Literary Review - August 2007

Page 56

FICTION

LINDYBURLEIGH

BIRTH OF A TERRORIST

THESIRENS OFBAGHDAD

★By Yasmina Khadra (William Heinemann 307pp £12.99)

The Sirens of Baghdad is a novel about a suicide bomber in Iraq and promises an insider’s view. Mohammed Moulessehoul, who writes under his wife’s name of Yasmina Khadra, seems ideally placed to imaginatively inhabit and demystify the terrorist mind. He is a former Algerian army officer and the author of two previous novels exploring Middle Eastern terrorism. This novel completes the trilogy, but readers expecting penetrating insights into the Jihadi mindset will be disappointed. Like his last novel, The Attack, it’s written in lurid, clichééd prose, and fails to illuminate the connection between radical Islam and suicide bombers. This more predictable narrative, however, lacks The Attack’s cumulative tension and menacing, nightmarish atmosphere. The narrator, an unnamed Bedouin Iraqi, is in Beirut, preparing for a deadly mission on enemy territory which will be ‘a thousand times more awesome than the attacks of September 11’. Contemplating his own end as well as the annihilation of the entire population of the West, he looks back over the journey which has brought him from Kafr Karam, a remote village in the Iraqi desert, to this juncture in his life. He is an introverted, thoughtful student at Baghdad University, looking forward to a none-too-rosy future under Saddam, when the Americans invade and he is forced to return home. His village, ‘sprawled beside the road like roadkill’, has been overlooked for centuries, until the war encroaches. Kafr Karam, steeped in inertia, has nothing to offer its men, who are unemployed, purposeless and kept by their wives and sisters. Stripped of their dignity, they pass the time playing cards. All are agreed that while Saddam was a monster, he was ‘our monster’. They feel keenly the humiliation of being pushed around by crass, loud-mouthed ‘American boys’. The Bedouins are depicted as honest, proud people, unfortunate casualties of progress and modernity. There is much to be said for Kadem the lute player’s plea for the West to understand Arab love songs and ‘hear our soul in the voices’, but then again it’s asking a bit much for it to ‘renounce all its cutting-edge technologies’. The arrogance and cultural insensitivity displayed by the callow GIs (their profanities and shouting are grossly insulting to Arab sensibilities) results in the death of a simple, vulnerable boy from the village and culminates in the ultimate sacrilege when the narrator’s father is left exposed and half-naked in front of his family during a terrifying night

raid on their home. The offence to his family’s honour is too much to bear and he hastens to Baghdad intent on avenging his father. He stays with his easy-going, hedonistic cousin, Omar, but amid the chaos and carnage he falls in with a group of fanatical Jihadis. Thus a suicide bomber is born. Western abuses of Arabs are apparently justification for suicide bombers, who are portrayed as principled but wrongheaded. Even so the conversion of the Bedouin from ‘docile, courteous boy’ to righteous scourge of the Western world is hard to fathom without reference to the allure of fundamentalist Islam. Once he’s volunteered for a suicide attack, he comes under the tutelage of Dr Jalaal, an embittered, alcoholic academic who turns away from the West when his genius goes unrecognised because of racism. Contrived, lengthy debates on the morality of suicide bombing and mass murder ensue, and a writer, representing humane Islam, sagely counsels that for ‘the sake of humanity’s future’ Arab culture must assert its moral superiority over the godless, materialistic West by non-violent means. The many Iraqis who don’t view the West as their enemy and who came out to vote in their millions in the country’s first ever democratic elections are presumably ‘Arab Uncle Toms’. When a last-minute crisis of conscience on the part of the Bedouin jeopardises the mission, the other members of the cell are surprisingly tolerant of the blow to their dastardly plot. The ending is a further illustration of Khadra’s conviction that Arab suicide bombers at least are honourable men and not murderous ideologues, and the blame for terrorist violence is laid squarely and dishonestly at the feet of the West. To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37

DANGWYNNEJONES D-DAY AND DERRING-DO

COWARDONTHEBEACH

★By James Delingpole (Bloomsbury 336pp £12.99)

THE BLOOD-SPATTERED, OILYbeaches of the D-Day landings of June 1944, and the ensuing slaughter at the Battle of Normandy, are still a bit too close for comfort. It is therefore a brave place for James Delingpole to begin a series of light-hearted historical romps. But he has made a pretty decent fist of it. Dick Coward is billed as a twentieth-century Flashman: charismatic roister-doyster with permanent semi-erection and a knack for getting out of the most devilish scrapes. His memoirs, we are told, have been transcribed and edited by his grandson from a set of old cassette tapes. This first volume sees Coward dodging Nazi bullets and largely

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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