Two big things have been occupying my time for the past months. One, I am preparing for a two week trip to Israel that has me more excited than any other trip I’ve taken in my life. Two, I’ve been doing a lot of flying. A lot.
I’m the world’s worst packer and one of the things that has made difficult for me has been lugging around Michener’s incredibly entertaining (some might even call it good) one thousand page novel about Israel called The Source. In typical fashion I have a hardback copy (actually, an original printing, borrowed from my Mom, but it is now worn to shit) and it is as weighty as the legacy of history that hangs around the Chosen Peoples’ neck.
Michener frames his story with a pre-67 American-led archeological dig in a fictional city near the Galilee. They discover artifacts dating from 1948 to the dawn of time, stopping at various points in history (the Crusades, birth of Islam, Roman Empire etc) along the way. Each look into the past is its own short story, flashing back to “today” for indirect commentary.
Michener delivers history with the right spoonfuls of sex and violence as well as focusing on the odder, more gossipy parts of a forgotten culture. It’s cliff notes history, maybe, but it ensures that there’s something at least somewhat interesting on every page. It isn’t a textbook, nor is it literature, but it is far more well-rounded (and well-meaning) than cheap beach reading.
The prose gets odd once in a while – like presenting as reporting the occasional divine interaction – and there’s one section that is oddly first person. Is this because this was written in a pre-word processor era when dude had to bang out another thousand page novel on deadline and no one had the energy to go back and re-type? I honestly think this could be part of it. . . .or maybe I’m just excusing some cheesy moments in the writing because of my overall fascination with the subject matter.
I can say this, though, that when I am in Akko, Safed and Tiberius in a few weeks, I’m going to be looking around for certain fictitious things that I know never really happened there but feel like they did.
