I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the Guardian a few months ago, having been ‘lucky to see an advance proof’. Lucky? Well, he and Nathan Englander do share an agent, who perhaps noticed that Dinner at the Centre of the Earth just happens to take its epigraph from a novel by, er, Julian Barnes.
That’s showbiz, I guess; and in any case, a spot of sly boosterism rather suits this mixed-up tale of cloaked allegiances, which never quite supplies the facts you need to grasp what’s going on — at least not during the globe-trotting, time-toggling fug of the novel’s opening half.
In 2014, someone known as ‘the prisoner’ rots in a bunker in the Israeli desert; why, we know not. In 2002, a Berlin-based wheeler-dealer calling himself Farid offers his contact in — or under — Gaza to a suspiciously chummy Canadian electronics exporter keen to skirt customs in Cairo.
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