THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 8, 1995 TAG: 9502080063
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
``A DREAM TRYING to come true.''
That's the struggling Jewish state of Israel - in the words of Gen. Zev Barak, a central character in Herman Wouk's second novel, ``The Glory'' (Little, Brown, 685 pp., $24.95).
The new book, a seamless continuation of ``The Hope,'' begins in the proud afterglow of the 1967 Six-Day War, a war in which the Israeli armed forces crushed the besieging Arab armies and ended Jerusalem's division in the process. This time, Wouk brings the saga right into the present seesaw of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
So much has gone on in the Middle East cockpit since Israel's independence was proclaimed in 1948 that it's hard for many of us nowadays to recall the sequence of events and their relation to larger world history. It's a history that includes the on-again, off-again United Nations ceasefires, the succession of Israeli leaders, the desert battles, the terrorist episodes, the diplomatic to-and-fro'ing, as in the shuttle-negotiations of Henry Kissinger and in the Sadat-Begin talks under President Carter's aegis. Among other things, ``The Glory'' serves as a refresher for this history.
The precarious lives and tender loves of four main fictitious characters are again threaded through actual historic crises. The reader plunges into the clank and dust of the Israeli comeback after desperate early days in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and goes right along on such touch-and-go missions as a punitive raid on terrorists in Beirut, the snatching of a small flotilla of undelivered war vessels at Cherbourg and the incredible 2,000-mile leap of an airborne task force to rescue 100 Jewish hostages from terrorist captors at Entebbe airport in Uganda.
And there is the reminder of the genuine, if brief, period of global alarm when the problem of a trapped Egyptian army, after the Yom Kippur War, brought a threat of Soviet intervention. The preliminary nuclear alert ordered by the United States was no drill.
Yet another Wouk contribution to the record is his finding that Moshe Dayan is due chief credit for a breakthrough in the Sadat-Begin negotiations. This was a real comeback for the eye-patched hero of 1967. He had been left under a cloud by the early setbacks in the 1973 conflict, and he had lost leadership momentum in one of those unseemly political tangles that have badly handicapped Israel from time to time.
About the politicking, the muddling, the excess ambitions that caused so much self-questioning in the country in its first 40 years of independence, Wouk is more than candid. And he deals realistically with human emotion, too. Personal vanities and family infidelities make his romantic pairings most believable, but nobilities in his characters also come through and ring true.
One problem with the book is the sheer number of such characters, now multiplied well beyond the count in the previous book by the arrival of a whole new generation. I had to make a chart at one early point to keep track. But later on, Wouk's fine, clear writing sorted everything out.
``The Glory'' rounds out an array of works in which an ancient people do modern battle for their dream, wresting themselves out of a bitter recent past. For this they have as their spokesman/narrator a master weaver of fact and fiction. And of pain and glory. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Herman Wouk's novel ``The Glory'' is a seamless continuation of
``The Hope.''
by CNB