In just five years, David McCloskey has gone from being a complete unknown to his current status as one of our leading writers of spy fiction, a remarkably rapid ascent. While his first three novels—Damascus Station (2021), Moscow X (2023), and The Seventh Floor (2024)—were set in the same fictional universe, centered around the CIA (where McCloskey himself spent seven or eight years as an analyst, mostly in the Middle East), The Persian marks a new departure.
Its protagonist is Kamran Esfahani, “a Persian Jew raised in Sweden” (as he describes himself), by profession a dentist, drawn into the murky realm of espionage by dreams of getting enough money to emigrate to California and a life of ease. A muddled scheme brings Kamran to the attention of Arik Glitzman, a high-ranking Israeli intelligence officer, the second of the novel’s three principal characters. The third is Roya Shabani, an Iranian woman whose scientist-husband, Abbas, has been coopted by Iran’s intelligence services. At the very beginning of the novel, set four years before the principal action, Abbas is killed while driving the car in which Roya and their young daughter, Alya, are riding; the Israelis who planned the operation took care not to harm them. In due course, Kam will fall in love with the widowed Roya.
What I have told you so far is true. But still it doesn’t begin to give you the flavor of The Persian (nor, if you are already a confirmed McCloskey fan, the extent to which this book marks a sharp departure from the first three—not in quality, not at all; it is, I think, his best to date). The narrative shifts from Kam’s first-person perspective (though sometimes, instead, Kam is “he” rather than “I”) to third-person centered on Roya or Glitzman. For most of the book, Kam is in an Iranian prison, where a semi-insane Iranian general keeps prodding him to write (at great length) his “confession”; then he is commanded to write it again, and so on. This gives the novel a pronounced strain of black comedy.
Kam himself is a classic antihero; he reminded me of one of Eric Ambler’s most memorable creations, Arthur Abdel Simpson, protagonist of The Light of Day (the 1962 novel that served as the basis for the classic heist movie Topkapi) and Dirty Story (1967), though Kam, for all his foibles, is less unsavory than his predecessor. Nothing in McCloskey’s first three books prepared me for such a character.
As for Glitzman, he is one of the most appealing fictional characters I have encountered in the last few years: believable, not larger-than-life, but an admirable man vividly drawn. To publish, just now, a novel that prominently features such a character required moral courage. Like many others, I have been struck by the widespread loathing for Israel that is so fashionable today. Self-censorship on this subject is increasingly common. McCloskey doesn’t idealize Glitzman himself or the State of Israel or “the Jews” tout court, but neither does he demonize.
I mentioned, above, the care taken during the assassination of Abbas Shabani, at the very outset of the novel, to target so precisely that his wife and daughter are not harmed. As you were reading that, you may have thought about what has been happening in Gaza. In any case, those for whom Israel has become the Great Satan will not be likely to read this book in the first place. But one of the salient qualities of The Persian is the extent to which it gives us an unsettling sense of some of the ways in which warfare is evolving, especially with regard to the use of drones. The book suggests in particular that drones are capable of invading the sphere of “private life,” as happens here in an excruciating way. Yet another strand, signaled by the title, gives us a fresh angle on Iran, in part by the way it emphasizes the long history of Persian culture, against which the recent regime of the ayatollahs and their ilk looks very small. The epigraph of The Persian is a line from Rumi: “Love comes with a knife.” There’s nothing pompous about McCloskey’s treatment of such matters (pomposity would be very hard to sustain in a novel so laced with irony), but there is a capaciousness, a range, that much spy fiction lacks.
Of the three principal characters, Roya seems not quite as compelling as the other two, but other readers (women in particular, perhaps) may feel differently. Certainly, while not rosily portrayed, she is an appealing figure, especially as she emerges (after an ordeal in which she almost loses her beloved daughter) with the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction possibility of a new life. Readers who sneer at hard-won happy endings can mind their own business.
I finished The Persian wondering what McCloskey will do next. Given his publishing schedule to date, I shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out. Long may he thrive.
The Persian: A Novel
by David McCloskey
W.W. Norton, 400 pp., $29.99
John Wilson writes about books for First Things, Prufrock News, National Review, The American Conservative, and other outlets.
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