A hugely important book: A reader’s impression of The bitterness of olives by Andrew Brown

Shares0Facebook0 Tweet0 Pin0 Print0 Email0 LinkedIn0

Title: The bitterness of olives
Author: Andrew Brown
ISBN: 9781776458127
Publisher: Karavan Press

This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.

Andrew Brown is known to cut into the underbelly of society, to expose the malignant nature of humankind’s dealings with the poor and downtrodden.

He often seeks out difficult locations for his stories. His first book, Inyenzi, was about the Rwandan genocide. In South Africa, the reader may visit the boardroom of a mighty law firm, only to walk from there into a derelict building occupied by the destitute, who have nowhere safer to be – as he has done with Refuge. Or Brown would go to South Sudan, perplexing the local border authorities – nobody had visited that country as a tourist before. Brown did. He wrote Devil’s harvest as a result.

Now, he has done it again. In The bitterness of olives, Brown takes the reader into Gaza, that desperate strip of land where Israel herds people into open-air prisons. This is a timeous book, one that I believe everyone capable of understanding English should read.

This image by photographer Hosny Salah (Pixabay) might as well have escaped from The bitterness of olives by Andrew Brown.

The story – without spoilers

Khalid Mansour, an Arab, is a medical doctor in one of the big hospitals in Gaza. The staff is chronically overworked and tired. Dead bodies come in daily of those killed by Israeli rifle fire or bombs.

One day, during the madness after yet another bombing, a body lands in the emergency ward. The woman has been killed, everyone believes, by the same bomb that has killed and wounded the others who have been brought in. Mansour, however, realises that the victim died earlier, that she could well have been murdered a few days before the bombing. While he investigates the corpse, he makes a discovery that forces him to contact a rather unlikely person: Avi Dahan, a Jew and retired police detective living in Tel Aviv. What happens next is a detective story unlike any that one is likely to read again soon.

A specialist police unit

Andrew Brown is a remarkable man.

He is an advocate and a sergeant in the SAPS reservists, as well as the police liaison officer for the Child Protection Unit at Red Cross Children’s Hospital. When he launched Devil’s harvest, Mervyn Sloman, the owner of the Book Lounge in Cape Town, interviewed Brown, saying that they had first had Superman down for the interview, but that Superman’s agent had withdrawn him after he had read Brown’s CV.

Brown practises law and he understands police work. He knows how to twist his knowledge into a story. Brown’s second book, a detective novel called Coldsleep lullaby, won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2006. Since then, he has written a number of South African detective novels, with Eberard Februarie becoming a famed fiction cop, a bit like Deon Meyer’s Bennie Griesel.

Now, for The bitterness of olives, Brown created a specialist police unit in the Israeli police force. As one reads the novel, it turns out that Khalid Mansour, the Arab doctor, and Dahan, a Jew, both used to work for this secret unit. The Arab doctor and the Jewish policeman used to be friends and colleagues.

This is clever, because Brown hereby draws the reader into the lives of a group of people who simply do their work. They want to catch criminals. The Muslim doctor and the Jewish police become human; we get to like them.

In a deeply divided and polarised society like Israel, this arrangement would have had to raise eyebrows, and it did. More I will not say. Read The bitterness of olives.

Two men at odds with their own

Brown uses the reader’s interest in Mansour and Dahan to shed light on the situations they live in. No one can deny the disastrous circumstances in Gaza, but there are many questions about the work done by Hamas.

Mansour is not pro-Hamas; in fact, he despises them. As the reader understands more and more of the dire situation Mansour and his family live in, the role of Hamas becomes clearer. It becomes easier to understand why they exist and why they can be so powerful, even when they are not liked.

Similarly, we see Dahan toeing the Israeli line, not questioning the state or the government. He wants to catch criminals; he prefers not to get involved in the politics. Dahan’s son is an activist, though. He points out the horrors inflicted on the Arab population; he shows his dad how absurd the world is in which they have both grown up.

A third person’s story

The reader meets a third person and gets to know her well, but her story is not for me to share.

A timeous and important work

With the death toll mounting in Gaza, this book should be in the hands of every person able to read and understand English. The bitterness of olives is an important work.

Litnet