The Terrorists of Our Imagination Aren't Muslims ... They're Us

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted January 27, 2007.

Terrorism is now the stuff of fiction, as a glance at the best-seller lists will attest. But while Islamic plotters make the headlines, the terrorists we find on the bookshelves live in our own backyard.

Every era has its own built-in drama -- its plague or despot by which it will be remembered, whose looming menace inflects every conversation, kindles every sermon, tints every work of art. Ours is terrorism. A time of collapsing towers and exploding public-transit vehicles with charred guts ribboning the wrack is how this epoch will be pictured, centuries hence. But then to truly inhabit this era, to speak its language, I must add: if there even are centuries, hence.

Striving to picture our reality, future generations -- if there are future generations -- will sniff their anodyne air for phantom whiffs of ash or poison gas as they pore over novels published right now -- because terrorists have become stock characters in post-9/11 fiction just as spies were during the Cold War or pointy-horned demons in Dante's Florence. Maybe our descendants will read John Updike's "Terrorist" (Knopf, 2006). Its titular New Jersey teen -- Ahmad Mulloy, son of an Irish-American mother and long-gone Egyptian-student dad -- joins a jihadist cell plotting to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel and reveres an imam who intones, "The American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom." Perhaps they'll read Patrick Neate's City of Tiny Lights (Viking, 2005), whose hilarious private-eye narrator is an ex-mujahadeen who learned in Afghanistan how to slash a man from "his navel to his chops," and persuades an adoring young "thug lite" to infiltrate a jihadist cell plotting to blow up the London tube. (This book was published in the United Kingdom a week before the real London tube bombings of July 7, 2005.) Or they could read Xavier Waterkeyn and Daniel Lalic's "Where's Bin Laden?" (New Holland, 2006), a wacky cartoon romp in which readers are urged to locate the bearded Saudi in colorfully drawn city and circus scenes. They could pick up a copy of Robert Wilson's "The Hidden Assassins" (Harcourt, 2006), in which a bomb destroys a Seville apartment block amid clues resembling those found around the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Or maybe they'll tackle Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games" (Harper Collins, 2007), whose brooding cops race around Mumbai seeking a nuclear bomb they know that fanatics have built and which is poised to explode.

Novelists love built-in dramas. Think of all that time and effort saved which would otherwise be spent having to invent plots, characters, motivations, denouements. Terrorists plug handily into any genre. Thrillers. Sci-fi. Romance: Belinda ached for his touch. But why was he so reluctant to talk about his flying lessons?

And the trend factor sells. Publishers dream of reviewers trilling: "A real-life drama ripped from the headlines!" and "A tale for our times!" Surely that helped Chandra score a million-dollar advance from Harper Collins, which then budgeted another $300,000 for marketing "Sacred Games." Granted, Chandra crafts characters so authentic that you can practically hear their knuckles crack. But for a 900-page hardcover novel that's one big bet.

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