LOVE AND TERROR

Again, as in his last novel (the soppier Shadows and Wolves), Herrick's subject is the clash of political generations. The premise: German and Arab terrorists seize a Paris-to-Tel Aviv shuttle plane--an obvious fictionalization of the Entebbe incident. But Herrick has made three of the Israeli passenger-hostages old revolutionaries, in fact former KGB-ers, now living in Israel in their old age. These three--Avram ben Itzchak, David Grad, Clara Z.--serve as contrasts to the terrorists now holding them. And the focus mostly centers on one couple, Viktor and Gabriele: they're young West German campus anarchists who--apprised coincidentally of their respective fathers' Nazi pasts (although Viktor's real parentage is a slow-unfolding, if not too great, surprise)--joined a Baader-Meinhof-like gang with an ultimately violent, senseless ""spiral"" of extremist thought. As an amorous couple, the Germans' sex life is brutal and unrewarding, yet still they love--as though this made any counterbalance to the death they deal. . . . Herrick establishes the logics and discrepancies--the guilts and indulgences--of both sets of political killers, old and new, with a staccato, documentary style that is just about right. And though the novel is therefore sometimes stiffly schematic and theme-heavy, it is also frequently, dourly effective.