Art and Terror in Daniel Silva’s Spy Novel The Kill Artist

Abstract

The importance of Daniel Silva’s past, close to a Portuguese cultural environment, will be relevant to understand the psychological profile of his popular protagonist and central character, Gabriel Allon, a melancholic man haunted by his past, but also someone who is a gifted art restorer, very sensitive to the values of loyalty and fidelity, which the author assumed to have inherited from his Portuguese family. Being a spy and an art expert, Allon seems to conciliate two contradictory sides of the human personality. The connection between Portuguese and American culture, in this writer’s background, could have been responsible for the creation of a character who can be, at the same time, very sensitive and very violent; an assassin who is an Israeli secret agent and the world’s finest restorer of the Old Masters’ paintings. A perfect double who does justice to his creator’s double origin, which contributed to the success of The Kill Artist (2000), where terror is practiced as one of the fine arts by a hero very loyal and faithful to his complex cultural origins, living in a diaspora as the eternal wandering Jew.