The Tunnel by A. B. Yehoshua (Halban, £12.99)

A B Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem in 1936. He is one of the last of that great generation of Israeli writers born in the 1930s that included Aharon Appelfeld, Joshua Sobol and Amos Oz.

His most recent novels are about characters approaching old age. In The Retrospective (2011), an Israeli film director in his seventies attends a retrospective of his films. The Extra (2014) tells the story of an elderly widow trying to choose whether to live out the rest of her life in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Yehoshua’s new novel, The Tunnel, is about Zvi Luria, a road engineer in his seventies, trying to deal with the onset of dementia.

All three novels are about old age, but they are also about Israel, the past and history. Luria’s wife persuades her husband to offer his services to a younger engineer, Asael Maimoni, to help with a project to build a secret road for military use in the desert, in southern Israel.

The two men embark on a series of road trips to work out where the planned road should be and whether it would be better to build a tunnel rather than knock down a hill of historic importance. They visit Ben-Gurion’s grave: “Silently they read the names and dates engraved on the stones. Two births for Ben-Gurion: the first in the diaspora; the second, the real one, the date of his aliyah to the Land of Israel.”

Later, Luria works in an office where there’s a photograph of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of Israel, and the novel has a number of telling references to the Six-Day War.

Like many of Yehoshua’s novels, The Tunnel moves between two stories. The story of the central character, Luria, and his family, concerned about his worsening dementia, and the story of Israel and its troubled relations with the Palestinians and its past.

The plans for the secret road and whether to build a tunnel or knock down the hill become a metaphor for different ways of thinking about Israel.

It’s a story about two generations. Maimoni and Luria’s son represent the new, young Israel. Luria and Maimoni’s father, represent the old Israel born around the time of Independence. But there are also two other Israels: one of cities, engineers, medicine and technology; the other of deserts, Palestinians and small villages.

What starts as a novel about a man’s dementia and memory-loss becomes a story of national memory, with crucial references to the Lebanon war and Rabin. Luria can no longer drive because of his dementia. He is offered a lift. He says it’s fine to drop him off at Yitzhak Rabin’s grave. “‘You mean the memorial monument?’ ‘Of course, only for the memory.’”

David Herman is a senior JC reviewer