O Jerusalem

Politics in Israel is a tangled mess: Even if you were to eliminate the conflict with the Palestinians, the Knesset, the Cabinet and the ministries would provide material for even the least observant of novelists for a lifetime. The hardened old types who frequent the halls of Israeli power--and who are full of idealism and cynicism in equal measure--rush to scandal and ruination with almost heroic speed and thoughtlessness. A powerful religious politician is guilty of gross embezzlement; a spymaster turns out to have been fabricating top-secret cables for years; a fabled peacemaker is an alcoholic; a former candidate for prime minister--a decorated general--is convicted of repeated sexual harassment that took place in his government office, on his government sofa. Add to this wild rumpus the chaos and subterfuge of the battle against the Palestinian uprising, with its attempted and often successful (but unacknowledged) assassinations, and you have something of the corrupt, violent, zigzagging atmosphere of Melvin Jules Bukiet’s latest novel, “Strange Fire.”

Nathan Kazakov, a blind, disfigured, homosexual, Russian immigrant poet, is Bukiet’s hero. (Much that might seem implausible or exaggerated in another context seems only normal when it’s set in Israel.) Kazakov is also the top speechwriter for the right-wing Prime Minister Simon ben Levi, and the book begins wonderfully as a raucous vituperative attack on every kind of political hypocrisy--hypocrisy that is practiced to great effect by Kazakov but that he also recognizes and sometimes regrets. As it should be in today’s Israel, the plot is kicked off by an assassination attempt and then reels, often with great charm, from one conspiracy theory to another as Kazakov attempts to figure out who was behind the man who pulled the trigger, why the bullet was fired and, most important, who was the intended victim. Was the target Kazakov himself, who was the only person hit by the bullet, though he was not critically injured? Was it the prime minister, who was nearby? Or perhaps the prime minister’s son, Gabriel, an archeologist and peacenik?

Bukiet loves his subject, which is--despite all the twists and turns of plot--Israel. He has an exuberant, underlying affection for the country--he loves it the way you love an irritating old uncle who is wise and lets you live with him rent-free--but his biting observations about it can get in his way. Too often, the hurtling plot is interrupted by musings on a character’s background or on Kazakov’s earliest days in Israel; they go on too long and make Bukiet sound like a gonzo version of a Lonely Planet tour guide. His writing is never boring or flat, but it’s sometimes over the top. At one point, Kazakov has just met a powerful Meir Kahane-type figure, “Der Alter,” who will lead him to a clue that might explain the assassination. They are standing in the desert, about to embark on a long and dangerous donkey-back desert voyage. Excitement is high, but Bukiet interrupts his momentum with a 21/2-page flashback to Kazakov’s first trip through Israel on a rented Egged Co. bus with 40 other newly arrived Russian immigrants. “What I remember best about the journey,” Bukiet writes, “is the bus. The thing was as plush as the Hermitage. It was carpeted and air-conditioned, and, most amazingly, had its own bathroom. A bathroom on a moving vehicle! I think that we forty Russians peed about as much as all Odessa in those five days just to experience again and again the delirious thrill of exposing ourselves and urinating in the little closet while ocean, mountain, and desert scenery hurtled past the window.

“Der Alter brings me back to the present....” Thank you, Der Alter, the reader wants to say. We do want to know what’s happening now . Unfortunately, the remembered bus ride is more fun than today’s desert excursion.

Some readers may find the conceit of a blind narrator distracting. There is so much Kazakov cannot see, in a book filled with comings and goings and fantastic scenes. Bukiet’s great talents are understandably stretched by the number of times he must resort to smell, touch, taste and sound to convey the action. Often, Kazakov, accompanied only by his faithful seeing-eye dog, Goldie, knows who is in a room or how big a space is, and his explanation of how he knows (almost always given) is tenuous and sometimes tedious. When Bukiet needs his blind man to sense something, he does; when Bukiet’s suspense demands that his blind man not be able to feel his way to an answer, he can’t. You’re left wondering why Bukiet has set himself this hard task: Blindness is not a central metaphor in the novel, and if it were, it wouldn’t be very meaningful in this kind of high-flying semi-comic thriller. Kazakov’s blindness seems designed solely to allow Bukiet to show how well he can describe a world through a first-person blind narrator. He does it well, but it doesn’t help the book. The amazing thing is that a book narrated by a blind man turns out to be only as confusing as any other thriller that has a surfeit of interesting characters and an overload of implausible events.

Bukiet also has a tendency to pun that can be irksome (perhaps this is a professional weakness of speechwriters like Kazakov). “Come Shabbes, they come,” he writes, explaining the sexual habits of the Orthodox. A lot of plot hinges on using the word “money” to convey “bank,” meaning the West Bank, but in Hebrew (which the characters are supposedly speaking), the pun would not work: Neither the word for the occupied territories (shtakhim) nor the word for the West Bank (hag’dah) has anything to do with banks or money.

Nonetheless, Der Alter and Bukiet’s many characters are worth whatever annoyances the writer’s interrupting exuberance may provoke. His people are real, quirky but not irritating--they seem almost present, as if you’d met them somewhere recently, probably in Jerusalem. There is Kazakov’s mother, who lives for her son and with him, much to his disgust, in the tiny, smelly apartment provided for them by the Israeli government when they immigrated from the Soviet Union. There is Doctor Dmitri, who smells of cheese and omelets and who is always implausibly rescuing Kazakov from his crazed exploits. There is the prime minister, Ben Levi, who is (except for his ideology) so much like Shimon Peres (Yitzhak Rabin once memorably said that Peres was “capable of any stinking maneuver”) that it almost makes you feel, in spite of the farcical, whacked-out plotting, that you could be reading a historical novel. There is Abdullah, who runs a coffee shop in the Old City, a fat Sidney Greenstreet parody of a wily, connected Arab (“I hear many things,” Abdullah says mysteriously, when asked what he knows about the assassination attempt). There is Jacob Twersky, the coin seller in the Jewish quarter, who knows everything and everyone; and there is Ezekiel, who runs Dregs, a gay bar down a flight of stairs that is reminiscent, in stench and locale, of the Underground, a popular student hangout in West Jerusalem. And, of course, there is Kazakov himself, one mean, clever, punning, nasty and quite deviant blind guy who--in the end--is redeemed by his love for a decent, honest, upright man.

This is a book that does many good things well. It evokes Jerusalem, which is always a good thing because those who know it love to hear about it and those who don’t know it will always be amazed by it. The book takes the reader into the Machiavellian world of Israeli politics, and no one should forget how very dense and booby-trapped that world is. It opens a window onto the life of the Orthodox and of the farthest right settlers, and repeatedly captures the anger that secular Israelis feel at the religious. On this theme, Bukiet’s Kazakov comes up with some brilliant bitter turns: “Dig underneath the synagogue’s basement and you’ll finally find ... nothing.... On the other hand, my belief in Nothing is strong.” The sad thing is that Bukiet’s musings get in the way of the plot. The other, sadder thing is that the plot (which with its wild curves and slices is supposed to carry the avid reader through the musings) gets in the way of the musings, which are far more profound, funny and revealing than the rather rickety narrative.