Event Field - novel review

A decade passed since the secret service assassinated Prime Minister Rabin and a Canadian who had left the Middle East was still assessing the indelible impressions in turn left by Israel.

Event Field takes artistic license depicting eight years of experiences and factual events as it paints multiple conspiracies over the humorous cultural backdrop. Rabin's assassination from the inside. Nuclear physicists incarcerated under a security code. The stolen babies scandal. Once one's eyes open to deception and truth they cannot reseal, all then becoming seen through that lens...but hopefully not to the extent of flashbacks requiring a prescription.

The inner three books each carry a different style of prose. Zmam sweeps native Israelis through the drama of the secret service puppeteering events in their lives. It is as if the nondescript characters are merely reactive adrenaline addicts frantically chasing the plot laid before them. And the life and death polarities of war make it an apt playing field for fear and conflict, defensiveness and baser survivalist emotions, and self-involved shells seeking instant gratification in intimate and social comforts.

Whereas The Draft stops the action and peers inward into the personalities of characters who had been passed by and neglected in all the first book's commotion and diversionary tactics. A Canadian tourist reports her views of comical incongruencies from kibbutz to Hebrew University and into the ethnic neighbourhoods of Jerusalem from a perspective far outside that shaken "sand globe". In the same vein the attitudes and behaviour of the local conscripted artist and military operative reflect the viscous indoctrination process which envelopes them within their respective environments.

In Counterpoint the scene shifts to western Canada where both old intelligence figures and a new motley crew of Canucks engage in the inevitable standoff predominantly through dialogue. They are ready to widen their scope to question their circumstances and the entire life schematic from the viewpoints of physics and eastern philosophy. And while some still cling to roles familiar others learn to disengage from the scripted path and become aware in the moment, when they are the creators of their own outcome.
  
Event Field is in many ways a novel enabling the reader to think he is reading one story when it fact it is about something else entirely. As the author I now feel as though, unwittingly, I set out to write one book but in reality wrote on a whole other level. It is this second layer which I want to reveal.

The fictional novel is available in paperback format for $15 from Amazon.com and Createspace as well as in $4-$6 eBook format from Googlebook, Kindle, and iUniverse. The main Event Field blog page indexed on the right contains open links, a book description, and the Googlebook preview.

-elaine morrison-