Talk show host Hugh Hewitt has been promoting Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon spy novels for some time, so I finally tried one. I’m happy to report that Portrait of a Spy is an excellent novel, well-written, well-plotted, with engaging, believable characters. I highly recommend it, while at the same time confessing that I probably won’t be reading any more in this series. My reasons are not aesthetic or moral or political. More below.

Gabriel Allon is a skilled, even legendary Mossad agent whose working cover is his vocation as an art restorer, one of the best in the world. At the start of this novel, late in the series, he has at last broken his ties with Israeli intelligence, and is living with his beautiful wife in a secluded cottage on the Cornish coast. He’s excited about his latest commission, a recently identified lost Titian masterpiece.

And then one day, while visiting London, he witnesses a suicide bombing, one in a series of such bombings across Europe. He is drawn into the hunt for the masterminds, first back with Mossad, and then with the CIA as well. Their plan to locate and destroy the enemy involves a wealthy young Arabian heiress who has come (they’re pretty sure) to hate the jihadis.

No plan, as the generals say, ever survives contact with the enemy, and there are betrayals and deaths (and frustrating CIA political meddling) before the job gets done. It was all very suspenseful, and even moving.

Portrait of a Spy is a very good novel and (according to my lights) pretty much entirely on the right side of the issues. I recommend it highly, with the usual cautions for language, violence, and adult situations (not explicit).

The reason I can’t go on with the series is that I discovered something in reading it that I should have realized long ago. I’m just uncomfortable with spy stories. That world of deception and betrayal is tremendously stressful for me to think about. I could never live that way. I’m a very bad liar (not, I hasten to add, because of my high moral character, but because I just don’t do it well. My face gives it away). Spending time with espionage stories makes me uneasy.

You’re probably not like that, so you’ll very likely enjoy it.

My friend Robert Mullin sent me a manuscript of his novel Bid the Gods Arise a while back, and I read it and provided the following blurb:

Bid the Gods Arise possesses the music of epic and the color of myth. It’s a big story, spanning planets, but with a specific human heart. Once read, it lingers in the mind like a dream.

It’s not uncommon for me to receive manuscripts from people who’d like me to read and comment on them. It’s very rare that I can say much good. Bid the Gods Arise is an exception. A genuinely original work, it combines fantasy with interstellar travel far more successfully than you imagine it could.

The story involves two young men, Aric and Maurin, who are kidnapped from their home planet by interstellar slave merchants. Separated and sent to very different fates, they meet again at last and join with a company of others on a quest which involves both Aric’s true destiny and his greatest temptation.

This is a really good book, a Christian fantasy novel with no preaching. I recommend it.

“They [the previous generations in the region] had edges and angles, rough sides. You could get hold of them, you could tell what they were. And they weren’t always on the make; they already were something. They weren’t just getting to be something else all the time. They were already human beings.”

“You make them sound pretty ideal,” Magruder said without irony.

“It’s the truth.” She lifted the glass uncertainly to her mouth, she was a little tight. “If it isn’t, it ought to be. It’s what I remember.”

“Really, though, weren’t they pretty ignorant and backward – insulated?”

“All right if they were,” she said. “It’s not any better now; everybody’s insulated now – from everybody else. And still ignorant too; it’s just different, it’s all inside. And everybody’s hiding it; that’s why they look so slick. Do you know what we are? Scared; everybody is.”

America does have fine Christian writers in its recent history, beyond Flannery O’Conner and Walker Percy. It’s just that nobody knows about them. The works of Madison Jones were recommended to me, and I sent away for A Buried Land. It’s a very dense book – written with tremendous craftsmanship, with layers and layers of meaning and symbolism down to the bedrock, which is pretty far down.

Percy Youngblood is a smart young man in a small Tennessee town. When we meet him it’s before World War II, and he and his friend Jesse are working for the Tennessee Valley Authority, helping to build a dam that will flood Percy’s family farm and many others. Percy’s at odds with his father, who can’t see the point of destroying a way of life he likes just fine, in order to create a world he doesn’t want in the first place. Percy takes up with a local girl cast off by his friend Jesse, with unplanned consequences that leave him and Jesse carrying a shared, guilty secret.

After a hiatus in which Percy serves in the war, he returns home to take a job in a local law firm. As he tries to fit in with the town’s progressive set, he’s haunted by his guilt, and terrified because a certain person has come back to town – someone who may or may not suspect him and Jesse’s crime. As in every tragedy, the very actions he takes to protect himself work to his destruction.

A Buried Land is a true work of art as literature, and a harrowing Purgatorio of guilt and sin. It’s a hard read though, because there’s no whimsy here; no moment of relief. The downhill road is a long and oppressive one. Also, I fear that today’s readers will miss the point. Instead of locating the sin in Percy’s heart and actions, they will blame the Puritanism of the times, the laws of the times, and sexist oppression. Which is too bad, because there’s much to learn from this book.

Recommended, if you have the stamina for it. Adult themes, but no major language or explicit scenes to complain of.