Terror: reality mirrors fiction

In recent years fictional literature has managed to pre-empt the emergence of terrorism as the new global security threat. Caryn James looks at some of the books that have fictionalised the threat.

Written after 9/11 but before 7/7 had a significant meaning. Ian McEwan's novel Saturday creates a hero who looks out his window, sees London "waiting for its bomb", and worriedly thinks "rush hour will be a convenient time". Today this fiction may seem as prophetic as Chris Cleave's Incendiary, published in Britain on 7/7 itself, in which suicide bombers kill hundreds of Londoners in a soccer stadium. But both authors agree that their plots are based on sheer common sense and the awful fulfillment of our fears.

"How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?" McEwan wrote in an Op-Ed piece the day after the London tube and bus bombings. That same day Cleave wrote on his web site, "I don't think my book is unusually prescient – we all knew this was coming."

Faced with such inevitability and the persistent spectre of terrorism, some of the most ambitious novelists in London and New York are not addressing the 9/11 attacks themselves but their intangible legacy, what McEwan in Saturday calls "the general unease" and Michael Cunningham in Specimen Days sees as a change that shook New York's "dreams of itself". Along with Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (coming in September), these writers are depicting how the air has changed in cities living with terror: the jittery feeling that comes and goes; characters who think they are adjusting, only to lose their grip on reason.

The toll of a wartime atmosphere has always been an intriguing subject for novelists; even today's almost-instant reactions have their precedents. One of Graham Greene's most haunting books, The Ministry of Fear, was set in London during the blitz, written in 1942 and published in 1943, while World War II still raged. The novel, about a man accidentally caught up in political intrigue, is almost a template for today's anxieties.

Both God and the Devil, Greene wrote, rely on "little suburban natures and the maimed and warped", to serve their purposes, a description as easily applied to suicide bombers lurking in London's suburbs as to World War II traitors. After walking through bombed-out London, Greene's hero finds a bed in the Underground and thinks that "real life" as he knew it is gone; now "thrillers are like life".

London's altered reality is also at the centre of McEwan's eloquent yet piercingly analytical Saturday, which follows a neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne through 15 February 2003, the day of worldwide marches against the looming war with Iraq. As Henry observes, "international terror, security cordons" now "represent the steady state, the weather", and he reluctantly adapts as a patient might adjust to the loss of a limb.

Graham Greene could not have foreseen, though, McEwan's brilliantly astute description of how and why we obsessively follow "every little nervous shift of the daily news". Even though the sceptical Henry thinks he is "becoming a dupe" of the government and the media, "his nerves, like tautened strings, vibrate obediently with each news 'release'", as if this gives him some control.

The impact of terrorism is more direct in Incendiary, narrated by a woman whose husband and small son have been killed by the stadium bomb. The novel is shaped as her letter to Osama bin Laden, a form that is both an attention-getting trick (it's hard to ignore a book that begins "Dear Osama") and an effective literary device. This unnamed woman has been driven mad by grief; it becomes increasingly clear that the letter is a symptom of her derangement.

Cleave's satirical touches don't always blend smoothly with his narrator's anguish, but Incendiary is stunning in its portrayal of a city living with terror. Like 9/11, the stadium bombing in May instantly gets its nickname, "May Day". Bodies are not identified for weeks. And the way residents are told to carry on with ordinary life is the most familiar detail of all. A Scotland Yard official says, "We win by persuading the Brits" to stand up on the Underground "and ask Does this bag belong to anyone?"

The New York writers, looking back on the attack on their city, take a longer historical view. Different though they are stylistically, Cunningham's poetic Specimen Days and McGrath's psychologically resonant Ghost Town share a remarkably similar structure: each is composed of three stories set in three different historical periods, suggesting that terror and its shock waves are nothing new.

The first section of Specimen Days takes place in the 19th century and the final section is set in the 22nd. The frighteningly plausible middle story, The Children's Crusade, deals with contemporary terrorized New York.

The heroine of The Children's Crusade, a New York City police psychologist named Cat, takes a call from a boy who later straps a bomb to himself and blows up a stranger on a downtown street, "right by Ground Zero". Afterwards Cat sees three girls pause to look in a store window but they quickly move on. "Were they thinking of being showered with broken glass?" she wonders. "The danger that has infected the air for the last few years was stirred up now; people could smell it." Her own grief, predating 9/11, is stirred up too; after a second and possibly a third child suicide bomber appears, Cat becomes as unhinged as the narrator of Incendiary.

Similarly, the contemporary section of Ghost Town concerns a psychiatrist who becomes as unsettled as her patient. McGrath, the author of exceptional, darkly psychological novels like Asylum, sets his first story in the 18th century, when the narrator looks back to the American Revolution, and the second story in the 19th century. The final section, 'Ground Zero', takes place in the weeks after 9/11, when the psychiatrist treats a longtime patient who suddenly falls in love with a prostitute.

The psychiatrist tells us that her patient feels that the terror attack was "directed at himself, as in a way it was". She learns that the prostitute feels guilty because her boyfriend died in the World Trade Center: "She saw the plane go into the tower and she didn't do anything to save him." All around, the psychiatrist notices "episodes of peripheral insanity" as frighteningly ordinary as anthrax that arrives in the mail. As the doctor becomes fixated on her patient, the story places us in a mind that slowly reels out of control.

The political always comes down to the personal, yet the long historical view isn't necessarily comforting. Many of these novels envision a fortress-like future in which civil liberties are severely curtailed. The extraterrestrials and androids in the final section of Specimen Days are tracked by electronic surveillance not many steps ahead of today's. In Incendiary, after the stadium bombing, Muslims working on planes or in hospitals are fired as security risks, and London is put under nighttime curfew.

The characters in all these affecting, post-terror novels are not only grieving some personal loss; they are also mourning their vanished, secure way of life.

© New York Times