A Time To Kill
Lea Carpenter's new thriller about Revenge, Espionage and War is Eerily Timely
What a welcome change from Epstein-related material, to read Ilium, a new literary spy-thriller by a very old, dear friend, Lea Carpenter, whose elevated prose-style is joyous to read. Like all the best writers, Lea uses the particular - a young, single impecunious British woman, whose parents are dead, and who is unwittingly recruited as a CIA asset - to tell a universal story about all the shades of grey that compose humanity. And war.
With nods to Greek mythology, Carpenter’s suspenseful tale of international espionage and revenge deliberately refuses to pinpoint one side as good and the other side as bad. What she’s interested in highlighting is complexity. How people on both sides are capable of ugliness, brutality, deception, but also love and compassion. Simultaneously.
Even the book’s title Ilium - the code name given to the spy operation Carpenter’s heroine finds herself recruited to - is a wry sleight of hand. Given the obsession one of the main characters has with the Iliad and the parallels, in particular, between the story of the Trojan Horse and the way in which Carpenter’s protagonist must pose as something she is not in order to inveigle herself into the bosom of a family she is to betray, readers are tempted for much of the book to think that they understand the double-entendre.
But no. Carpenter takes her time to reveal that the hidden meaning lies outside Greek mythology. In fact: “Ilium was a scriptural reference to the biblical idea that there is a ‘time to kill.’ That there is such a thing as moral vengeance…”
It was with this in mind that I later read David Remnick’s profile of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in the New Yorker.
You could say that Remnick’s piece, which describes, among much else, the current state of mind of Israelis and Palestinians, is dominated by the theme of “revenge.” Remnick quotes a Hamas military leader, Yahya Sinwar, recounting his arrest of a collaborator:
We put him in a car and drove to the cemetery in Khan Yunis. We didn’t tell Ramsi what we were going to do. While we interrogated him we didn’t beat him much. On the way, I blindfolded him with a rag so he couldn’t see. . . . I put him inside a large grave and strangled him with a kaffiyeh I had. After strangling him, I wrapped him in a white shroud and closed the grave. I was sure that Ramsi knew he deserved to die.
Does anyone “deserve” to die in war? Remnick’s article shows the question is currently pressing everyone: Palestinians, Israelis, and South Africa which has asked the Hague to consider if Israel, bent on retribution for October 7, is committing genocide.
In Ilium, one of the characters bluntly articulates the moral dilemma for this state of being: “At the start of any war everyone believes they’re on the right side.”
And even peace, Carpenter suggests, is perhaps just an illusory pause from violence that is as natural to the human condition as love.
“Revenge,” Carpenter writes in an author’s postscript, “in a forever war, can take its time.”
According to the New Yorker, in the Middle East, they feel that acutely.
