This is a fun read! Alternate histories colliding, based around multiple potential states of the nation of Israel, with some clever meta-narrative and voice tricks going on. Quite rarely, for me, I found myself wishing it was longer.Our protagonist, Lior Tirosh, is flying home to "Palestina", the Jewish nation established, in this timeline, in early 20th-century Africa (our Uganda). For reasons not immediately clear, Tirosh is experiencing a kind of slippage between worlds, half-remembering other histories. In Palestina, an old acquaintance turns up dead in his hotel room, catching Tirosh up in a conspiratorial tangle of nationalism, terrorism, and some kind of transdimensional plot.
I'm a sucker for a little bit of meta done right, and, if anything, I could do with more here. Tirosh has written or considered writing books with the same names and themes as Tidhar; one can't help but wonder if his very name, Lior, is a pun. That aside, one of my favorite elements of Unholy Land is the occasional jump through alternate worlds, where we catch glimpses of our history, Tidhar's fiction, and even stranger worlds—including scenes from Lovecraft's mythos.
I really love the way that Tidhar's play with multiple alternate histories allows him to punch up the "what if"—his nation of Palestina is tantalizingly close to our timeline, based on actual consideration of establishing a Jewish state in Uganda. Not content with the idea of thus preventing the Holocaust, Tidhar tosses around timelines that seem even worse, or at any rate radically different, and in all the worlds we visit focuses our attention on the xenophobic and even genocidal force that the Promised Land, no matter where situated, might prove to be. Investigator Bloom, the Palestinan intelligence agent following Tirosh, displays a callous violence that is explained, if not excused, in the terrifying reasoning that "they're not my people"; we're left with little doubt that the wall being constructed around Palestina is far more about ideological separation than any effective defense. It's a fairly biting critique of Israel's relationship with Palestine, albeit couched in a plausibly-deniable fantasy that would do the Strugatskys proud.
