Nile Shadows

The Jerusalem Quartet #3

by Edward Whittemore

On a clear night in 1942 a hand grenade exploded in a Cairo slum, killing one man instantly. That man is Stern, an obscure gunrunner and morphine addict whose death should be of no significance during the darkest days of the century. In the Western Desert the Germans are advancing from victory to victory, and Rommel's powerful Afrika Corps is threatening to overrun Egypt and seize control of the Middle East. Yet Allied Intelligence takes a very special interest in Stern and in the enigma of his death, which may decide the outcome of the entire war. More and more lies hidden in the question: which side did he serve?

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Religion, Novels, Literature

478 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Edward Whittemore (1933­­­–1995) graduated from Yale University in 1955 and went on to serve as a Marine officer in Japan and spend ten years as a CIA operative in the Far East, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition to writing fiction, he managed a newspaper in Greece, was employed by a shoe company in Italy, and worked in New York City’s narcotics control office during the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay. He wrote the Jerusalem Quartet while dividing his time between New York and Jerusalem.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Spy and be spied upon…” It sounds almost like a proverb. Concerning himself with the clandestine activities of mankind Edward Whittemore boldly combines tragedy, mythology and buffoonery…
Nile Shadows is about the darker side of human existence…

Bloody Greeks and Persians and Jews and Arabs and Turks and Crusaders, there’s no end to it. And the odd bloated Mameluke floating down the Nile and the odd mad Mongolian whipping his horse into a frenzy, barbarians on their way in as usual to mix it up with assorted Assyrian charioteers and crazed Babylonians intent on the stars, while all the while the Chaldeans are sweeping in on the flanks and the Medes are sweeping out, and the Phoenicians are counting their money and the Egyptians are counting their gods, maybe the high priests of both of them getting together every millennium or so, to compare notes and see if either of them has come up with more of one than the other.

The war is raging all around – soldiers fight and soldiers die… But at the same time all over the world the invisible fighters of the secret services continue to fight their invisible combats… And the rest of the people are frightened and waiting for the worst…

A beggar of no particular era, homeless and stateless and of no use to anyone, a beggar of life from nowhere who would one day return whence he had come. And yet also, strangely, the man for whom the war was being fought, the prize for all the great armies, the solitary man who would survive their terrible victories and their legions of victims.

And spies live perilously… They hunt for secrets… They always live under the unbearable psychological stress… They are always in fear… They have nowhere to run… Their private lives lie in ruins…

It all seems chaotic to me, and only in retrospect does life take on any kind of purpose or design. Of course that could mean I’ve just never been able to fathom it. Or it could mean the purpose and design aren’t there, and it’s only our need for them as dreaming creatures that casts some kind of coherency over life when we look back.

Knowing secrets is dangerous… The greater is the secret the more dangerous it is to know this secret.

[Matt Brady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instead of the huge sweep of the Sinai Tapestry or Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows zeroes in one one particular time and place and tells a spy versus spy (versus spies) story in 1942 Cairo, with Rommel’s seemingly unstoppable armies looming menacingly on the horizon, and a mood of apocalyptic despair or delighted anticipation hanging over the city, depending on your outlook. It’s definitely the most, uh, novelistic of Whittemore’s novels that I’ve read, if that makes sense, but it doesn’t lack that huge sweep of history, events and characters that made the previous two stories of the Jerusalem Quartet feel so unique. The satire of intelligence services has a darker, less absurd tone than it did in Jerusalem Poker and feels more personal, like Whittemore is dropping the comedy routine a bit and putting some of his own personal experiences into the story. Of the Whittemore I've read so far, this one is definitely my favourite.

[Steve Garriott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whittemore shifts away from the magic realism typifying his previous two pieces of the quartet to produce a tale of intrigue, espionage, war, and loss. I have to admit if I hadn't read the first two I probably wouldn't have given this one as high a score as I did. However, this is the culmination of all the threads running through the first two books. Nile Shadows brings to close the stories of some of the main characters: Joe, Stark, and Maud, along with introducing us to new characters. Whittemore revels in the long monologues. Most are worth reading as he has much to say about life and humanity. The Quartet has definitely been worth reading. Whittemore is an accomplished writer.

[Lucy Cummin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third of four in the extraordinary and strange novels of the Jerusalem Quartet is very different from the first two. For one, it's serious, shadowed, dark. This is not a John LeCarre mystery, clever layers within layers, this third book is a meditation on purpose and what happens if a person loses hope. Stern, the son of Plantagenet Strongbow, born in the desert around the turn of the century is a child of everywhere and everyone, nowhere and no one. He is a big quiet, intriguing, kind, loveable and mysterious man. His dream is of helping to create a Palestine where the monotheistic monoliths, Christianity, Islam, Judaism can exist in harmony. Directly opposed to this sort of blasphemy (although they are only one among many) are the Nazis who, in love with death (in their own sick way recognizing that in death is the perfection they seek--absolute control, absolute authority). Cairo, unthinkably, is under threat. Rommel is impossible to stop. How do the Germans always seem to know what the British have planned? Stern has worked as an agent for decades and comes under suspicion. Joe O'Sullivan Beare (from the previous novel who, appropriately, has lived as a shaman in the American Southwest for the last ten or so years but is an old friend of Stern's) is called in to unravel the mystery of Stern. Instead he finds that Stern is unraveling, for as the war rages on, he is losing fait, suspecting that his cause is hopeless, that the difficulty is within the human soul -- that humans are impossible to manage, life itself is impossible to manage because all is in constant in motion, changing, evolving . . . and at the core? Life and love, life and suffering and loss are inseparable. Some kind of fundamental, almost impersonal wickedness is inevitable. The story itself is a vehicle for these meditations and if you don't like thoughtful books, don't bother. It feels as if there ought to be a plot, what with all swirling secret agents and agencies at loggerheads, but there really is not. What Joe does find out is . . . well, I can't spoil, but it has more to do with the state of a soul and what I was writing of above so if you're looking for a clever plot, etcetera, stay away. Honestly, I never did figure out, not for sure (if there even is an answer in the text I might have missed it) whether Stern did betray anything to the Germans by accident or on purpose. And it's not really the point, is it?
****1/2

[George K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Βαθμολογία: 9/10

Τρίτο βιβλίο του Κουαρτέτου της Ιερουσαλήμ, με αρκετά διαφορετικό ύφος γραφής και στιλ αφήγησης σε σχέση με τα δυο προηγούμενα βιβλία, και με πλοκή που περισσότερο θυμίζει τα κλασικά κατασκοπευτικά μυθιστορήματα τύπου Τζον λε Καρέ, με όλες τις αμφισημίες και τα επικίνδυνα παιχνίδια που παίζουν οι κάθε είδους πράκτορες, για να πετύχουν σκοτεινούς και πολλές φορές δυσδιάκριτους σκοπούς. Εδώ τα πράγματα είναι πιο σοβαρά, ο κυνισμός και ο ωμός ρεαλισμός είναι αρκετά πιο έντονοι και ο μαγικός ρεαλισμός πιο αχνός, λίγο στην αρχή υπάρχει μια κάποια πλάκα, υπάρχουν ορισμένες αστείες σκηνές και πνευματώδεις διάλογοι, αλλά μετά τα πράγματα σοβαρεύουν για τα καλά, υπάρχει μια τάση προς τη φιλοσοφία, την ψυχολογική ενδοσκόπηση και την ανασκόπηση των πεπραγμένων, μέσω διαλόγων και αρκετών μονολόγων. Ορισμένα σημεία εδώ κι εκεί με κούρασαν κάπως -η αλήθεια είναι-, όμως ήταν λίγα, στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος του βιβλίου ο συγγραφέας κατάφερε να με καθηλώσει για τα καλά και να μου δείξει μια άλλη εικόνα για τη Μέση Ανατολή και την Ιστορία, καθώς και πού μπορεί να οδηγήσει η ανθρώπινη ματαιοδοξία. Και μπορεί το βιβλίο να ανήκει στο Κουαρτέτο της Ιερουσαλήμ, αλλά σχεδόν ολόκληρη η ιστορία διαδραματίζεται στην Αίγυπτο, και ειδικότερα στο Κάιρο. Όμως η Ιερουσαλήμ, αυτή η μαγική πόλη, είναι πάντα κάπου εκεί, και πάντα επηρεάζει τις σκέψεις και τις πράξεις των πρωταγωνιστών (που δεν παύουν να είναι αξιοπερίεργοι ή/και ιδιόρρυθμοι, με πολυσχιδές παρελθόν). Πολύ ωραίο βιβλίο, με τον τρόπο του δυνατό και σκληρό, και όπως συνέβη και με τα δυο προηγούμενα βιβλία, δεν ήθελα να τελειώσει, να όμως που τελείωσε, και τώρα τρέχω ολοταχώς για το τέταρτο και, δυστυχώς, τελευταίο βιβλίο του Κουαρτέτου. Και μετά; Τι κάνουμε μετά;

[Jay Daze · Rating 4 out of 5]

"So it strikes me there are no commonplace people in the crowd, said Joe, and no innocents in the game of life really. We all seem to be double and triple agents with unknown sources and unsuspected lines of control, reporting a little here and a little there as we try to manage our secret networks of feeling and doing, our own little complex networks of life..." (Chp 18, 'Crypt/Mirror', 336-7)

Nile Shadows is a sort of Heart of Darkness/Citizen Kane, where Joe O'Sullivan Beare is brought in by a British Intelligence agency to 1941 Cairo to investigate and discover just what his old compatriot Stern Strongbow is up to, possibly with the Germans under Rommel. As the book opens Stern is already dead, killed by an apparently randomly tossed grenade into a seedy bar. Most of the the book is a flash back of Joe's investigation of the mysterious Stern.

But this is as much a spy thriller as The Crying of Lot 49 is a mystery novel. Whittemore does mix genres, but after what feels like in retrospect spy MacGuffin, the book falls into a rhythm of Joe having long cosmically metaphysical conversations with Stern's friend's that make up the bulk of the chapters. (Like how in Citizen Kane the reporter interviews the people in the newspaper tycoon's life.) Perhaps paradoxically, it is the encounter with Ahmad the Poet (now the desk-clerk at the Hotel Jerusalem), a 50 page meandering conversation which earns the book its longueur tag that is also one of my favourite sections -- even though it basically just halts the book. In a novel where one of the major themes is the impossibility of meaning and absolute knowing, you know the mystery is just going to get bigger and more diffuse, not smaller. Oh, and in any self-respecting spy novel the baddie would get a final resolution scene (possibly with him blowing up or falling off a building or something). You don't have to go more than a chapter or two to realize Whittemore's ambitions are more on the Proust level than the le Carré.

A major hole in the book for me is Stern himself. Whittemore handles the mystery, the ambiguity, the paranoia, the charismatic cult around this unknowable shadowy figure well, but when the actual dude finally does show up... He just doesn't seem all that interesting. He is just this guy, you know. (Have to furnish your own German psychoanalyst accent.) His appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions: which Joe frustratingly doesn't seem to want to ask. And it really does feel like a deflation. But no, after this section and the novel goes on, and Joe doesn't seem to have changed his view of Stern. That was a let down for me, though I guess it is equally possible that I missed the point on my rather fragmented first reading. (I'm sure there is a whole graduate thesis to be done on all the pillars of smoke in this novel, all leading to the columns of smoke coming from the Nazi death-camps.)

This is a book organized around friendships, and that is one of its real strengths on a character level. I really felt Joe's connection with Ahmad, Liffy (oh Liffy!), Bletchley and the Sisters. Again, not as much with Stern, because when Joe gets to Stern he sort of starts ranting at him, and so the dude we're expecting answers from spends a lot of time sitting and listening to Joe speechifying so there is not as much a connection show. The romance in the book is kept small which is good, because I found the scenes with Joe and Maud (who is now connected to Stern) rather too sentimental, and didn't jibe with a harder view of other things in the world. Actually I expected Maud to betray Joe, but in the end this doesn't seem to have happened, though it might have also been too subtle to me. (Again, I am rambling. There is a LOT in this book.)

But I still give the book four stars. Thank goodness Whittemore much different writer than Pynchon. Even though he's dealing with complex, mysterious, secret worlds, he doesn't feel the need to clog his prose with the same obscurantism. Whittemore is hugely ambitious, he swoops and he weaves everywhere, almost Proust-like in his scope. He wants to cram everything into his book. He has a kind of earnestness which may not be in style today (thus my own distaste for his romance sections) but the book really is enormously rewarding.

This is the first Whittemore I've read, based on a recommendation by another author I love, Jeff VanderMeer. Though it is a stand alone novel it's the penultimate book in the Sinai Tapestry series (also the only Whittemore my local library had). The earlier books are supposed to have much more fantastical elements (while Nile Shadows on its own is more an absurdist spy novel in places). I'm quite happy to have discovered this 'hidden treasure' author and can now hunt down the rest of his books.


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Oh, and a blurb on the back (of the 1983 ed)that cuts through the usual bullshit of blurbs:

"If the price of whiskey goes up again and the wife leaves me, I'll sit down and reread this book." -- Hugh Murphy, reader, County Donegal

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January 29, 2011

A happy little update (for me). I was in the library and the very copy of Nile Shadows I read was in the discard bin for one dollar! Snatch. I celebrated by ordering all the other books in the quartet from Powell's in Portland through AbeBooks.

[Luce Cronin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book at a used book sale. The blurb said that novels in this quartet could be read independently, so I tried it, thinking it would be a good, light summer read. Surprisingly, this novel turned out to be very complex in its ideas and philosophy. I will certainly hunt down the rest of the quartet and read those also.

[Pablo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book!! The culmination for Joe and Stern while bringing in new characters to the show. More controlled and contained and far less erratic than Jerusalem Poker( a plus for me, but not it seems for others). Exciting, sad, philosophically interesting and simply a great tale of historical fiction.

[Tasha]

I can tell this book and I aren't going to get along.

[John Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good. Not as good as Jerusalem Poker, but still...quite good.