The Terrorists of Our Imagination Aren't Muslims ... They're Us

Every era has its own built-in drama -- its plague or despot by which it will be remembered, whose looming menace inflects every conversation, kindles every sermon, tints every work of art. Ours is terrorism. A time of collapsing towers and exploding public-transit vehicles with charred guts ribboning the wrack is how this epoch will be pictured, centuries hence. But then to truly inhabit this era, to speak its language, I must add: if there even are centuries, hence.

Striving to picture our reality, future generations -- if there are future generations -- will sniff their anodyne air for phantom whiffs of ash or poison gas as they pore over novels published right now -- because terrorists have become stock characters in post-9/11 fiction just as spies were during the Cold War or pointy-horned demons in Dante's Florence. Maybe our descendants will read John Updike's "Terrorist" (Knopf, 2006). Its titular New Jersey teen -- Ahmad Mulloy, son of an Irish-American mother and long-gone Egyptian-student dad -- joins a jihadist cell plotting to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel and reveres an imam who intones, "The American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom." Perhaps they'll read Patrick Neate's City of Tiny Lights (Viking, 2005), whose hilarious private-eye narrator is an ex-mujahadeen who learned in Afghanistan how to slash a man from "his navel to his chops," and persuades an adoring young "thug lite" to infiltrate a jihadist cell plotting to blow up the London tube. (This book was published in the United Kingdom a week before the real London tube bombings of July 7, 2005.) Or they could read Xavier Waterkeyn and Daniel Lalic's "Where's Bin Laden?" (New Holland, 2006), a wacky cartoon romp in which readers are urged to locate the bearded Saudi in colorfully drawn city and circus scenes. They could pick up a copy of Robert Wilson's "The Hidden Assassins" (Harcourt, 2006), in which a bomb destroys a Seville apartment block amid clues resembling those found around the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Or maybe they'll tackle Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games" (Harper Collins, 2007), whose brooding cops race around Mumbai seeking a nuclear bomb they know that fanatics have built and which is poised to explode.

Novelists love built-in dramas. Think of all that time and effort saved which would otherwise be spent having to invent plots, characters, motivations, denouements. Terrorists plug handily into any genre. Thrillers. Sci-fi. Romance: Belinda ached for his touch. But why was he so reluctant to talk about his flying lessons?

And the trend factor sells. Publishers dream of reviewers trilling: "A real-life drama ripped from the headlines!" and "A tale for our times!" Surely that helped Chandra score a million-dollar advance from Harper Collins, which then budgeted another $300,000 for marketing "Sacred Games." Granted, Chandra crafts characters so authentic that you can practically hear their knuckles crack. But for a 900-page hardcover novel that's one big bet.

We didn't ask to live in an era when subways blow up. Or, to put a finer point on it, when people blow them up. But that's the way it is. So terrorists are stock characters not merely in mass-market drugstore-rack airport-shop blockbuster potboilers but in intellectual epics whose authors are professors praised by the Guardian and who win prestigious prizes. Neate won the Whitbread, one of the United Kingdom's top awards. Chandra won another -- the Commonwealth Writers Prize -- and teaches at UC Berkeley. Updike has won two Pulitzers, though the last one was 16 years ago.

OK, so what insights do all these novels offer into who terrorists really are and how they feel and what they want? Well, here's a spoiler warning. Beaucoup spoilers follow. Chandra and Wilson -- a Brit who has won the Gumshoe and Gold Dagger Awards and lives in Portugal -- are among those who engage in a bit of psy-ops. Knowing that today's typical Western reader is inclined to imagine terrorists as Muslims, the authors set things up so as to appear that Muslims are indeed perpetrating mayhem on an apocalyptic scale. In "The Hidden Assassins," a van containing a Koran, explosive residue, a black hood-mask and a green sash emblazoned with Arabic script stands parked alongside the bombed apartment block. The van's registration is traced to a man named Mohammed who is on a government watch list. A victim mutters: "We all know who it is, don't we? ... the Moroccans." Another character observes that ever since the Madrid train bombings, locals have "been watching them go into that mosque and wondering." When a cop muses that the evidence is puzzling, his colleague retorts: "Explosives, the Koran and a green sash and black hood don't sound confusing to me." Yobs in a bar go ape when a TV pundit suggests it might be anyone but Muslims.