I never quite settled into this highly praised novel. I really wanted to like it, but found myself reaching for something else to read. The review in Publisher’s Weekly said, “Fantasy Award winner Tidhar (Central Station) will leave readers’ heads spinning with this disorienting and gripping alternate history,” and I think that’s an accurate description of my experience. I could never tell which of many connected alternate worlds I was in, or sometimes which character’s point of view I was in.
On the positive side, I loved the premise: in another world, the Jewish people find a homeland in the early part of the 20th Century, not following the horror of the Holocaust. And not in the Middle East but in Africa, in Kenya. As in modern Israel, where Palestinians are exiled from the lands they have lived in for millennia, Africans are relegated to the other side of the (literal) wall and systematically disenfranchised. I appreciated the evocative parallels between this African Palestina and the modern American immigration debate or Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Our guide to this world is pulp fiction writer Lior Tirosh, returning home (to Kenyan Palestina) from Germany. At first the story reads like a murder mystery, alternating Lior’s discovery of a body (and so forth) with the first-person narrative of a police officer. However, the initial mystery is quickly superseded by others, eventually centering on the breakdown of the barriers between alternate worlds. That’s a pretty tall order for one book, and I found the switching of worlds and viewpoints (third, first, and even second, which just knocked me out of the story every time) to be confusing rather than intriguing.
Others may find Unholy Land to be a brilliant tour de force, but for me it was frustrating to be repeatedly baffled and to be thrown out of the story line just when things were beginning to make sense.
The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book,
but no one bribed me to say anything about it. Although chocolates might be
nice.
Fascinating. I hadn't heard of this book, but its concept comes from actual historical events: there really was a serious proposal to create a Jewish state in Kenya in the early 20th century.
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