Despite not really loving the previous Daniel Silva thriller I’d read (The Heist), I decided to give him another chance for two reasons: first, The English Girl seems to be one of Silva’s most acclaimed thrillers, so it had the best chance of being good; and because when I was browsing audiobooks on my phone, this one popped up.
I was immediately at a disadvantage when I started this book, because The Heist takes place after the events of The English Girl. Even though there weren’t any serious spoilers for The English Girl, there are plenty of references to the case in The Heist, so right from the beginning I had a vague idea of where the plot was headed. But Silva still manages to throw in some twists that I didn’t see coming, so if you’re reading the Gabriel Allon books out of sequence, you can still enjoy this one.
The plot here was definitely more coherent than The Heist, which started out as a fun art caper and then turned into a dreary political thriller two-thirds of the way in. The English Girl, luckily, has enough of a plot for Silva to stay focused for the book’s considerable page count. The story starts when Madeline Hart, a minor-level employee in the British government, is kidnapped while on vacation in Corsica. A ransom video is delivered to the Prime Minister: “Seven days, then the girl dies.” A possible justification for Madeline’s kidnapping soon becomes clear: she and the Prime Minister were having an affair. Desperate to keep the kidnapping, and the reasons behind it, out of the news, the British government recruits Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon to find Madeline and get her back. With the help of his Israeli team, a former British soldier turned assassin, and a Corsican mafia don, Allon has six days to find the missing English girl. And of course, finding her is only the beginning.
This was a fast-paced, well written thriller, with good characters and good twists. Overall, I liked it. I liked how Silva lets us enjoy the long, careful planning that goes into even the simplest operations, and it’s a nice blend of exciting shoot-em-up action scenes and more subdued passages about the bureaucratic side of espionage. Also this book features more appearances from Allon’s super cool wife, Chiara, who is probably my favorite character in the series. Because Chiara is also a spy, she and Gabriel get to talk about his work honestly, instead of doing the tiresome bit where the husband has to protect his sweet innocent wife from his dangerous work by never telling her the truth about anything. I do wish that Chiara had actually gotten to do something in this book – her job in The English Girl is mainly to act as a sounding board for Gabriel, and then cook dinner for everyone and have lots of sex with her husband. Also she really wants to have a baby, and has an eye-rolling line where she describes being on a flight with a crying baby and says that the mother was “the luckiest woman in the world.” Ugh.
Another unfortunate thing I noticed in this book: Gabriel Allon is not as great as Silva thinks he is. Gabriel has a lot of conversations with the assassin Christopher Keller where Silva tries, desperately and repeatedly, to show the reader that Allon somehow has the moral high ground over Keller. Look, buddy – at the end of the day, they’re both hired guns. It doesn’t make much difference that one works for the Israeli government and one works for criminals. All cats are grey, etc.
(speaking of uncomfortable moments, Silva’s politics are definitely showing in this book. First there are the subtle and frequent anti-Muslim lines that Silva has his characters recite, and then there’s a bit at the end where Allon is trying to convince a defecting spy to come to Israel and work for him because “that’s what we do in Israel. We give people a home.” Cue me, yelling from the balcony: “Unless you’re Palestinian!”)
Also there’s an oh-so-charming scene where Allon is searching a female criminal for weapons and uses the opportunity to grope her, and then makes a joke about it. Jesus, say what you will about James Bond, but at least he knows he’s an amoral asshole. Allon’s holier-than-thou attitude and characterization really started to grate on me by the end of this book.
But the most annoying aspect of the book is the title character. Madeline Hart is set up as this brilliant, ambitious, resourceful character (who is also smokin’ hot, because we can’t possibly be expected to care about the kidnapping of someone who is not young, thin, and beautiful), who has so much promise and potential that she’s been tapped to be groomed as a future Prime Minister. And then, after that great introduction, Madeline gets kidnapped and disappears from the narrative. Characters spend a lot of time talking about Madeline; she herself has maybe two scenes where she gets actual dialogue.
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