ByDavid Herman, David Herman
1 min read
ByDavid Herman, David Herman
By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Pushkin Press, £12.99
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen made a great impact last year with her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, a very human story about love and secrets, set against the background of present-day Israel. Waking Lions has a similar theme: how distant we can be even from our loved ones. Her characters have secrets that they can't or won't share, with consequences that will define their lives.
Eitan Green, the central character of her new novel, is a young, up-and-coming, Israeli neurologist. He is happily married to Liat, a police detective, and they have two young children. But Green has a secret. He has killed someone.
We are told what happened on the first page of the novel. Green is driving his SUV in the desert. He is driving too fast, late at night after a long exhausting session at the hospital. He runs down an Eritrean man and drives off without telling anyone. But the man's wife finds Green's wallet by the scene of the crime and comes and finds him.
Waking Lions falls into two halves. The first 180 pages develop this situation. The wife blackmails Green and he has to make a choice, which ends up threatening both his home life and his professional career.
Is the doctor a good man? Can someone be good even if they do one bad thing? Where will his lies take him?
The second half is very different. It becomes a fast-paced thriller, full of dark, moral complexity. There are Israelis, Eritrean illegal immigrants and Bedouin gangsters. There are drugs, rape and violence. And suddenly roles are reversed. It is hard to tell who are the good guys and the victims, and who are the baddies.
Amid all this, the writing becomes more and more interesting, inviting you to keep turning the pages as you get sucked into the plot. But you suddenly begin to realise that the novel turns on three couples, each with a dark story, involving either lies or terrible violence. It also turns on four kinds of space: Green's home, a place of love and domesticity; the hospital; the desert, a place of violence and death; and a fourth place which becomes increasingly significant.
Gundar-Goshen is a fascinating talent. She doesn't have a great turn of phrase but she's a brilliant story-teller, moving between plots and sub-plots with a gripping cast of characters.
And, like the best US, Israeli and Scandinavian TV dramas, she can take a straightforward genre - the thriller - and use it to explore big moral and political questions about secrets, lies and race in modern-day Israel. As the bodies pile up and the lies deepen, we enter a new genre: Israeli noir.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen will be talking about 'Waking Lions' at Jewish Book Week on February 28. David Herman is the JC's chief fiction reviewer