Predictably, the more of these I read, the more comparisons I tend to draw. Here we have a novel set, like Lionel Davidson’s “A Long Way To Shiloh”, against the backdrop of Arab-Israeli conflict, with the Arabs as the bad guys, though Eric Ambler’s milieu is considerably more realistic. We also have a novel deeply immersed in the world of industry and commerce, like Mary Kelly’s “The Spoilt Kill”. And of course we have another novel by Ambler, last encountered in 1959. I enjoyed that one, and said I would read more Ambler. Well, now I have, and the news is mixed.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about that last Ambler one was the structural control, the way the novel built and peaked and relaxed. There is rather less of that here. The novel starts with thirty pages or so consisting mostly in a dump of information—not really exposition, more a sort of primer on the political situation in the Middle East and the complicated nature and structure of the protagonist’s business operations. That’s spread across a chapter and a half, one voiced by the protagonist (Howell), the other by a journalist (Prescott). These two mostly alternate throughout the book, though there’s rather more of Howell than Prescott, and a third character rather oddly gets one chapter to speak her own brains. It’s far from a mess, and the story does tick along nicely when it gets going, but it’s much less masterly than that 1959 novel.
The story is about how Howell comes to aid a radical Palestinian group in their efforts to wreak havoc in Israel. We’re given to understand at the beginning that he’s been tried in the court of public opinion and found to have done this willingly, and that what we’re reading is his attempt to show that he was forced into it. This is an interesting setup that might lead to some compelling ambiguity, especially with the two narrators, but it becomes clear soon enough that Howell’s version is essentially correct and he’s been unfairly excoriated—at least, we’re not given much to suggest otherwise.
The whole thing unfolds in a way suggestive of a thriller, but with rather too many of the points of action signposted in advance to be truly thrilling. Mostly, we’re not waiting agog to see what happens next; we’re waiting to see how exactly the things we already know will happen come to happen. That said, there is skill here, for sure. Ambler is a good writer; the prose is tight, the knowledge of geographical and commercial area becomes rather more lightly worn after those first thirty pages, and there’s at least some residual doubt about Howell left hanging at the end, which feels like where the novel should land. I enjoyed the thing well enough, but the promise of the setup and the evident accomplishment of the writer suggests it could have been rather better.