Unholy Land

Using the Kabbalah's concept of sefirot, or mystical and creative forces that change the world, as a framework, Tidhar creates multiple tantalizing and richly detailed worlds through which his characters slip. Following three characters who have slipped between various worlds, in which a Jewish homeland has been established in differing places and through differing means, the novel is both a mystery and a meditation on the appeal of "what-ifs" and "might-have-beens" to readers, writers, and politicians.

Unholy Land was one of those books that fit a whole lot of things I love into one book. Noir, science fiction, alternate history, political/social/historical commentary, existential crises, all that good stuff.

It was, from the start, quite pulpy and does set itself up as a kind of contemporary detective story. We follow a writer, Lior Tirosh (who has a lot of real world similarities to Lavie Tidhar) as he returns from Berlin to his home country Palestina, a Jewish state in the middle of Africa. Slowly we realise that nothing is quite what it seems to Tirosh as his memory becomes muddy and his actions confuse those around him. We begin to understand the world that he left behind in Berlin is not quite the same as the one he's now entered in Palestina. And before long, Tirosh falls into a kind of reluctant hero-detective narrative as he searches for a missing niece but of course that isn't straightforward in the least either.

The book blew me away for a lot of reasons. There's a lot of moving pieces to the story and Lavie Tidhar handles it all like a virtuoso. How he plays with alternate histories and the questioning of what history even means, how history is just a convenient narrative we impose upon chaos, was particularly an idea that appealed to me.

And the way Tidhar handled using 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person narrators in a way that wasn't confusing and didn't grow tiresome, as a writer, floored me. Rather than just choosing a POV for the sake of it each one serves a purpose and functions as yet another way to view something, which plays back into the whole alternative history/what-does-history-even-mean thing. Wonderful.

As an example, the third person narrator is one that feels as though we're all pretty indoctrinated from a lifetime of reading to think of as a reassuring one. But here it becomes more sinister. At least it did for me. It made me think it had an agenda all on its own and I began to question what version of reality/history I was really being told and by whom.

I just loved this book and I'm looking forward to reading more by Lavie Tidhar.

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lior Tirosh, the main character in Lavie Tidhar's novel, may as well be the author. I mean, the author certainly seems to think so, both being more or less a self-described semi-successful pulp-fiction writer of SF, and like writers being in their own stories, they tend to go absolutely nuts on the imagination bits.

Well, at least, the good ones do. And guess what? He's one of the good ones. :)

This book wears several hats and unlike a normal hat-trick, this one does it gently enough that we barely even realize we've gone from a noir mystery in an alternate history to jump headlong into an existential crisis across multiple Earths where neither memory, history, or selfhood is set in stone.

Add to that the wonderful little twist where this is a history where Isreal never happened, where the grand refuge takes place in Africa... a thing that really and truly MIGHT have happened... throw in the Zohar and wonderfully interesting quasi-religious ideas that drive the Qabbalah, including the words of God and reading the Torah from a prism of different experiences and world-building viewpoints, and we've got a much deeper reading experience than anyone might assume from a first glance.

In fact, even tho the actual tale is fun to follow and only gets more and more interesting even as it amps up the bloodshed and deeper mystery, it deserves another read-through for the subtext. It's not just about the Jewish condition although that is a big part. It's about identity on a much deeper level.

I only read Central Station before this and both are very different beasts, but neither of them is lightweight or pulp in nature. Indeed, I'm rather thrilled at how many levels both succeeded.

Unholy Land is probably BETTER than Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union, by the by. The other had them all retreat to Alaska and this one had them wind up in Africa, but the true joy isn't in the location. It's in everything. :)

Oyou to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this thought provoking book. The story's premise is based on an expedition taken in the early 20th century, the goal of which was to found a Jewish homeland in East Africa. In the book itself a man, whose name is so close to the author's that we know we are entering territory that overlaps Tidhar's life, leaves Berlin on a trip to see his ailing father in Palestina, near Uganda. Tirosh is an author of fantasies and mysteries and as he travels he seems to suffer an odd sort of memory loss. Once he reaches the land where he was born he becomes enmeshed in unexplained murders and intrigue. There is social unrest surrounding a wall being built to keep the former natives of the land out of what is now Palestina. The story asks questions about boundaries, particularly the artificial ones of countries or constructed walls. At one point a question is asked of the main character: Do you think the world is real? And if there is more than one reality, whose to say which one is the real one or the better one?

Tirosh is asked why he writes fantasy. He replies that "stories don't predict the future....(they warn) about what the future could become." In the afterward the author reminds us that as much as we readers and writers love our fantasies with often hopeful solutions to human struggles, we live in this world with no easy answers.

Unholy Land was well written and even when I wasn't sure whose voice was telling the story I was totally absorbed. I highly recommend this book and suggest readers keep their eyes open for surprising clues throughout the book.

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar- This book is a historical fantasy based on the premise of "What If", and concerns how small changes can make a lasting difference as they alter the Future. The author in his introduction explains that when he was growing up in Israel, there were folk tales told about an effort to build a Jewish State in Eastern Africa that never came about. Then he begins his story in the fully developed African nation of Palestina, in the present day, which also has no Israel, and the German Reich is alive and well. The main character, a pulp writer is searching for his niece, stumbling around a country he grew up in but barely remembers. At every turn he is followed by people from different backgrounds and allegiances. Mostly they want to kill him, but he does not know why, and he doesn't understand why he has confusing memories of a different world that appear then fade away. He finds that there are many possible futures and he can slide in and out of those worlds while still being pursued across a ghostly landscape.

I doubt that I'm doing justice here to a very entertaining and engrossing story. The concepts are intriguing and Lavie Tidhar's comfortable, stylish writing is well paced and engaging. He changes POV quite often and it can be a bit jarring at first, but only the important characters get their own reality. You get used to it, so you know at once who is speaking. As with his last book, Central Station, I recommend this book.

There was a time in my life when a book described as "literary science fiction" would have caused me to run at full speed in the other direction. I don't run away from it any more, but I don't necessarily run toward it, although it can be argued that most of what I read and review these days is much more literary than I might be willing to let on. But I will run toward the work of Lavie Tidhar, whose work contains literary qualities that would make your high school English teacher (well, mine, anyway, since in the mid-1970s genre fiction was to be avoided at all cost) nod with approval while at the same time paying homage to the ideas of science fiction of old. Tidhar's last novel, CENTRAL STATION, was a novel that nodded toward the old traditions while telling the story with modern literary sensibilities. And he's done it again with UNHOLY LAND.

The novel uses the actual historical event of an expedition to Africa to take a look at some land that was under consideration to be a site for a Jewish homeland. In this way, it is somewhat reminiscent of Michael Chabon's THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION, but that idea of an alternate Jewish settlement is about where the similarities end. While Chabon's book remains grounded in reality - only qualifying as genre because of its alternate history aspect (although I would argue that the book is not really science fiction in anyway, although it was a brilliant novel) - UNHOLY LAND, when all is said and done, takes the reader in a completely different and unexpected direction that is unmistakably genre.

At the beginning of the novel, pulp author Lior Tirosh is traveling from Berlin to his homeland, Palestina, in East Africa. Things are a little bit odd right at the very beginning, but when he goes to talk with his niece, he discovers she is missing - well, missing as far as he is concerned, anyway; no one else seems to be worried about her. Thus, the novel starts out as a fairly straightforward detective story in an alternate history setting. And yet, it is not all *that* different fromour world of today. Palestina is in conflict with a neighboring state, and a wall is being built to keep intruders out (I don't for a minute believe that Tidhar was thinking about the current situation in the United States when he wrote this, but it sure makes for an interesting thought experiment).

There's a lot of stuff going on here that is very meta in nature. Tirosh feels as if he himself is a detective in one of the novels he's written. Tidhar leads the reader into thinking that Tirosh is actually Tidhar himself; there is mention of Tirosh having written little, unknown books such as OSAMA and CENTRAL STATION. He even refers to looking for a book called UNHOLY LAND in a shop, a book that he himself wrote.

But, as I said earlier, there is much going on that leads the reader and Tirosh to believe that something is amiss, and this is where the book changes from a detective story to an all-out interdimensional genre tale. The book quite literally changes from one story to another in such a way that is seamless. It's one thing, and all of a sudden it's another. At the beginning of the novel, I was wondering what it was Tidhar was getting at; it certainly didn't seem like genre to me. It was a bit slow to get moving as well. But once that twist is revealed and the transition made, the book was really a page-turner as it made a mad dash toward its completion.

Once again, Tidhar has written a gem. It truly is a book that your high school teacher would approve of you reading. But since when have you needed her approval to read anything? You'll give yourself all the approval you'll need when you've finished reading it.

I closed the book--or rather swiped to the last page on my iPad--and my first thought was, I want to read this again. Now.

Because Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar took me on a crazy ride across genres and space and time and I want to do it all over again.

I read Tidhar's Central Station last year after my son raved about it. So I was expecting Science Fiction. But Unholy Land transcends genre, encompassing alternative history, noir mystery, and time-travel sci-fi, with social and political commentary (not so unusual in sci-fi, of course), so in the end, it transports the reader into an imagined alternative reality AND reflects on contemporary world politics. Add the "wink wink" self-referential nods and existential discussions on the nature of reality, we also get humor and philosophy.

In one work of fiction. And I think I missed some things.

So, yes, I want to read it AGAIN.

Tidhar was inspired by a true story of forgotten history. In 1904, the Zionist movement leader Theodor Herzl was offered land in Uganda as a Jewish homeland. Three men went on an expedition to survey the territory. One became separated and at journey's end, reported fertile land and while the other a saw desert. The idea was abandoned. Tidhar's novel considers the implications of establishing a Jewish homeland predating the Nazi regime.

The main character Lior Tirosh (note the character's name, so like Lavie Tidhar) slips through to an alternative reality. He doesn't realize what has happened, but he is tracked by two people who have been through the portal and lived in other worlds. He becomes embroiled in a battle to control the portal and prevent overlaps in realities.

Tirosh questions, what is history if not an attempt to impose order on a series of meaningless events, just as a detective must piece together a story from conflicting tales.

Don't expect escapist genre fiction, readers, for in Unholy Land we learn in all the worlds possible walls will be built and some will be cast into the outer darkness.

"Lavie Tidhar is a clever bastard, and this book is a box of little miracles." Warren Ellis, Afterword Unholy Land

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

This book works in a meta cognitive fashion, sweeping and engaging in a cultural sense. There is fine characterization here with a protagonist like no other.

There are notes or writers like Orhan Pamuk, but also uniqueness.

Lavie Tidhar – Unholy LandLavie Tidhar follows up his 2016 Mosaic Novel/Short Story collection Central Station (John W Campbell winner, Clarke shortlist, and book of the year for me) with Unholy Land, an alternative history concerning a Jewish Homeland in Africa which turns out to be much more more.

It's not as light, not as dancingly sparkling with ideas and concepts as a lot of the former is, but at the same time it's maybe heavier, worthier, loaded with thought-provoking takes on identity, the fluidity of reality, and weighty moral questions which are exhibited rather than discussed or preached.

It starts simple enough, though – we follow one Lior Tirosh (a thinly disguised alter ego, it appears), a moderately successful writer of 'inconsequential fantasies' in some personal crisis, as he is headed to Ararat City, Palestina. Which is set in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley. And so we know we are in an alternative history – or, to be more precise, in a world where the Wilbush expedition to British East Africa returned a different report, had a different outcome, and a Jewish state, a Nachtasyl, was created instead of the country we are familiar with. At first this is, like all such conceits, mightily disorienting. We see Palestinians, who speak Judean, and a culture which inevitably has taken on parts of the area it has settled in and the people it displaced, whilst retaining a lot of the tensions and drivers that brought it here.
But back to Tirosh – he is here to visit his ailing father, a general and famous figure, we learn later on. But instead he gets, more or less from the go, caught up in strange happenings involving Border/Secret police, multiple agencies following him, murder (it's actually an attempt on his life which catches an acquaintance), a disappeared niece who campaigned for the rights of the native population, a builder who builds the wall designed to keep the terrorists and suicide bombers out... it's a fascinating and dizzying world, and you get absolutely no time to get used to it before the action kicks off.

“Then he asked you if you thought the world was real”



And just when you think you know where you are with the premise and the setting then the story takes a sharp turn into the leftfield. Tirosh is a damaged man – not just from the loss of his son and his wife, but there is something else. He comes from “Outside”. He has visions of other worlds, of concentration camps. We see several agencies who work across different worlds, across possibilities. We learn that the wall has other aims than simply keeping Suicide Bombers out. That time can run differently on the Outside. There is more, so much more, and most of it only gets hinted at, is never explained or barely shown. And boy would I have wanted to see, learn, read more.

“The world is the sum of what it could be, what is might have been, and how it could have been”

The story is told through the eyes of the protagonists – and the viewpoint frequently shifts fluidly between them which can be rather disorienting; and occasionally it does so in ways evidently designed to actively mislead the reader. Tidhar also heavily uses foreshadowing, giving the reader (sometimes misleading) information advantages, again occasionally, purposefully, and skilfully misleading us.

I was surprised at how little there is here in terms of looks, skin colour, racial origin. It's not that book entirely omits this, but given the setting I would have expected more variety warranting comments, descriptions, and assignations. This is a minor quibble – what bothered me more was that we learn so little about the parallel worlds, the sephirot, and how they hang together; how people travel between them; who this mysterious Border Agency is which seems to look after some of it; or also the rather mythically infused final denouement, which I found to be a bit of a let-down after all that had transpired.

Still, this is great and all too short book, delivering much more than it originally promises, and for this alone it deserves your attention.

Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer, who has spent long periods of time in South Africa, Laos, and Vanatu, and who is now living in London. He writes across genre boundaries, and is the author of the World Fantasy Award–winning novel Osama, of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station, in addition to a number of other books and many short stories.

More Lavie Tidhar

Title: Unholy Land
Author: Lavie Tidhar
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: Tachyon
Publisher URL: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Publication Date: October 2018
Review Date: 180925
ISBN: 9711616963057
Pages: 196
Format: ePub
Topic: Alternate History
Topic: Parallel Worlds

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Lavie Tidhar tiene un claro fetiche con las historias alternativas. Desde el anhelo de lo que pudo ser (o la revancha) en «A man lies dreaming» hasta el triste y melancólico inmovilismo de «The violent century» (siendo estas novelas sólo dos ejemplos), el autor israelí parece deleitarse con el ejercicio intelectual de imaginar posibilidades. No os voy a engañar: mientras que con otro autor/a esta obsesión por un tema o una estructura podría hacerse cansina, hay algo exquisito en las historias de Tidhar, aun compartiendo claros late motivs, y que me hace disfrutar como un enano. También es cierto que es lo suficientemente consciente de su propia obra como para encarar cada libro de forma distinta y original.

¿A qué viene esta chapa introductoria? Pues a que quizá por sinopsis, y para alguien que ya haya leído algunas de las obras que he citado en el párrafo anterior, este «Unholy land» pueda no resultar tan atractivo a primera vista: Lior Tirosh es un escritor de novelas pulp que, debido a un suceso traumático que nos acompaña de manera difusa a lo largo de la novela, vuelve a su país natal para descansar y pasar página. Ese país no es otro que Palestina, pero no la Palestina que conocemos. En 1904, Nahum Wilbusch, un joven judío de origen ruso, encabezó una expedición a una región al norte de África para juzgar la viabilidad de que un territorio, supuestamente no reclamado y que sería cedido por los británicos, se convirtiese en el nuevo hogar de su pueblo.

Esto es historia; como también lo es que Wilbusch falló en favor de los «Holy Landers» —un grupo que sólo veía con buenos ojos la ocupación de Jerusalén— y el proyecto fue abandonado. A partir de aquí, como cualquiera podrá imaginar, comienza la ucronía. En la novela, este informe fue muy favorable y finalmente esta Palestina imaginaria se convertiría en el estado oficial de Israel. Al regresar a su hogar, Tirosh descubre de manera desagradable que su sobrina ha desaparecido y a partir de aquí la novela tiende más hacia el género negro (al menos momentáneamente).

Como iba diciendo, me gustaría desterrar ese pensamiento de que «esto es más de lo mismo» de la mente de cualquier posible lector. ¿Me dejas intentar convencerte?

Otro elemento clave en la obra de Lavie Tidhar es la experimentación salvaje con los recursos formales de su arte. En esta novela, eso no podía ser distinto y lo apreciamos desde el mismo nombre del protagonista: Lior Tirosh. Este personaje es un trasunto descarado de Tidhar y a lo largo del libro incluso se le atribuyen con bastante gracia parte de sus obras; se hace con «Osama», por poner un ejemplo, o con «A man lies dreaming» (aunque de forma distinta y muy divertida). Además de este elemento meta-literario, que aunque divertido, no deja de ser algo a mayores, otro recurso interesante es la elección del narrador: una arriesgada mezcla de primera, segunda y tercera persona que evoluciona a lo largo de la novela y que, a pesar de resultar algo extraña al principio, a medida que se avanza en la lectura va cobrando significado. La verdad es que me ha parecido un poco innecesario. Si bien agradezco que un autor/a pruebe cosas distintas, en este caso me parece que aporta poco para lo mucho que complica las cosas (y lo mucho que se las tiene que haber complicado al autor).

Como he dejado caer antes, no estamos sólo ante una historia alternativa. La historia —en la que al principio podríamos apreciar de forma clara la rima con «A man lies dreaming»—, se va tornando cada vez más fantástica; creciendo la especulación y la crítica social conforme esto ocurre y ampliando la riqueza de la novela más allá del mero ejercicio intelectual de la ucronía de partida. La prosa de Tidhar es elegante; evocadora y bella sin caer en lo barroco; precisa a pesar de las complicaciones que su propia elección de narrador le impone. Su pluma acompaña divinamente este in crescendo, creando una atmósfera de extrañamiento cada vez mayor que consigue transmitir con la habilidad suficiente como para que el lector no se quede por el camino.

No quiero contar mucho más porque la gracia de la novela es ir descubriendo todo lo que esconde Tidhar detrás de esta sinopsis de apariencia repetitiva y que podría parecer una simple variación de «El sindicato de policía yiddish» de Michael Chabon. He disfrutado muchísimo de esta novela. Creo firmemente que Lavie Tidhar es uno de los mejores escritores que tenemos hoy en día y me encantaría ver este libro ganando algún premio en 2019. Muchas gracias a Tachyon por el ejemplar.

I absolutely loved Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (and was not alone in that), and while his newest, Unholy Land, didn’t blow me away quite to the same extent, it kept me on the couch in “don’t talk to me I’m reading” and “uh-huh, uh-huh, ya don’t say, uh-huh” mode all afternoon while my family just rolled their eyes and gave up, as they know to do when all the signs of being engrossed in a great book are manifest (luckily, they live those moments as well so it’s a fond eyeroll . . . )

The novel is set in an alternate universe setting where the Jewish homeland of Palestina appears not in the Middle East but in East Africa, a homeland formed before the Final Solution occurred (a forward explains how this is based on an actual idea pre-dating the creation of Israel). The book follows three characters: the main character Lior Tirosh via typical third-person narration, a ruthless security agent via first-person, and a mysterious third actor via second person.

Lior Tirosh (suspiciously similar to Lavie Tidhar) is a middling science-fiction and mystery writer who had left Palestina for Europe long ago but has now returned. The country is in turmoil, with terrorist attacks, protests, and the construction of a huge wall to keep out refugees (those who had been expelled from the land so Palestina could be formed). In short order Lior witnesses a horrific bombing, is caught up in a murder, and learns his niece, an anthropology/folklore student who’d been protesting against the wall, is missing. Things actually spiral downward from there.

But things had begun to go strange well before then. The reader is teased from the beginning by all sorts of weird tidbits: the way Tirosh’s memories don’t seem to cohere, vaguely foreboding hints about his young son, an odd emphasis on the word “outsider,” references to “strange sightings of ice age carnivores the locals had named Ngoloko or Kerit . . . ,” or to how “organisms can disguise themselves visually in a foreign environment.” All of these, combined with the disorienting and often sudden shifts in POV, including that unnamed second person “you,” create a wonderfully surreal, unnerving, and compelling atmosphere, where, similar to Tirosh, the reader is never ever on firm ground.

And it all creeps in at such a wonderfully glacial pace. Such as that reference to his son that you’re so smugly sure you know where it’s going, what Tidhar is doing there, but then it takes a little sidling hop and suddenly you think you know but then again, maybe . . . and then the light slants in a different way, and then there’s a change in temperature, and then and then and somehow, in as dully mundane and banal a fashion as you can imagine (think airports, think bureaucracy) you’re in a completely different world than you thought you were.

That sense is both metaphorical and literal, because — and since it’s noted on the back of the novel, I don’t feel it’s too spoilerish to say this — eventually what comes clear is this is not simply an alternate history but a book set in a multiverse (the “sephirot”) full of alternate histories, complete with people who can travel between them — some more easily than others, some more intentionally than others. Such a set-up allows Tidhar to explore several themes: the creation and guarding of borders, questions over do walls shut out or shut in, ethical conundrums over what acts are allowed if done with good intentions, the old stand-by of is it OK to kill some to save more, the construction of memory and self, the desire to belong somewhere, the bond between people and land, determinism, the possibility that different historical choices would lead to different results (or not), and more. And of course, explorations as well of the political morass that is the Middle East, though such questions can easily be broadened to conflicts around the world and throughout history.

It’s a heady mix and one can easily linger a while to think such moments through as they appear on the page. And it’s not the only esoteric facet, as one could argue for a metafictional point here as well, what with the main character being an author, one oddly similar to his creator, and one who muses on or is questioned about the impact of writers in the world. And after all, what do authors do but create a sephirot of their own?

But I don’t want to make it sound as if Unholy Land floats along in some airy realm. Tidhar keeps things grounded by offering up alongside the more esoteric aspects of the book an old-fashioned, solid mystery — what happened to Tirosh’s niece — which, combined with a ticking bomb scenario wherein someone is trying to either break down the walls between worlds or destroy the worlds, keeps things gripping throughout. You read just as much to find out what happens as you do to explore the themes.

And then there is the language, which is vivid and precise and always adapted to the moment. As just one representative illustration (out of many to choose from), here’s an early segment as Tirosh’s plane takes off for Palestina:
The flight attendants went through the safety routine. The inside of the plane smelled of warm plastic, stale breath. There was a piece of gum struck to the underside of the food trey. The engines thrummed alive. Tirosh watched small grey figures through the window, moving with a clear but unguessed at purpose. He watched the runway move past and tensed as the plane began to accelerate, then took to the air with a bump. The airport grew wider before growing smaller. For some moments there was a flash of fields, the density of a city, the silver snail trail of cars on a highway. Then they entered the clouds the world turned white and grey, and fine strands of fog drifted past outside the wind. Tirosh put his head back and closed his eyes.

Take a look at the progression here. We begin with the routine. Literally, the same old same old safety talk. We get the concrete smell of stale breath, the concrete mundane image of gum stuck to a tray. Dull language, dull syntax (sentence begin with The, The, There). Then we get “thrummed” and a bit of personification with the engines coming “alive.” Then we get mysterious “grey figures” doing who knows what. And once the plane has left the ground, the prose shifts from, well, prose to a more lyrical poetry. The alliteration of “flash of fields.” The near rhyme/echo of “density-city.” The alliteration, rhyme, and metaphor of “silver snail trail of cars.” The consonance and assonance of “white-fine-outside, strands-past, fine-fog-drifted, that strings of D sounds.” All of it ending with Tirosh, and us, in a world removed from reality, a drifting, untethered, non-distinct, blurry world of white and grey. That is an author in full control of his craft. And as noted, this isn’t an isolated example (I haven’t even touched upon the maddening teases of some of the other worlds: “the mechanical warriors under the banner of the Crimson Emperor in Jund Filastin,” “the fish-frog men abomination of Ash-Sham,” “the green swamp villages of Samaria where the Awful Ones live”).

I read Unholy Land straight through in one sitting, blowing off work, family, and the first few minutes of dinner to do so. And had I not finished I most likely would have just skipped dinner entire until I did. For such a short book — under 300 pages — Tidhar crams in a world (worlds) of thoughtfulness, suspense, imagery, and beautiful prose. Highly recommended.

In Lavie Tidhar’s new novel Unholy Land, a suspiciously similarly named pulp writer Liro Tirosh returns to his homeland of Palestina, a Jewish state on Lake Victoria between Kenya and Uganda. Tirosh has been out of the country, living in the Reich for years, in a Germany that never perpetrated a Holocaust. But his father, a larger than life national figure, is dying, so he returns. He presses through his dreams of Berlin in the plane above Palestina, and then through customs, where he is interrogated by the secret police, and then pushed out into the strange, bright streets of his homeland.

Revisiting one’s home town, one’s native country, after a long period always causes a sense of dislocation: the smell of things and the quality of the light tend to remain the same, but the buildings, the cars, often the very scale of the place feels off, forcing the memory to stutter and warp. Tirosh’s uneasy reintegration to the place of his origin seems the usual kind of dislocation—until he is visited by an old classmate, who barges into Tirosh’s hotel room and harangues him with his very presence. Tirosh knew him as young man, but now he’s run to the thin-haired middle age, both thicker and thinner than he remembers.

The guest drinks Tirosh’s hotel liquor and rants about how Tirosh’s niece, the daughter of his war hero brother, has gone missing amid her investigations of the folklore of the wall, The Wall, the wall—the one going up now to partition the Jewish state from the displaced African populations around it. And then, the old classmate dies, poisoned, and Tirosh is blamed for it, and arrested. Even though the secret police were watching Tirosh, they missed both his friend’s entrance into the hotel room, and his death.

Here, the slippages begin in earnest: Tirosh begins thinking of himself as a detective in one of his novels, interrogating old drunks and rich socialites as he plays the flatfoot. He answers his phone and speaks to his ex-wife, but the connection is staticky, and when he looks down, the phone is a glasses case again (there are no cell phones in Palestina). These are not the only holes in Tirosh’s reality: in a remembered conversation with the literary agent who is pressing him to write more marketable fiction, Tirosh snarls, “Why don’t I write a book about, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler as a private detective?” Which is, of course, precisely the plot of Lavie Tidhar’s novel A Man Lies Dreaming. You see: Tirosh, Tidhar. We are in that kind of novel, the kind that doubles back and dodges sideways. Keeping up provides its own kind of pleasure.

There are three point of view characters in Unholy Land. Tirosh’s portions are the only in the third person, but strangely remain the most intimate, lingering in the strange fallow between his life in Berlin and his return to Palestina, running forward and back through his young life, his exodus and return, and intimate in their close observation of his thoughts and feelings. Conversely, the first person narrator, Bloom, a member of the secret police, is the most impersonal. Bloom is a terrible person, filled up with his own righteousness and fully believing in the structural and institutional cruelties he perpetrates.

The final sections are narrated in second person, and follow Nur Al-Hussaini, who is a sort of detective herself, sent to Palestina to shadow Tirosh (and Bloom, and any others influencing the ouroboros of the overt plot.) At times, the various points of view meet up, and the result is an altogether dizzying and masterful use of narrative voice. The clashing narrative perspectives produce something like parallax—looking out of one eye, and then the other, and then both focused together on a third point. Which is the operative metaphor of Unholy Land: one of partition and perspective, the same thing seen over and over and over again through different eyes.

I believe there are a number of hat tips in this novel to China Miéville’s The City & the City, which is about two central European cities superimposed onto one another, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, even down to rooms in the same domicile. The people of Bresźel and Ul Qoma unsee one another when they pass on the street, and any perforation of the lines between the two cities, even sightlines, results in harsh consequences. It is not quite clear if the separation between the cities is mystical or cultural, or if the difference would matter.

The Palestina of Unholy Land does not have this kind of cross-hatching, exactly, but the metaphor of partition, separation, and division operates throughout the narrative. This Jewish state in Africa is building a wall between the African people who were Palestina’s original occupants and the Jewish people who have resided in Palestina for several generations. Both, certainly, have rights of residence, and birthright, and colonization, and all the other things nations use to decide and mark citizenship. Still, there are suicide bombers on buses, unrest in the streets, and resistances on both sides of the wall.

The people of Palestina are known as Palestinians, which surprised me every time I came upon the word, this inversion of the state of things in my reality. The partition between the real Israel and Palestine is called a “separation barrier” by the Israelis, and an “apartheid wall” by the Palestinians. It is the same thing seen by two very different points of view, occupying the same space (more or less, depending on granularity): a physical manifestation of both difference and sameness. Unholy Land plays in the strange, uncomfortable DMZ between the national founding myth and the uninterrogated childhood, between the person who leaves the homeland and the one who returns.

It is actually really hard to review Unholy Land after reading its afterword by Warren Ellis.

"Unholy Land is one of those lovely books that starts out presenting itself as one thing, and mutates into another almost without you seeing it."

In a way, that’s spot on. This book starts with a “what if.” What if a Jewish state had been founded in Uganda? It was a scheme in the early 1900s, but one that was never acted on. And, if you’re familiar with Lavie Tidhar’s style of writing, this what if is a tasty morsel. Tidhar’s forte is in providing settings that you feel like you’re walking through, sweating in, having dinner and drinks at. It’s even better when the setting is a mash-up of cultures and technologies.

But I disagree that Unholy Land‘s transformation, from an alternate world noir to a more politically charged thriller, occurs without notice. Tidhar does things that are designed to put the reader off-kilter. Point of view changes happen not only between chapters but within scenes. Memories shift for characters. It’s obvious early on that something more is going on than originally meets the eye. This isn’t a comfortable book despite my wanting to spend time in the world. I enjoyed it, but I also feel like I’m going to need to reread it. And that’s not a bad thing.

Addictive and exciting. In line with Central Station, Lavie Tidhar elevates his bet with a great detective/historical/thriller story.

This book treats genre boundaries with the same disregard it has for the borders of nation-states and our notions of space-time. A great premise that is fully realized in this compelling and thought-provoking novel.

A fantastic novel. Imaginative, extremely well written, and quite original. If you're looking for some science fiction with a difference, then I'd highly recommend Unholy Land (and Central Station).

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar is a masterfully crafted alternative history novel that takes readers on a mind-bending journey. The story follows Lior Tirosh, a writer who travels to his homeland, Palestine, to uncover the mystery of his father's death. What he discovers is a world that could have been, a world where history took a different turn, and the State of Israel never came into existence.

Tidhar's writing is exceptional, and he weaves a complex narrative that is both immersive and captivating. The characters are well-developed and engaging, and the story's pacing is perfect, keeping the reader hooked from start to finish. The alternative history concept is brilliantly executed, and the author seamlessly blends real-world events with fictional elements, creating a vivid and believable world.

Overall, Unholy Land is a must-read for anyone who loves alternative history or just a great story. Tidhar's writing is outstanding, and his ability to create a world that feels so real is a testament to his skill as a writer. This book will leave you thinking long after you've turned the last page, and it is not to be missed.