"The Collaborator of Bethlehem"
(Reviewed by Poornima Apte DEC 19, 2007)
News reporting at its best, presents well-researched facts in a compelling fashion. Fiction, on the other hand, allows you to breathe, to take liberties with characters and their stories.
For this reason Matt Beynon Rees, a well-established journalist who has reported extensively on the Middle East, decided to create a series of fictional stories all featuring protagonist, Omar Yussef. Rees, whose experience includes serving as Jerusalem Bureau chief for Time Magazine for many years, has put all his expertise to work in the first book in the series, The Collaborator of Bethlehem.
Omar Yussef is an experienced teacher in Bethlehem employed by a local U.N. school. He has been teaching his students to be free of bias and to be good citizens even when they are surrounded by constant strife and violence. But his forthright policies don't win him many popularity points with the local Palestinians. Then an old student of his—a Christian, George Saba, newly returned from Chile with wife and kids, gets falsely accused of murdering a local Palestinian businessman. The injustice of it all really bothers Yussef. Soon enough, he starts asking questions, trying to figure out exactly who killed Louai Abdel Rahman and shortly thereafter, his widow Dima. As his investigation digs deeper, Yussef is often thrown up against some of the most dangerous players in the region.
Rees sticks to the principles of the whodunit genre methodically—sometimes a little too methodically. Some initial suspects are found out to be mere red herrings and as the body count ratchets up, the inevitable showdown between the protagonist and the bad guy yields satisfying results. A final confrontation scene between the suspect and Yussef is set in the Church of the Nativity, one of Christianity's most religious places. The suspect even tries to hide in the Grotto of the Nativity—the cave where Jesus is believed to have been born. This precisely choreographed scene is vividly (almost cinematically) realized but together with the setting, it comes across as a little too contrived.
Even if the essential structure of the novel is somewhat predictable, the real strength of The Collaborator of Bethlehem comes from Rees' expert handling of the setting. The underlying story turns out to be a nuanced one showing the internal conflicts in the region not just between the Palestinians and the Israelis but between the various factions of Palestinians themselves. Rees writes convincingly about the petty in-fighting between the various factions of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade as each person jostles for leadership within the group.
Rees sneaks in a touch of romance to the narrative, including details about the natural beauty of the city with its olive groves and gently sloping hillsides. He also does a good job portraying Yussef's brave fight against all the evil around him. “Perhaps Bethlehem was [the gunmen's] town after all, and it was Omar Yussef who was the outlaw interloper here, peddling contraband decency and running a clandestine trade in morality,” Rees writes.
The Collaborator of Bethlehem is a promising start to what looks to be an interesting series of mystery stories. Omar Yussef is convincingly reminded of this fact: In a land riddled with violence, justice is often meted out not by reason and procedure but by guns and bombs. What's worse, he has to learn to make peace with it.
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Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
- The Collaborator of Bethlehem (January 2007) (called The Bethlehem Murders in UK)
- A Grave in Gaza (February 2008) (called The Saladin Murders in UK)
Nonfiction:
- Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (November 2004)
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Book Marks:
- Official website for Matt Beynon Rees and blog
- NPR interview with Matt Beynon Rees
- BookSlut review of The Collaborator of Bethlehem
- Euro Crime review of The Collaborator of Bethlehem
- Washington Post review of The Collaborator of Bethlehem
- SF Gate review of The Collaborator of Bethlehem
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About the Author:
Matt Beynon Rees was born in Newport Wales in 1967 and studied at Oxford University and the University of Maryland.
As a journalist, Rees covered the Middle East for a decade. He was Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief from 2000 until 2006, writing award-winning stories about the Palestinian intifada. He also worked as Middle East correspondent for The Scotsman and Newsweek.
Rees lives in Jerusalem.
