34 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.ukBOOKS & ARTSCosy, comforting and a bit inconsequential: Here We Are, by Graham Swift, reviewedAn Ethiopian Exodus
Stephen Daisley
Red Sea Spies: The True
Story of Mossad’s
Fake Diving Resort
by Raffi Berg
Icon, £16.99, pp. 324Menachem Begin was Israel’s most reviled
and misunderstood prime minister. Reviled
by Britain for his paramilitary activities
against the British Army in Palestine, Begin
was a keen admirer of the Westminster par-
liamentary system and English common
law. Reviled by Jimmy Carter as a hawk
who refused to cede an inch of territory,
this ultra-nationalist signed the peace treaty
with Egypt that returned the Sinai. Reviled
by the left as a racist and fascist, Israel’s
first right-wing prime minister summoned
the head of the Mossad soon after his vic-
tory and instructed him: ‘Bring me the Jews
of Ethiopia.’
That unexpected order from a mercu-
rial leader began a train of events that led
to Operation Moses, the covert immigra-
tion to Israel of thousands of Ethiopian
Jews, whom the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate
had only latterly recognised as halachical-
ly Jewish. How they ended up in Ethio-
pia is the subject of legends, but no firm
historical answer; yet while their adopt-
ed homeland referred to them as falasha
(‘landless’), they knew themselves as ‘Beta
Israel’ — ‘the house of Israel’. They had
a land, Jerusalem, and would return one
day. As an Ethiopian Jewish children’s
song ran: ‘Stork! Stork! How is our coun-
try Jerusalem doing?’
The gap between that longing and its
realisation over a series of months in 1984
and 1985 is the subject of Raffi Berg’s Red
Sea Spies. Posing as European investors,
Mossad agents purchased Arous, an aban-
doned Italian resort on the shores of the
Red Sea, convincing Sudan that they could
bring tourists back to the country. To that
end, they flooded Europe with glossy bro-
chures for a package holiday ‘a wonderful
world apart’, with ‘some of the best, clear-
est water in the world’.
By day, they ran their diving resort; by
night, they sneaked Jews out of the refugee
camps in Sudan to which they had jour-
neyed. Cut off from other Jews for millen-
nia, Beta Israel believed themselves the
last of the Israelites, and were astonished
to learn that Jews could be Europeans.
Initially, the returnees were spirit-
ed through the desert back to a coastal
point near Arous. There, special forces
lay waiting with dinghies to row them to
a naval ship moored out in the Red Sea,
which in turn delivered them home to
Israel. Discovery and death hung over
these tense, danger-drenched night crawls;Period piece
John Self
Here We Are
by Graham Swift
Scribner, £14.99, pp. 208There’s something — isn’t there? — of
the literary also-ran about Graham Swift.
He was on Granta’s first, influential Best
of Young British Novelists list in 1983,
and he won the Booker Prize in 1996,
but he has never attained the public-face
status of his contemporaries. That may not
be so surprising, given who those publicity-
hoovering contemporaries are, Amis, Barnes,
McEwan and Rushdie among them. Once in
a while, one of his books rises a little higher
in the sky — 1983’s Waterland, 1996’s Last
Orders, 2018’s Mothering Sunday — but will
Here We Are be one of them?
The title gives a clue to what sort of book
this is. It’s something a secondary character
says when delivering drinks or proffering
something: ‘Here we are!’ It’s a ‘bright and
strangely echoing phrase’, a welcome which
is simultaneously a piece of empty conver-
sational filler, of no nutritional value. Above
all, it speaks of a particular aspect of Eng-
land, an England of ginger beer, cold frames,
magicians in top hats and people called Ron-
nie, Eric, Agnes and Sid — all of which fea-
ture in Here We Are.
The magician is Ronnie Deane — stage
name Pablo, after a parrot he had as a child-
hood pet — and the book covers his rela-
tionship with his wife and assistant Evie,
and their mutual friend Jack Robinson, who
often acts as compère for Ronnie and Evie’s
end-of-the-pier magic show in Brighton.
‘Please join me, folks, boys and girls, in drink-ing to Ronnie’s other half. Or should I say
halves? May he always keep putting her back
together again.’
A triangle of characters provides a stur-
dy, reliable structure for a novel, and there
are some foreseeable developments coming
from that; but the book is more interesting
on the subject of change. As a child during
the second world war, Ronnie was evacuated
to Oxfordshire, and it was while living there
that he learned how to perform illusions; he
returned to his parents, aged 14, changed by
those developmental years. All three main
characters have changed their names: Evie
to Eve when she’s on stage with Ronnie, andJack from Robbins to the more archetypal
Robinson when he dons his ‘black-and-white
get-up that was the outdated rig of showmen,
conmen, masqueraders everywhere’.
The biggest changes in the book are hid-
den. The story jumps from 1959 to 2009,
and there’s some pleasant mental exercise
to be had in working out what happened in
between. But it’s firmly backward-looking,
and most of the book feels not just set in the
1950s but as though it were written then too:
there’s no sense that this is a new perspec-
tive on the past. It’s comforting and cosy,
which are by no means futile attributes in
a book, but it does make the effort of read-
ing it feel mildly inconsequential. It’s a bit
sad, a bit funny, a bit interesting — but only
a bit. Swift does show admirable boldness in
his refusal to provide a neat ending, but for
a story about magic and showbiz, it’s weirdly
lacking in pizzazz.The Twittering World
It’s like posting letters to the press –
the local press, or spilling matches
from the shaken matchbox of your brain
convinced you’ve composed the I-Ching
not I wuz ere in some drunken cubicle
in Vladivostok or Le Paz. Let’s be clear,
your words are going nowhere, pal,
but thin air, the ether. They skedaddle,
die, they disappear, and not one tweet
will save your neck. No one gives a toss.
So save your breath, your thumbs, your wrist
which, the way that you’ve been using it,
must ache. For all our sakes, grow silent
as the grass, be quiet a bit, and shut it, please.— Richard Lambert
It’s comforting and cosy: a bit sad,
a bit funny, a bit interesting –
but only a bitBooks_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 34 25/02/2020 14:39