Writers of sharp, contemporary political thrillers are fortuitously inspired by topicality but also lucklessly undone by it. A plot fashioned from today's headlines is all too often delivered as yesterday's news. The extraordinary rendition that caps John le Carré's 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man was not the explosive finale as intended: not only could the reader see this "American justice" coming, the grab-and-run abduction was by then a years-old counterterrorism technique and thus a stale narrative trope.
In Salar Abdoh's third novel, Tehran at Twilight [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] the Iranian-American author avoids this kind of built-in obsolescence by deliberately backdating the drama to 2008, creating a wholly fictional cast of Iranian clerics, agents and fixers, and exploring perennial black spots of betrayal, repression and corruption. Granted, a roman-à-clef featuring a thinly disguised Ahmadinejad and his gang would have proved more exciting. However, Abdoh still manages to captivate us with credible characters wrestling dangerously real issues.
Abdoh begins by enticing both protagonist and reader with a trip to Tehran. Malek, a teacher of something called “creative reportage” at a university in New York, is summoned by his best friend, Sina, to return to the Iran he fled years ago to discuss what he cryptically terms a legal matter. Malek arrives in Tehran and discovers a city inching towards revolution and his old friend in cahoots with a militant Shia outfit. He also finds there Clara, a Pulitzer-hungry journalist for whom he used to translate on daring investigative assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and who now wants his help again, in Iran, with what could be her biggest scoop.
Two such strands normally suffice for this sort of genre-read, but Abdoh is only just getting started. Malek is reunited with his long-lost mother and sets about hatching a plan to spirit her out of the country. At the same time, he must locate the missing body of his mother’s friend and give her the burial she always wanted. As he runs his numerous errands, he is shadowed by Fani, a former spy turned middleman with a finger in every ministry, who wants to track down Sina and secure a share of his considerable fortune that was confiscated by the Islamic Republic.
To a large extent, Abdoh succeeds in keeping all his balls in the air. Tehran at Twilight only really founders when Malek is out of Tehran. A subplot, which takes him back to New York and fighting for his job against "hardened Marine veteran"-turned-"idealist jar-head" James McGreivy is one too many. After a bout of prosaic office politics and redundant domestic affairs, we yearn for a return to the murk and intrigue of Tehran – "a world of double meanings and casual one-upmanship … as far away from his life in New York as one could get".
Tehran remains underused as a location in today’s thrillers. Luckily for us, Abdoh guts the city with authority. We veer from encounters with the super-rich who spend their time “complaining about the failing Iranian currency and wishing that the Islamic regime would just be gone already” to dealings with fences, prostitutes and junkies in the shanty-town underworld. “It was all a mad carnival,” we are told, “where Malek felt more like a hostage than a player.”
Tehran comes alive but, on occasion, Abdoh’s prose stutters to a halt. We believe Malek when he tells us that the city is “a place of quiet desperation but also grand stupid gestures that went nowhere” – but wince as clichés mount up in the same paragraph: “And he was afraid of the place. Afraid because he knew it too well, knew how things could turn on you in a heartbeat. And then you were in too deep and there was nowhere to turn to.”
Elsewhere, Fani warns Malek that he is “playing with fire”. Perhaps most damaging is when shopworn language mingles with signpost language: “What Fani wanted was to be sure the bird wouldn’t fly the coop. He wanted assurance.”
Needless to say, the novel regains its footing when Abdoh leaves us to make our own way along his many ambiguous trails. And yet despite the book’s grey areas and convolutions and final sting in the tail, it ultimately reads less like a thriller and more like a commentary on the daily struggles and political machinations within modern Iran – and is all the better for it.
Abdoh’s Tehran feels like uncharted territory, and his stand concerning the plundering of estates from the pre-revolution regime is as original as that of the hundred thousand Polish Jewish refugees that found asylum in Tehran in the 1940s. New history and a fresh take on the same old dirty tricks result in a clever and compelling tale.
Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.
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