him that Gabriel Allon had placed an agent in his circle, we move from Trump's clueless carelessness about intelligence matters making him a useful meathead for America's opponents to him being an active asset for the same. This sheer wish-fulfillment by Silva lets readers know that they have essentially wasted their time following Isabel and her infiltration because it's all a set-up to inform them Donald Trump is bad. Many people knew that already. Even many of the people who voted for him twice -- your reviewer is not among them -- knew that already. We didn't need Daniel Silva to trash a perfectly enjoyable spy novel to tell us.