Having found my way to McCloskey via The Seventh Floor (reviewed very recently below), I was made up to find The Persian in my local library. I mean, how of-the-moment is it possible to get? And that, I'm afraid, was the problem. Israelis and Iranian false flag ops - it's too painfully of the moment - the only element lacking is a demented and corrupr US President blackmailed into participating (but who would dream that up?). There can be no question about McCloskey's skill as a writer but I couldn't engage with this at all. My fault, not his.
One problem for me, technically, was the lack of a major player I could identify with. I don't care about the 'hero' Kam Esfahani, a failed Iranian-Swedish-Jewish dentist who gets drawn into Mossad black ops whose story is being extracted under duress by his Iranian captors. Perhaps if we'd been shown more of what breaks him ... The core of his story, which should I suspect is meant to make us empathise with him - is his affair with Roya Shabani, the widow of an Iranian scientist who Kam helped assassinate. Kam rather cynically seduces her and turns her into a double agent but he still has feelings for her. It's plausible, I suppose - Stockholm Syndrome and all that - but I just don't buy it on an emotional level. At the end of the day what we have here is a weak momma's boy and a woman victimised by two mysogynistic theocracies.
For me the most captivating character here is the Mossad action man Arik Glitzman. His motivation, by the end, we can absolutely identify with, and I would love to see him reappear in a future McCloskey novel. The action sequences are superbly executed, the fieldcraft, as in The Seventh Floor, completely convincing. McCloskey, in my view, is now 100% the most significant US writer of contemporary spy fiction.
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