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THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM
by Matt Beynon Rees
Houghton Mifflin, January 2008
272 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 0618959653


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Omar Yussef teaches history in a girls' high school run under UN auspices. He is not a popular teacher in some quarters. Protected by his affiliations with a large and powerful local clan, he fails to follow the dictates of political orthodoxy. He seeks, admittedly with slim success, to teach his charges to examine the evidence before forming an opinion, for if they do not take control of their own lives, then someone else will do it for them.

It is not a position that recommends itself to his boss, an uneasy American named Steadman, who wishes chiefly to ingratiate himself with the Palestinian educational authorities and to avoid the suggestion that he is insensitive to the local culture, about which he knows depressingly little. In addition, the schools inspector once got Omar Yussef fired from his job at an elite boys' college; now he seems after his job at the UN school.

What Omar Yussef would like best of all would be quietly to mind his own business, which is teaching, and stay as aloof as possible from the swirling currents of violence around him. But this will prove impossible. First, the husband of a young ex-student of his is killed; then George Saba, a Christian antiques merchant whom Omar Yussef had taught in the early days of his academic career, is arrested as a collaborator, accused of having betrayed the young man to the Israelis. Finally, the dead man's wife is herself found slain, the apparent victim of an honour killing.

If something is not done, and promptly, George will be executed, a prospect that Omar Yussef cannot abide. He therefore embarks on a risky course – to prove George's innocence and, even riskier, to implicate the leaders of the local Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, whom he believes to be not, as they style themselves, heroes of nationalism but plain murderous thugs.

Beynon Rees, a Welsh-born former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, has remarked that he turned to fiction from journalism because fiction provided him with the opportunity to get to the heart of what he knew about the Palestinians in a way more conventional journalism did not offer. He certainly provides us here with a rich sense of the realities of daily life in this city on the West Bank that has a Muslim majority, a large, if dwindling, Christian minority, and at least one significant Jewish holy site.

The author takes no apparent position regarding the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel and certainly in no way romanticizes the activists in the struggle. The Israelis, in their almost random appearances, are crude, rude, and violent; the Martyrs Brigades are greedy killers; the ordinary Palestinians do what they can to remain alive; the Christians keep their heads down and try to stay out of trouble.

Through all this, Omar Yussef, an ordinary man in many respects, retains an extraordinary decency and an unshakable belief, bolstered by neither religion nor political commitment, that what he does matters. In this way, the novel forms part of that small but valiant sub-genre of crime novels that, like Dan Fesperman's Bosnian stories, insists that even when violent death is commonplace and almost unremarked, murder cannot be overlooked.

As Omar Yussef concludes: "It was a mistake to believe that detection was a matter of figuring out what had happened in the past and then taking revenge for it. He understood now that it was about protecting the future from the people who committed evil and who would do so again." It's difficult to imagine a better moral justification for crime fiction than that one.

Note: THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM is published in the UK as THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS; the second in the series, due out next month, is titled A GRAVE IN GAZA in the US, and THE SALADIN MURDERS in the UK.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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