September 11 2011, another day that will live in infamy. Cataclysmic events invariably cause a deluge of fiction, some of it great. The Easter Rising, The Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, The Charge of the Light Brigade, the sinking of the Titanic, all have inspired tomes and novellas. And who could forget Lord Flashart’s contempt for the “endless poetry” of the First World War.
So it’s curious that comparatively few novels have been written about 9/11. The BBC has produced this graph to illustrate the disparity between fiction and non-fiction; just 164 novels on the subject:
Some of the books included do not exactly concern 9/11. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is more of a critique of the American response to al Qaeda’s atrocity, charting the slow radicalisation of the protagonist, Changez (the Urdu name for Genghis, which immediately evokes Genghis Khan).
The book is framed as a monologue, spoken by Changez to an unidentified American, presumably a secret agent. At numerous points in his narrative, Changez urges his companion to calm down and do not flinch at the sight of a long beard. The message is hardly subtle.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is well fashioned and deeply provocative, but it isn’t definitive nor was it meant to be. Its author, Moshin Hamid, thinks that the search for a ‘definitive’ 9/11 novel is pointless while the retaliation is still being meted out. You can’t do “history in a hurry,” he says.
It’s a persuasive view. Distance from the atrocity will crystalize the tragic drama and, of course, it effects will have become clear. That is invariably the case: the guns of Borodino had been silent for nearly 60 years when Tolstoy published War and Peace. A century has passed since the Great War and perhaps the Great Novel of that war is yet to be written. The fictionalisation of the war on terror, if there is to be such a thing, is probably some way off.
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