Review: Vivien Horler
The Bitterness of Olives, by Andrew Brown (Karavan Press)
For the author the situation must be bitter-sweet. His seventh novel, published in 2023, is about Gaza and Israel and the situation in the Middle East.
It is set during the third intifada – the time of the (first?) Trump administration, the European Union’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the increase in settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the regular appearances by Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa Mosque/ Dome of the Mount during Ramadan.
But this novel came out just before Hamas’s vicious attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and gives a terrible and poignant insight into what is happening in Gaza and Israel today.
What could be better for an author to have his work this relevant and yet, judging by the content of this novel, author Andrew Brown would not have wanted this for the world.
The scenes described are only too familiar to people who watch international news today. A ceasefire that expires, border control that will not allow meaningful supplies of aid into Gaza, a kibbutz child on a swing wounded by a device fired from Gaza, a Palestinian farmer killed by high-calibre machine gun fire while trying to reap tomatoes from his field.
“The cellphone video footage on Al Jazeera was shocking, but they were the only network to show it….
“Both sides prepared themselves for the inevitable and waited for the trigger. What did it matter from whence it came? One side would always say it was the other. But it would come, for sure. There was no other way to live.”
It’s hard to believe this was written before October 2023. But perhaps that’s just because it was only then that most people in the wider world sat up and noticed what was going on.
The novel is chillingly prescient, and yet what is happening now is levels worse than it was then. Then, Israel’s aim seemed to be subjugation, today it seems closer to annihilation.
Brown, an award-winning, Cape Town-based author who is also a practising advocate and an SA police reservist, has tackled some other international issues in his novels, yet I think this one really touches a nerve.
It’s a detective story, and a story about friendship and betrayal across lines of loyalty.
Avi Dahan is a retired Tel Aviv detective long estranged from his former colleague and friend, Dr Khalid Mansour, who works in the police mortuary. In those days Khalid and his wife Jasimah were among a dwindling number of Arabs based in Tel Aviv, but Jasimah persuaded her husband to move to Gaza, where they can be of real use to their people.
Both Avi and Khalid feel somewhat at adds with their respective backgrounds, as though neither really fit in.
But Khalid’s reluctant decision to go to Gaza is partly fuelled by his outrage at the way an investigation into the death of an Arab street boy is unfolding. Khalid tells Avi if the boy had been Jewish the Israeli police would never have covered up his death. Ari is deeply offended by the allegation.
And now, out of the blue, Khalid has phoned from Gaza, asking for help with a case.
A woman living in a Gaza apartment block has been killed in an Israeli strike that morning. The body is brought to Khalid’s hospital for certification, where he notices something odd. She smells of putrification, indicating that she was dead before the rocket strike on her apartment. Even odder, in her hand she is clutching a scrap of paper bearing a Jewish pesach prayer.
Why would a Palestinian woman living in Gaza be apparently reciting a Jewish prayer?
Khalid can think of only one person he can to turn to for help in solving this puzzle – Avi.
And so the two are in touch again, with years of distrust and animosity between them to be set aside, for now.
To read this book at any time would touch the reader’s emotions. But now it is all so much more harrowing – yet so worthwhile, as it brilliantly does fiction’s job in taking you where you might never otherwise go.
- The Bitterness of Olives is on the fiction longlist for the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards.