Fantastic Metropolis

Chief among the new characters are the master Israeli spy Yossi/Halim and his operator Tajar. The story of how the Runner operation is set up is a fascinating look at the workings of an intelligence unit–in this case Mossad–and what it takes to make a master spy, the objective being “an agent who was to penetrate Arab culture so deeply he would never come back.” Tajar’s life almost spans the century and provides a link with the previous novels in the quartet: In his youth, he had heard tales of the great Jerusalem poker game and the finding of the original Bible. He was connected to the Monastery in the Second World War, learned the tricks of the trade from Bletchley/Bell, and is also a cripple, another link to the spymasters of Nile Shadows.

The transformation of Yossi into Halim, the master undercover agent, is the main preoccupation of the novel. Whittemore obviously knew first-hand what is described in the novel as “the controlled schizophrenia of a deep-cover agent.” Unlike Eli Cohen, who was active for only five years, Halim’s double life continues for over twenty.

The action of the novel shifts among three main locations: Jerusalem, Jericho, and Damascus. In Jerusalem Whittemore follows the lives of Tajar, “the grand rabbi of espionage,” Anna and her son Assaf (who is also Yossi’s son), and through their eyes the reader witnesses the Six Day War of June 1967, a dramatic account of the Israeli victory over the united Arab armies. In Jericho, three wise men keep watch over the centuries in the oldest inhabited town in the world: Bell the white-robed, one-eyed hermit and former WWII Intelligence agent; Abu Musa, who once rode with Lawrence of Arabia; and Moses, a giant black eunuch, formerly the retainer of an elderly Ethiopian princess “who had come to the Holy Land to live out her last days in pious Christian seclusion.” These three meet on Bell’s porch on regular basis, Abu Musa and Moses to play shesh-besh (an Arabic form of backgammon) and idly explore the Universe, or so it seems to Bell. Halim operates out of Damascus, and the action focuses on his activities as the Runner and his private life in that other ancient city. The lives of all the protagonists overlap and become entwined as is usual in a Whittemore novel. Halim’s intense life in Damascus is juxtaposed with the peace of Bell’s porch in Jericho.

The locations are described in loving detail: the streets of Jerusalem; the quiet timelessness of the oasis that is Jericho, redolent with orange trees and eternal summer; the wilderness of Judea where Abu Musa’s nephew Yousef lives in a solitary, self-imposed exile; the ancient streets of Damascus. In Thomas Wallace’s memoir of Edward Whittemore, he describes the compound where the author lived. Whittemore has used the location for Anna’s apartment in Ethiopia Street and he brings the street to life.

Whittemore provides a short history of the region, describing the origins of the PLO and their subsequent involvement with the KGB, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s and ’80s. The complicated politics of the Middle East form part of the ongoing drama of the Runner’s activities. Jericho Mosaic is an amazingly relevant novel for our times, with the never-ending war as far from peace as ever. This book goes some way to explaining the origins and motivations of the ongoing conflict. It is a sort of history primer for the region. Whittemore never in any way takes sides or shows any partisanship with either party. His view is holistic; his characters believe there is a way for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to live in harmony. Over and over again, he has a triumvirate representing the three main religious groups. The message is clear: No matter how impossible the idea of a common homeland for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, among individuals peace is possible and happens all the time.

Jericho Mosaic, like Nile Shadows, presents a dark vision of the Middle East and is less playful than the earlier novels. However, larger-than-life characters and fantastical, dreamlike sequences still enrich the storyline.

And so ends the ambitious Jerusalem Quartet, a veritable catalogue of wonders, a fantastic sequence of tales from a modern-day Scheherazade where a giant English explorer comes to secretly own the Ottoman Empire, where a pious Albanian monk forges the Bible, where an Irish rebel becomes a Poor Clare nun on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where a survivor of the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade whiles away the years as a dancing priest baking bread in Jerusalem, where a Japanese Buddhist converts to Judaism and becomes a committed Zionist, where an obscure dealer in antiquities has lived for 3,000 years, where saints and sinners, secret agents, Egyptologists, dragomen, mummy-dust dealers, oil millionaires, and gun runners commingle in what Whittemore terms “the constantly shifting images of a tapestry we call history.”

Conclusion

Edward Whittemore’s writing has been compared to such diverse writers as Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Carlos Fuentes, and Vladimir Nabokov. His style is closest to that of Jan Potocki as, like that author, every story is multi-layered and connects with other stories. Whittemore’s favorite authors were apparently John Le Carre and Graham Greene (according to Tom Wallace), and it is obvious that espionage continued to interest him after his career in the CIA.