"Teguva ro'emet" ("Stormy Reaction") by Dan Shilon, Yedioth Ahronoth, Sifrei Hemed, 334 pages, NIS 88

Surprising as it may sound, this is an important book. Forget who wrote it (journalist and TV anchor Dan Shilon). Ignore the title ("Teguva ro'emet" - "Stormy Reaction"). And don't look at the cover (which features a jet fighter and gold embossed lettering) or the disclaimer on the back ("Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental"). Because, barring all that, the book is an important one.

As Dan Shilon begins to approach the end of his television and radio career, we are reminded on the book jacket that he won first place in a competition for battlefront reporting in 1967. He is not a writer or a novelist, but has managed to produce a worthy and very disturbing book. I began to read it uneasily, wading through silly, pedestrian cliches. And the bloody, over-the-top ending also left me uncomfortable. But somewhere along the line, Shilon has succeeded in raising an important, if not critical, question: Is the book's resemblance to real life really coincidental?

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Shilon has written the kind of thriller you read on the plane. It's a well-known genre with all the usual elements - big money, government, television, sex. The plot moves forward mostly through dialogue. It's all superficial and lightweight, peopled by cardboard characters. They screw, rape, cheat on each other, cook the books, take bribes, tell lies - and in the end, gun people down and blow their own brains out. You could easily read it and toss it in the bin.

But the author has created a hallucinatory world that is not as fictional as it seems. Shilon, the fallen star (whose dizzying success and hard landing were equally undeserved), has written a book that describes a world that no one knows like he does. It may be full of gross exaggeration, it may be overstated and inflated, but readers are left with an overpowering sense of gloom.

A defense minister who accepts a huge bribe for approving an aircraft deal, who sends the air force out on a daredevil mission to Iran just to win headlines, who rapes his bureau chief, whose personal advisor meddles backstage at the TV broadcasting studio, who blackmails journalists - is all this really a product of the imagination of our national television retiree, or is there something more to it? After all, we have a president suspected of rape. We've been through a war designed to bolster the standing of a rookie prime minister. We've had our blackmailed journalists (at least one, name withheld upon request). Even the phenomenon of political advisors dictating to interviewers what questions to ask their boss is something I have encountered personally.

So, despite appearances (couldn't the editor, Amnon Jackont, come up with a subtler title?) the book, read properly, is not without merit. A two-three hour visit to this fictional land of the corrupt can be just as effective as reading an investigative report in the newspaper. Shilon knows what he's talking about, even if he hides behind the blurb on the cover, and insists that "all responsibility for drawing such parallels (between the book and real life) lies solely with the reader." Take it on my word that this book is more truthful than it appears.

Rotten kingdom

This is the tale of a defense minister corrupt to the core, a commercial television station corrupt to the core and industrialists corrupt to the core, who run a country corrupt to the core. "The problem is that even the dogs have stopped barking ... Even the dogs are covered in shit," says one character, summing up the book, and maybe life, in one sentence. True, there are things in this book that have never happened. A TV station's military reporter trying to break up some racket in the defense establishment, for example, is something we haven't seen yet. We have yet to see a military reporter appear on the small screen and expose corruption in the institutions that are part of his beat.

On the other hand, maybe a defense minister who is an alcoholic and a rapist, and who threatens to get senior reporters fired, a ministerial advisor who schemes to take charge of the "news line-up" on TV, to mysteriously "adjust" the ratings and to get an anchorwoman appointed as cultural attache to Paris, is going a bit far. "From tonight, he's our soldier," the advisor says about the chief of the news desk - and Shilon, after all, was there.

All is rotten in Shilon's kingdom except, perhaps, for his "Mr. Television" character, Eyal Doron, who sounds amazingly like our own, real-life Mr. Television. Indeed Haim Yavin should be grateful to his colleague Shilon for that flattering portrayal. He comes out well, except for that little business about being a skirt-chaser (in the book, folks, in the book): "I love my wife," says Doron. "I appreciate her and respect her, and sometimes I even sleep with her. But every once in a while a guy needs a good screw." In the Sodom and Gomorrah of the media world depicted here, Doron-Yavin emerges as the one journalist with guts.

Even the entertainer and TV host Dudu Topaz makes an appearance in this book. Shimmy Hozez, as he is called here, is as ridiculous and pathetic as in real life. But when Shilon pokes fun at Hozez's "guests" (a Hebrew-speaking Swedish dwarf who sings in Yiddish, a boy who needs a liver transplant, a soccer star who comes out of the closet, a Tel Baruch prostitute in a wig, and the guest of honor, the defense minister), Hozez-Topaz suddenly turns into Shilon, in a rare and courageous display of self-parody.

Some of the other characters are also drawn from life: Bentzi Ziegler, the advisor and invincible spin doctor; the police chief, Ofer Schechter, who hangs out with the Maimon brothers (a crime family in the south, also among the defense minister's circle of friends); the all-powerful millionaire David Pritzker, one of the owners of the commercial TV station; and the defense minister, who cynically rattles off hollow cliches in countless interviews and basically doesn't care about anything besides himself. Sound familiar? How could it not?

What will not sound familiar at all is Doron a.k.a. Mr. Television's interview of a lifetime with the defense minister, Avraham Lavi. Such an interview has never graced our screens. Lavi is asked: Are you an honest man? Should a defense minister befriend criminals? Can you tell us what economic considerations guided the defense establishment in its choice of this aircraft? Has someone in the ministry pocketed $30 million in brokers' fees? Have you ever heard an Israeli TV interviewer asking such gutsy questions?

If Shilon were braver, he would have written a nonfiction book about the goings-on in the corridors of power, big bucks and TV broadcasting. In the meantime, he has written a novel. Until he gets up the courage to write the real thing, we can amuse ourselves with the thought that "Stormy Reaction" is an upstairs-downstairs thriller with no connection to reality. Happy are they who believe, as the saying goes.