John Updike’s new novel, Terrorist, which reaches into the mind of a would-be holy warrior, will surely tempt many of the same readers who fell on Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, which tells the story of a terrorist assassin, and on Martin Amis’s story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, an imagined account of the final hours of the man who piloted one of the aeroplanes on September 11 2001. It’s not surprising if people are hungry for these fictions. We go to these novelists, some of the greatest writers of our time, in the hope that they can flesh out a troubling emptiness — what drives people to want to kill us?
It is admirable simply that they are going there, that writers and filmmakers are not being held back from these modern nightmares on grounds of taste or modesty. In United 93, the terrorists are hardly more fleshed out than in the news reports — we do not reach into their motives or their characters.
But Updike, like Rushdie and Amis, is attempting to give you what is in a putative terrorist’s mind. I can’t even imagine how difficult that must be artistically, and I can see that it is also difficult politically.
It’s also hard, in a different way, for the reader. We want something very different from a novel than what we get from the newspapers: imaginative understanding; to get close to a fictional individual; the challenge of speculation rather than the reassurance of certainty. We want art, not news.
Writers have mapped similar territory before. When Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Agent he was responding imaginatively to a real botched bomb attack in London, at a time when there was panic about anarchist extremism. When Doris Lessing wrote The Good Terrorist, she knew her readers would be thinking of the Baader-Meinhof generation. In Libra, Don DeLillo delved into the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald.
But I found Updike, Amis and Rushdie disappointing. They each choose a different way to explain the terrorist’s motivation, in line with their own creative obsessions; Updike goes most deeply into religion; Rushdie sex, Amis death. But in the end, each of these fictions seems weighed down by the burden they are trying to carry.
They are taking the reality beyond the novel seriously, and they certainly do their research. Yet rather than giving extra richness, the research produces a feeling of artificiality — as though research has replaced empathy. For Amis and Updike, the feeling of being in thrall to the news seems to have been particularly stifling. These writers’ usual ebullience and invention evaporate in the gaps of experience they are trying to leap.
Compare those to Algerian Yasmina Khadra’s novel The Attack, about an Arab Israeli man struggling to understand when he finds out that his wife has become a suicide bomber. This is a truly felt exploration of injustice and rage. I closed it with a sense that something invigorating had come off the page.
Maybe time will give us more writers who can help us carry on believing that the novel can still go imaginatively undeterred into this territory. This isn’t the time to give up that hope; we need it now more than ever. — Â