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| The Rembrandt Affair |
In The Rembrandt Affair, by Daniel Silva, shows our hero Gabriel Allon getting back to his roots. After chasing down Palestinian terrorists and evil Russian oligarchs, an old friend asks Gabriel to track down a stolen $45 million painting of Rembrandt van Rijn’s mistress. The book even opens in in Port Navas, Cornwall–where Gabriel hid/lived during the early books, after the death of his family. Not only that, but the book is peppered with appearances from old characters. And even though it was 460-odd pages, I blistered through it yesterday.
After a few chapters to set the scene, an old friend visits Gabriel to enlist his help in tracking down the stolen painting. It takes a little arm twisting by Gabriel’s wife, but soon Gabriel is headed for the Continent to track down the painting by finding out its provenance. Meanwhile, we get to see what’s happening to the painting. For a while, it seems like the painting is just getting further and further away while Gabriel turns up old horrors about Dutch Jews being forced to give up their property before being deported. The provenance trail leads to Argentina, then to a wealth Swiss industrialist with a spotless reputation.
It is a law of fiction that two apparently unrelated plot lines will eventually converge. When they do, a simple (for a given amount of simple) job of recovering a painting turns into an operation involving the intelligence services of three different countries. Nothing ever goes off without a hitch in a Silva novel. The only problem I had was that most of the action took place in the last sixty pages. Everything else was background and buildup. Until the big finale, I felt like Gabriel was taking a back seat to the action. I kept waiting for him to take the lead, but it just wouldn’t happen until almost the end of the book.
I was reminded as I read it of my favorite books in the series, the ones that weren’t just about terrorists. But it wasn’t quite as good as those books. I saw a few things in this book that worry me and make me worry about the future of the series. Is Gabriel going to start taking a more behind-the-scenes role? Are his fighting days really behind him? If so, who’s going to be the new Gabriel? I hope this isn’t the end of the line for my favorite assassin/art restorer.