This is the depth of suffering of the Syrian civil war

Levin is a Swiss-American lawyer, who received his legal education at the University of Zürich and Columbia University School of Law. He is on the board of the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, a charity that transfers appropriate knowledge and know-how to nation-states to help them control their political, economic, and financial futures. He lectures on topics relating to financial literacy, economic reform, capital market development, and so on.

All this may, of course, be a cover for much more exciting and dangerous work connected with the murky, underground industry of war, where corruption flourishes and everything is for sale, including arms, drugs, and even people. Indeed, Levin admits that despite this novel, or memoir, his wife and two children are “still left wondering what exactly it is that I do for a living. For that,” he tells them, “I must continue to beg your indulgence.”

An old friend summoned Levin to a restaurant in Paris, told him that Paul Blocher was known to have entered Syria two months before, and had since vanished. His friend pleaded with Levin to discover what had happened to the young man. Levin knew from experience that all too often such searches entailed a long period of stress and ended in tragedy, so it was with many misgivings that he agreed to try.

The novel, or memoir, then recounts the circuitous twenty-day-long odyssey that Levin underwent in order to reach the truth of the matter. Along the way, he found himself introduced to a variety of shadowy figures – one enormously influential in Islamist circles, another opportunistically seeking to squeeze as much cash as possible out of Levin, a woman desperate to get back to her home in Syria. The trail led Levin around the globe – to France, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Dubai, New York – and into the worlds of corrupt politics, drug dealing, and people smuggling.

Levin believes his whole quest, and the unsavory individuals he meets along the way, reveals the corrupt and inhumane basis of the Syrian civil war. That he feels passionate about the suffering that has been inflicted on the Syrian people he makes abundantly clear in a postscript appended to his main narrative. In it, he lists a succession of horrors inflicted on individual Syrians by the savagery of Assad’s military forces and the chemical attacks that he inflicted on his own people.

It seems something of an anomaly that the trail Levin pursues in his quest for Paul Blocher – who, be it remembered, disappeared in Syria – never leads him into that country. It is one of those odd circumstances that either substantiate the veracity of his account or indicates the opposite. In the final analysis, however, whether Proof of Life is a genuine record of events experienced by Levin or a cleverly conceived novel is irrelevant. The book is a wonderfully readable thriller to be savored from the first page to the last.