Seems like I’ve
been talking about this book for a month.
I think I’ve just drawn out the pleasure for as long as I could. This was a brilliant book by the same author
as “The Good German”. It was good for me
because it combined my love of spy thrillers like those of Le Carre, and my
recently acquired love for the latest hot-spot, “in” place in this world,
Istanbul. Jason Goodwin got me started
on the place with his writings about Yashim, the 19th century, Ottoman
detective. This “Passage” book takes
place in late 1945 – the war is over and neutral Istanbul, Turkey is
readjusting to normalcy after being a city much like Casablanca, but still thick
with spies from all over the world, dining and drinking with each other at places
not unlike Rick’s.
Our
protagonist, American Leon, and his peers were tobacco people, R J Reynolds,
Liggett Myers types before the war and most can’t wait to get back to the
States. Just like Rick, Leon has run a
few guns and these days, Jews to Palestine, now under the British Mandate. And yes, the author has liberally lifted plot
line from Leon Uris’s Exodus:
the broken down ship with the salty Captain and 400 starving passengers heading
for Cyprus. Our Leon is now confused: he
has a wife in a coma at hospital; he speaks fluent Turkish – stay or go maybe
not even up to him – he accepts doing one more covert job – a person coming
from the East, needing to get to the West.
Leon isn’t formally a spy, but he helps the US Consulate doing American
State Department business at a low level because of his Turkish language
ability. I hope you’re picturing Matt
Damon by now.
Of course, the
simple hand over goes awry, people get shot, and Leon slowly finds that
everyone, except him, is a real spy, only he’s not sure who’s with who. He has to learn quickly as the situation
continues to become more and more complicated.
His consulate boss is killed, severing the ties he had, to accomplish
what he thinks is his job. A romance
with his boss’s wife doesn’t help to clarify things. The action in Kanon’s book is fast-paced, and
he paints a fascinating picture of Istanbul.
It is the type of place in which I would like to spend a few months discovering
the food, the locales, and the people. I
was lucky enough to do this in Jerusalem on a consulting job, staying a few
months in a downtown apartment, long enough to develop a romantic relationship.
This is a well-balanced book: good character development of a
dozen primary people and another dozen secondary characters are captured
well-enough to make them recognizible and motivationally understandable;
excellent plot development, continually raising the tempo bar, right up to the
end; and most of all, a captivating and compelling description of Istanbul
through an American’s eyes, one who has sort of gone native. There is a
requisite sprinkling of Turkish words, but no so as to be distracting.
I’d recommend this book to others for a spellbinding summer
read.
I would give “Passage” a ten out of ten.
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