Review: Silent Servant by Daniel Silva

Last September. I read Daniel Silva's sixth novel about Gabriel Allon, semi-retired spy-assassin, and felt compelled to write a review, trying to explain how it moved me. Action and suspense abound, but Silva produces serious fiction with a serious purpose. Silva keeps the pressure on the reader as well as his characters as there are important lessons to be learned and vital history to be remembered. In prior novels, Allon addressed the actions of Swiss bankers during World War II, neo-Nazi interference in European elections and the plunder of Jewish-owned art by the Nazi regime with the cooperation of Swiss bankers. In his past novel, "The Messenger", Silva explored the Vatican's alleged inaction in World War II and the Holocaust. He also asserts that the primary source of terror in the Middle East and Europe is the Saudi family.

Silva's newest novel is, in my opinion, even more exciting and thrilling than his previous works.

Without giving away any of the many twists and turns of the plot, Allon is given a routine assignment: travel to Amsterdam to purge the archives of a murdered Dutch terrorism analyst who also happened to be an asset of Israeli intelligence. But once in Amsterdam, Gabriel soon discovers a conspiracy of terror festering in the city's Islamic underground, a plot that is about to explode on the other side of the English Channel, in the middle of London.

The murdered analyst had been the author of several studies with the view detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders. His last book, The Islamic Conquest of the West, had argued that Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault, he maintained, was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the ­not-­too-­distant future, Islamic law, or sharia, would reign supreme. The terrorists and the colonizers were two sides of the same coin, he warned, and unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the freethinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.

Allon discovers a plot to kidnap the daughter of the American ambassador in London and the bulk of the novel describes how Allon and a handful of associates attempt to locate and save her. The locales are Washington, London, the North Sea coast, Israel and other cities in Europe.

As in the earlier books, Silva takes time to explain Middle East politics. He quotes British Intelligence officials as acknowledging impotence in fighting Islamic terrorism in the U.K., noting that recent terror attacks were committed by British residents, not terrorists from outside.

Again in this novel, the Saudi regime is held to be the primary financiers and supporters of al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist threats to Europe. Their aim is to cause sufficient rioting and unrest in Egypt to have that country's leaders overthrown in favor of a theocracy.

During the course of the story, Allon decries torture as non-productive and something that lowers the torturer to that of pure evil. Yet, when confronted with an alternative that is not acceptable, he reluctantly tortures. He states that sometimes killing is necessary for survival or the survival of Israel, but not "with troops on the ground" as the United States is doing in Iraq, but secretly so as not to encourage more martyrs.

I have previously written about the S.S. St. Louis. The story of that Voyage of the Damned makes these fictional exploits of Gabriel Allon a must reading.