I am suffering from a book hangover. I have been making time to read, on the advice of my counsellor, and have ploughed my way through a number of books in the last few weeks. A couple have gripped me – By The Rivers of Babylon, by Nelson DeMille, whose obituary in the paper last week pointed me to his debut, was a compelling and exciting piece of brutality that seemed to have some relevance to the slaughter going on in Palestine at the moment, but it has left no particular mark, apart from a certain queasy aftertaste of a relish for brutality. I’ll look forward to reading another of his books, when I am in the mood for a well-written but unchallenging thriller, but I am not particularly enlightened by it, only further convinced that Israel’s terminal decline is very much of its military’s own making.
Last Friday, however, I came across American War on my ebook server while I was tidying up my Tolino, and read the first couple of pages. It was immediately engaging, even though it begins with a meta-narrative frame voiced by a character who then disappears from the story until the last fifty or so pages, a conceit I rather dislike. However, for a literary science fiction novel, the exposition in this story is well handled, and the narrator provides a very useful historical framing, while not giving too much away.
The novel is actually about a character the narrator knew when he was a child, Sarat1, whose tragedy is that of the war child: displacement, refugee status, recruitment, betrayal, torture and, well, that would be telling. Although her doom is played out within a broken America, it is the experience of any one of hundreds of thousands of children who have grown up or are growing up under the distant but devastating influence of the American military empire now, and over the last three quarters of a century. Her country is riven by a proxy war, and she is a mote within the storm who rises, through her fury, to achieve the status of decisive pawn.
The story is powerful in its own right. However, as a parable of how the American empire keeps its potential rivals from developing through the fomenting of division and war, it is a masterpiece. In early childhood, Sarat’s family is forced to seek refuge in a breakaway revolutionary territory, The Free Southern State, after her father is killed by a southern suicide bomber (they are not called that in this book, in order, I think, to not stress the comparison too early) and the simmering war between the U.S. and the Southern rebels threatens to reach their home. From the refugee camp, she is, eventually, recruited to the rebellion by an American agent who is in the pay of a controller from the unified empire of the Middle East, The Bouazizi Empire.2
The agent engages in all the shenanigans of an agent provocateur in the pay of the C.I.A. in Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine or anywhere the U.S. wants to keep in chaos. He recruits bombers, pays off their families, whose poverty is too deep to allow them to fight back against him, and sows a sense of belief in the fiction of the rightness of the confected conflict. The cassus belli for the South’s rebellion, incidentally, is the ban on the use of fossil fuels: that is the religious split over which the U.S. tears itself apart, and it is no sillier than the exaggerated distinction between Shia and Sunni, or Arab and Persian. The South fights to retain the right to burn fossil fuels, even after the technology is largely redundant.
The great tragedy of the story is a great crime, but it is a crime committed by a character whose motives we understand fully by the time it occurs. She has my unreserved pity and I have to remind myself that what she does is not justified by her suffering. Her crime is that of every soul-wounded jihadist: allowing her own sufferings and tragedies to eclipse her view of the rights and fears of others.
I am trying to be careful about spoilers, but I must go into the sequence which, in my view, locates this novel as a dark satire of American atrocity, rather than some weak-arsed “warning about the future” so, if you want to read the book unsullied, you should stop reading this post now. At the core of Sarat’s moral undoing is not her choice to join the rebellion, or her commitment to political assassination, questionable as they are. Sarat is broken by imprisonment in a military torture camp. In here, she is taught that she did still hold illusions about the restraints on power, and about her own ability to maintain some thread of agency in a life which has repeatedly beaten her with messages of her worthlessness. She is brutalised by people who believe they are being clever. Their rape-acts are couched in a sort of science that is supposed to make them virtuous torturers. They are the camp guards of Abu-Ghraid and Quantanamo who return to their respectable middle-class lives after making a living from sating their satanic lusts behind the razor wire. They are the least human of us all. El Akkad’s portrayal of these people is a triumph, in their bureaucratic, shoulder-shrugging pretence of disinterested duty, and the fact that he allows his heroine to enact a revenge upon one of these monsters is a weakness of the book – a little too neat, a little implausible, and setting up a ridiculous coincidence in the final act – satisfying as it becomes.
Incidentally, if these people suffer,3 I don’t care. I cannot raise sympathy. It is not a revelation to know that torture is wrong and torture is not hard to recognise. They crossed the line. They had a choice. There are some things that it is worth dying to avoid doing, and the real Guantanamo guards would not have been killed for refusing orders. A few unpleasant years, perhaps, and some economic disadvantage in the richest nation in the world, but still nothing compared to the loss of their eternal souls.
This novel impresses me the way very few do. It is not perfect, but it holds together and, in its cleverly coherent fictional world, it is true to the actual world. Nothing except the great final crime is without precedent in this novel of horrors, and that crime is something we know all militaristic nations have plans to commit, if they can ever find an excuse and overcome their fear of retribution.4
Over the last year, the monstrous, squinting depravity of the military mind, enabled and encouraged by its despotic political lackey-chorus, has been flaunting the worst of its diseased imagination in a holocaust against refugees. The sheer lack of fucks given by the bureaucracy of hate that must have been necessary to enact the pager and walkie-talkie mass assassinations is blinding; as bad as any act in El-Akkad’s fiction. The blind hatred of the Hamas warriors, who employed rape and child murder in their revenge for the near-century of Israeli atrocities is as difficult to justify as the final act of Sarat in her agonised hatred of her oppressors and torturers, but the soullessness, implacability and nihilistic determination of the Israeli mafia-war state, even in the midst of its nation’s obvious death-spiral, is giddying.
This is a novel of history, of prophecy, and of contemporary commentary. I recommend it.
- Names matter in this book. El Akkad uses a clever device to give a southern-states black/Latino American girl an Arabic name, pointing to the central satirical theme of the novel. [↩]
- This is another name that is a clue, referring, as it does, to the original hero of the Arab Spring. [↩]
- WARNING!!! Link to Youtube, where you have no rights or privacy. https://youtu.be/TDO1SjX5Zmc?feature=shared [↩]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention#Verification_and_compliance See the section labelled, ‘Non-Compliance’ [↩]