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THE RIGHTEOUS MEN
by Sam Bourne
HarperCollins, August 2006
432 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0061138290


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

As all the world can Google, Sam Bourne is the pseudonym of Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland. The man himself has admitted this, in the pages of the Guardian and in a short prefatory note to this paperback edition of THE RIGHTEOUS MEN, Bourne's debut novel.

The said novel has been described as a sort of Jewish DA VINCI CODE; others have agreed that the Brown influence is rather conspicuous. Indeed, that's what I thought after reading the first half of Bourne's novel: a very cracked CODE, with a New York Hassidic Jewish conspiracy instead of an Opus Dei one.

However, the parallel is, thankfully, misleading. It's hard to say more without spoiling Freedland's tricks, but Freedland does much more than round up the usual suspects. He takes his protagonist, young Oxford-educated New York Times reporter Will Monroe, on a chase that will reverse all his assumptions -- and, probably, some readers'.

Bourne's character development is better than Brown's, and he laces THE RIGHTEOUS MEN with an acidic satire of American and, more subtly, British newspaper journalism. We can trust that Bourne writes what he knows, at least in this department.

Will is investigating a series of murders that have no apparent connections, except that the victims outwardly behaved like crooks, yet acted like angels. Then, his beautiful, much-loved, and first-time pregnant wife Beth is kidnapped and held for ransom.

The only clue to the kidnappers' identity is an email, which turns out to have been sent from a cafe in the city's Hassidic Jewish enclave of Crown Heights. Is it time to round up the usual suspects, or is something more complicated behind the kidnapping?

Will sets out to find out, with the help of a mysterious riddling email correspondent and TC, a former flame whose electric-blue hair, piercings, and bacon consumption clash with her Jewish origins. With their help, Will discovers that his crisis and the murders are related, and that only by finding the murderer can he save his wife and unborn child.

Some of this gets grating, fast. I was personally annoyed by the Madonna-and-whore contrast between Will's wife and TC, and thought that the brilliant, eclectic, and courageous TC seemed far more appealing than the expectant but otherwise undefined Beth. (Okay, she has a job. She's a shrink. Yet her only memorable dialogue constitutes shrieking about her baby hunger. Can she send herself to herself for counseling?)

Bourne gives readers a much clearer physical picture of TC than Beth -- through Will's eyes. There's a way that this story wants to go, and Bourne, fixated on a Madonna-and-child image, stubbornly takes it elsewhere.

As for the plot, it's suspenseful, in places. Characters turn out to have surprising backstories. At the same time, anyone who is familiar with a certain legend from Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, or with Andre Schwarz-Bart's novel THE LAST OF THE JUST, will know to what the title refers and a bit more about the murder motive than Bourne initially reveals.

Occasionally, Bourne's unwavering attachment to this myth got annoying, at least to this reviewer. I was not convinced that the 'righteous' of the world must all be men. Even if this is a time-honoured, respectable traditional belief of a bunch of guys who don't let their wives wear tank tops in August, empirical evidence of righteous women exists. Google "RAWA" if you don't think so.

Bourne also erroneously refers to the "medieval conformity of Hassidic lives". Actually, Hassidism was a reactionary movement founded by the 18th-century mystic Israel Ba'al Shem Tov ("Master of The Name").

Whilst secular Enlightenment ideas changed all the societies of Europe, the Ba'al Shem Tov and his adherents tried to return to 'ancient' ways, but, like all reactionary fundamentalist movements, what they created was a new idealisation of an unrecoverable past.

Medieval Jewish men didn't wear top hats, nor live in New York. And because the Ba'al Shem Tov's ideas were considered new revelations by his adherents and heresy by some of his Jewish contemporaries, they were anything but 'traditional.'

Still, THE RIGHTEOUS MEN is a respectable and entertaining novel, with some great twists: a seamless tapestry of folkloric imagery and modern scenario. I'm glad that Bourne has tried his hand at fiction. I hope he's considered this experiment a success.

And Audrey Tatou, with a cute dye job, would be perfect for TC.

Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, July 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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