As the world sits in quarantine, one of two things is happening: people are streaming more TV and wasting their lives or people are reading more books and thereby enriching their brains (ask your doctor where the differences lie). Hopefully you’re in that second class!

I came across this book in the “FREE” pile at the local library, and I was ecstatic, because I’ve enjoyed Lionel Davidson‘s novels before, and I’ve always wanted to read through his bibliography. This story is as unique as was The Rose of Tibet, populated with interesting characters, fit with an almost fable-like plot, and containing a scene where a Jewish man sleeps through the Six-Day War of 1967. It’s an unexpectedly interesting read.

The eleven chapter titles follow this formula: “All about ___”, and each exists as a block of story that, when all are shoved together, make for a magical tale. It begins in Chapter 1: “All about the Ungulates,” introducing the reader to a beautiful animal on the plains of Israel. The problem is, this animal should no longer exist. It had gone extinct many decades ago, so why was it here? The zoologist who re-discovered the miraculous gazella smithii or Smith’s Gazelle followed the animal and discovered a small herd of six. Balancing his responsibility to track the animals and to inform his superiors, he loses them and all but one are slaughtered for meat by roving Bedouins. The blip on the screen of naturalist history has faded once more.

But then we learn “All about Hamud”, a disfigured Muslim man whose wife is murdered and who, after enacting revenge, flees his village to hide in a ravine on the Syrian-Israel border. Here he discovers the missing gazelle with kid, and here he realizes that Allah has preserved his life for a special mission: to raise these two beautiful, never-before-seen animals until they are a herd that the ravine can no longer contain.

Enter two boys, a nomadic Muslim from Syria named Musallem and a Jewish brat from the Kibbutz above the ravine named Jonathan. Now I’ve read a lot of books, but I can only think of one other character from any novel who was worse than Jonathan seemed at his introduction (the boy pilot from Paul Theroux‘s O-Zone which made me give up on the book before I really even got to the plot). This Jonathan kid is terrible, and you’d just like the people in the Kibbutz to slap him in the face once or twice. In fact, an Israeli General in Chapter 10 considered him a “cretinous gibbering grinning little b****** who would be much improved by a bloody good hiding delivered not only on the spot but also every hour, on the hour, for the next week or two” (190). Boy did that sentence make me laugh.

The two boys’ impact on this story is that after meeting each other across the ravine, they spark an impossible friendship based on challenges of bravery and curious respect. After meeting the deeply-religious Hamud and realizing how the man has come to raise nearly 600 gazelles over the past ten years, Jonathan sees an opening to play what he calls “The Game” (Chapter 8). In this game, he convinces Hamud that he and Mussallem are prophets of  God and that they have come to guide Hamud in raising the gazelles. They do in fact help, giving him days off to sleep and helping water the animals, but as they continue to enjoy this game together within the ravine, their countries above also begin tensing for war.

War does come in Chapter 10: “All about War and Peace,” in which the original zoologist comes down with malaria while in a nature reserve and sleeps through the entire Six-Day War. But by the end of the war, news of the gazelle’s presence lead to a joint-effort between the army, the zoologists, and Jonathan to help Hamud bring the growing herd of gazelles back into the Holy Land.

The ending to the novel comes as a bit of a shock, but generally you can’t judge a book by its ending. In fact, the story itself is so delicately told and my mind’s eye view of the ravine is so clear that I know this story will stick with me for quite a while.

I’m sure that whatever political allegory Davidson intended with the tale was more strongly felt back in 1971, but no matter. It still holds weight and it still speaks volumes about the differences between nations and the individual citizens of those nations…much like when talking today about “China and the U.S.” vs. “a Chinese person and an America.” Those two comparisons are worlds apart.

In fact, this story reminds a little bit of what is perhaps the greatest foreign-language film I’ve ever seen called No Man’s Land (2001) about enemy soldiers stuck precariously in no-man’s land during the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict of 1993. The language is military-grade, so beware of that, but honestly, that film captures the same dissidence between a nation and its citizens as this novel does, and in a way that will give you strong opinions about macho politicians who send soldiers off to war.

Davidson’s writing ability was superior in this book, and it makes me want to go out and find more. I’d place this as my most favorite so far, with The Rose of Tibet second, The Night of Wenceslas third, and The Sun Chemist fourth. But still…keep them coming.

©2020 E.T.

Read More from Lionel Davidson:

• Adult Novels:
  The Night of Wenceslas (1960)
  The Rose of Tibet (1962)
  The Menorah Men (UK title: A Long Way to Shiloh, 1966)
  Making Good Again (1968)
  Smith’s Gazelle (1971)
  The Sun Chemist (1976)
  Murder Games (UK title: The Chelsea Murders, 1978)
  Kolymsky Heights (1994)
• Youth Books:
  Soldier and Me (UK title: Run for Your Life, 1965, as David Line)
  Mike and Me (1974, as David Line)
  Under Plum Lake (1980 )
  Screaming High (1985, as David Line)