DANIEL SILVA: The Cellist

This is the 2021 “operation”, which I somehow missed, featuring Gabriel Allon, the art restorer and former assassin who is now the head of Israel’s secret intelligence outfit – “The Office”, as it’s known.

The target this time is Arkady Akimov, a Russian oligarch who manages the investment of the billions of dollars that flow into the coffers of the country’s corrupt and tyrannical president, whom some people call “the Czar”.

To bring down Akimov, Gabriel recruits Isabel Brenner, a young German banker who has recently whistle-blown the machinations of a bank deeply involved in money laundering and sanction-busting activities. Isabel also happens to be an accomplished cellist – hence the book’s title. Akimov has an eye for a pretty face, and Gabriel hopes to infiltrate Isabel into the management of the oligarch’s funds and bring him down, together with his boss in the Kremlin. “The Russian president is not a statesman, Isabel,” Gabriel tells her. “He is the godfather of a nuclear-armed gangster regime.”

No prizes for guessing who the gangster president is, nor his opposite number in Washington who is contesting the result of the election that has removed him from office even as the novel’s events are unfolding. In the text Daniel Silva doesn’t name either of these presidents, although the Russian is referred to sometimes as Vladimir Vladimirovich or Volodya, Putin’s patronymic and his pet name (if we can imagine Putin being anybody’s pet).

This is arguably Daniel Silva’s most important novel to date. In a lengthy Author’s Note at the end of the book he re-examines some of the “evidence” for Putin having interfered in the election that brought Trump to power; he also suggests that there were undocumented meetings between the two men during Donald’s time in the White House.

The politics and financial chicanery that make up most of The Cellist make for an occasionally stodgy read. The one high-octane scene, a chase in the French Alps, is too much like an outtake from a Bond movie. This is a book which, like many of John Le Carré’s novels, clearly draws on the author’s concern about the great issues of the times we live in. A fictitious story of corruption in the Kremlin and the White House is based on the belief that there is or has been corruption in these seats of power.