Saul’s Game (Homeland #2)

Andrew Kaplan’s two books in the “Homeland” series are very good. They give us a lot of back story, and both Carrie and Saul’s characters are true to those created in the TV series. The first book was about Carrie and how she got started, how she comes to specialize in the Middle East and begins on the trail of Abu Nazir. This one is more about Saul — his background, his troubled marriage with Mira, his professional relationship with Carrie and his nearly surreal spymaster capabilities. We are introduced to Nick Brody, the co-star of the first few seasons of “Homeland” on TV. We see how a long captivity has marked him, how he converts to Islam in a heartfelt manner, and how his loyalties to the U.S. waver as he develops a friendship with the child of his captor – Abu Nazir. He wonders what has happened to his family during six years of captivity, including a young son who doesn’t remember him, and a wife resentful that he joined the military after losing his job. And we hear about his depressingly awful childhood at the hands of a drunk and abusive father – a former Marine. The book gets into areas the TV series never did. Saul grows up as the only Jewish kid – and Orthodox – in a small town in Indiana, the child of Holocaust survivors. He couldn’t possibly be more an outsider. He is constantly looked upon as “Talmudic”. The book plays the Jewish angle more heavily with Saul than does the TV series (with the exception of the last series where Saul’s relationship with the Israelis comes into play as he’s about to become a fugitive.) We learn more about Dar Adal, Saul’s CIA colleague through much of the TV series. On TV he’s played as an American, but here we learn he’s Lebanese, an orphan to their civil war, and was adopted, and trained in the dark arts, by a major Palestinian terrorist. How he not only comes over to the American side, but rises in the CIA, isn’t made clear, and would bear explaining. Dar has a harder edge, and is more likely to see the need to kill someone now while Saul often takes a longer view and wants to hold off. It’s the spring of 2009. The story is about the hunt for Abu Nazir, but it winds around – Syria, Iraq, Iran, back to Iraq. It’s hard to keep the strands straight, just as it’s hard to keep the players straight in the real-world Middle East, with its dizzyingly complicated overlays of rival religions, governments, tribes, terror organizations and animosities, some recent and some dating back a thousand years. Carrie dodges death on multiple occasions, including at the hands of a sexy South African mercenary, head of a private security organization privy to high-level Western military intelligence, but suspected of leaking it to Iran or Al Qaeda or both. He and Carrie have the hots for each other – Ecstasy-fueled nights plus a threesome with his hot Ukrainian girlfriend – despite it becoming increasingly clear they’re maneuvering against each other. Carrie starts seeing the pattern of destruction that comes to men involved with her – the soldier Dempsey, killed in the first book, an Iraqi boyfriend about to divorce his wife for her, and now the mercenary DeBruin. Her world is so insane, she reflects, that being bipolar isn’t necessarily a problem. And she survives harrowing experiences both in Iran, where she is taken prisoner while working on a desperate gambit of Saul’s, and in Iraq, where she and a Sunni team try to stop a Sunni terrorist strike against a Shiite holy place which might start a civil war, just as the Americans are trying to pull out.

Very exciting just like Homeland. Wish I would have read it before watching Homeland as it would have helped to make more sense of the beginning of the show.

Missing the series? Read this book. Just as good, if not better.

If you\’re a HL fan which is why you found this book, it does well as a prequel to the Showtime series. Only challenge was trying to keep all the characters straight. The details And descriptions sink you into Carries\’s thoughts and world.

As in the first volume, \”Carrie\’s Run,\” there is a lot of helpful information for those Homeland fans who otherwise don\’t know very much about Carrie or Brody when they appeared in the very first episode. But unlike the first volume, the repetitive thematic meme of Carrie getting in well over her head and pulling it off or being rescued by Saul in the end is a bit worn by now. Not sure if this second book was really necessary or as informative as the first, but still a page turner that\’s I couldn\’t put down until the end.

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