Osama

By: Lavie Tidhar

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

A private detective is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man....

The quarry? An obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: vigilante. Our detective pursues his quarry from the backwaters of Asia to the Capitals of Europe, the New World and into a realm of shadows. Here he finds the refugees, ghostly entities haunting reality. Where do they come from? And what do they want?

©2021 Lavie Tidhar (P)2021 W F Howes Ltd

Heady mix of noir & 2666 w great narration

Absolutely brilliant book, best experienced in its audio format read by Jeff Harding, and an excellent example of why it's so important to seek out works written by non-US authors, particularly when delving into events in which the US has played a pivotal role.

The book blurb emphasizes the author's close scrapes with terrorism in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam and London, as if this makes him uniquely qualified to write a novel about the War on Terror. But it seems to me his early life in Israel (where he was born) and nomadic adult life (including periods living in South Africa, Laos and Vanuatu, if Wikipedia is to be believed) has been a bigger influence on his view of the world in which such a war has been unleashed and the ways in which people understand the nature of the conflict.

The novel plunges us immediately into a noir world where sentences are short, life is cheap, and everyone smokes. The main character, a private detective we only know as "Joe" is sitting in his office when a mysterious, beautiful woman enters. Anyone who has ever seen "The Maltese Falcon" knows exactly how this scene looks and sounds.

The woman sets Joe on a quest to find the author of a series of books called "Osama bin Laden, Vigilante," and we soon figure out that in Joe's world, there is no terrorism and no al Qaeda. There is only a series of very popular pulp novels written by the elusive Mike Longshott describing bombings, coups, and other terrorist acts. The terrorist acts are easily recognized by the reader as real things that have happened, such as the shoe bomber Richard Reid, and the 9/11 attack. But it's interesting to note that Tidhar also mentions a couple of non-al Qaeda events, such as the violent 1973 Chilean coup in which the US was heavily involved (and for which both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger have been widely labeled as terrorists in the eyes of many in the international human rights community).

I would say more about the plot, which is convoluted and incredibly imaginative, but I fear giving too much away. This is a novel best experienced without knowing too much ahead of time. I will say there were many times when the writing--which is deceptively simple--made me stop cold and re-listen, it was so good.

"A couple was walking hand in hand and the girl wore a summer dress, though it was not yet summer. And when she turned her head for just a moment, he thought about his client, the woman who had hired him. And he thought something he couldn't put into words, but which hurt, and he turned away from the couple."

"The cliffs of Dover, chalky and pale, were being left behind, their faces, many now, staring out across the sea. Joe stared back through the window. Inside it was warm and the humidity fogged up the windows and he had to wipe the pane with his sleeve. He pressed his face to the glass, which was cool against his skin, and peered out. he wondered what the faces of Dover saw when they gazed out to sea. Across the channel, the poppies grew, somewhere there beyond the water, in the French landscape he had so recently passed through. He pictured a field of poppies growing where beneath, a field of humans had been sowed and reaped. The train gathered momentum, but for a long time, Joe's face remained glued to the glass, staring out beyond the gentle English moonlit landscape sprayed with silver rain, seeing as if through a fine haze, endless red flowers blossoming across the silent world."

Blatantly riffing off Casablanca while echoing Bolaño's 2666, Osama asks us to think about what is real and what is imagined, the choices we make and what we decide to remember. I know I will remember this book for a very long time.

Terrorist as a fictional vigilante

Lavie Tidhar’s Osama is an alternate history tale that offers a world without terrorism. There is a hugely popular pulp fiction series that features, Osama, a vigilante whose exploits are eerily similar to actual historical events. A private detective is employed to hunt down the author of these tales. His search takes him all over the world in a ‘peeling the onion’ type action. At the same time, there is a mysterious group that continually attempts to deter him from his task.

Tidhar offers an alternate universe where the fictional exploits of a vigilante / terrorist garner a huge fan base and following, including specific conventions and fan magazines focused on the character. Intermixed throughout are ‘excerpts’ from the fictional series mirror actual historical events.

The narration is good with solid character distinction and smooth brisk pacing.