THE INNOCENT’S STORY
by Nicky Singer

LAST MONTH, as the initial shock of the suicide attacks on London began to subside, people started to ask how young men could strap explosives to themselves, climb aboard a bus or train and look into the faces of the people they were about to murder. The cold hard facts gathered from similar atrocities around the world — suicide bombers tend to be young, and recruited by older men into a kind of death cult — only go so far to explain a phenomenon that rightly engenders peculiar horror.

So perhaps we should turn to novelists, who are used to getting inside other people’s minds, to help us to understand what drives suicide bombers. Of course the pitfalls are obvious: earnestness, whether it stems from fear of giving offence or too overt a political agenda; and sensationalism.

Too much crime fiction these days consists of ever more gory killers; such novels long ago ceased to illuminate, settling instead for cheap thrills. Yet it is easy to understand why one of crime’s closest cousins, the thriller, might attract a novelist who wants to tackle terrorism in general and suicide bombing in particular. Terrorists are akin to spies, planning their atrocities in secret and being pursued by the world’s security agencies.

This is the route taken by John Fullerton in This Green Land, a thriller originally published last year under a clumsier title, Give Me Death. Fullerton was the Reuters bureau chief in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war and This Green Land was inspired, he says, by real events in that country. In contrast The Innocent’s Story (to be published in October), a novel about a suicide bomber by Nicky Singer, an author who has previously written for adults and children, seems to be entirely the product of her imagination. It is her attempt after 9/11, she says, “to stand in the shoes of The Other”.

Tackling a subject that often excludes women, both Fullerton and Singer have chosen to make their most important characters female.

In This Green Land an idealistic young Englishman, Nicholas Lorimer, arrives in Beirut in 1986 to work for the UN, undergoing a baptism of fire when his boat from Cyprus is shelled. Fullerton evokes Lebanon during the civil war, with an insider’s knowledge of its complex feuds and loyalties.

Lorimer is targeted by Reem, an attractive 20-year-old woman from south Lebanon who draws him into an affair on the instructions of her handler, a veteran terrorist known to half a dozen security agencies only as the Ustaz (teacher). Reem is on a mission, preparing for a suicide attack on a controversial politician who is about to become the country’s next president, and her instructions are to use Nicholas’s privileged access as a foreigner to get close to her target. She is a Christian, the only survivor of a massacre that wiped out her family, an event which Fullerton presents not just as her motive but as a psychological barrier between her and the rest of humanity. While Reem looks normal, her behaviour is almost robotic, anaesthetised.

Her equivalent in Singer’s novel is Akim, a would-be suicide bomber who survives his attempt to blow up an English railway station. Akim is a T’lanni, a member of a made-up faith whose members wear three rings and follow a text called the Holy Desert Words. This may be a well-meaning attempt to avoid stigmatising a genuine religion, but it is one of several features of Singer’s novel that quickly divorce it from real life.

Another is her narrator, a 13-year-old girl called Cassina who is blown up by Akim’s bomb along with her younger sister, Aelfin. Instead of dying, Cassina becomes a para-spirit, which has the power to enter other people’s minds, including that of her would-be murderer; there are echoes here, unintentional I think, of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s novel in which the narrator is a young woman who has been raped and murdered.

It is hard to imagine anything more distracting than Singer’s descriptions of Cassina’s entry into other characters’ brains, and on one occasion her father’s lungs. This literal interpretation of the notion of empathy is a testament to the inadequacy of good intentions, turning the novel into a whimsical exercise that cannot be taken seriously.

In a fascinating reversal of expectations, it is Fullerton’s piece of genre fiction that gets closest to the heart of this difficult subject matter, perhaps because the thriller format imposes tighter demands on plot and characters. I suspect that Fullerton had enough to think about, keeping control of his complex narrative, whereas Singer, by her own account, approached her book full of anxieties about wanting to understand terrorists without sympathising with them.

In an atmosphere in which the prospect of another attack is on the mind of everyone who uses public transport in London or other big cities, no one could deny that terrorism is a suitable subject for fiction or fail to be grateful for any insights it might provide. But novels about suicide bombers are subject to the same rules as any other fiction, and the moral (if there is one) has to emerge from the story rather than the other way round. By an accident of timing, these two novels offer a template of how it should and should not be done. And one of them, at least, is also a shockingly good read.

This Green Land
Pan, £6.99; 352pp
£6.64 (free p&p)

The Innocent's Story
OUP, £12.99; 224pp
£11.69 (free p&p)
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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