Summary
Joe is a private detective in Vientiane, Laos, with no surname, no visible past and, it seems, no life outside his work. A mysterious woman walks into his office and hires him to find Mike Longshott, the elusive author of a series of cheap paperback thrillers called Osama bin Laden: Vigilante, and hands him a credit card with no limit. In Joe's world the attacks of our era never happened. There are no mobile phones, people still smoke on airplanes, and bin Laden exists only as the hero of pulp fiction. Joe, who appears to be an American expatriate, has never heard of the World Trade Center.
The search takes him to Paris, London and beyond. He visits a convention where fans dress as the character and argue about the books, is followed by men in black suits, has a bizarre encounter with Rick from Casablanca, and keeps hearing about "refugees," people who seem to have slipped into his world from ours, and whose arrival a government agency seems to fear. Joe does catch up with Longshott in the end, but the author's purposes stay obscure. In a scene of hallucinatory power Joe stands on a hill above Kabul as it is bombed, and there are hints throughout that he is an opium addict and that the whole story may be a dream.
Between Joe's chapters Tidhar sets excerpts from Longshott's novels, with titles such as Assignment: Africa and World Trade Center, which describe real al-Qaeda attacks in flat, factual prose. The contrast between those pages and Joe's noir haze is the engine of the book. It is strange and unresolved on purpose, and readers who need answers will be frustrated. Michael Levy, in Strange Horizons, wrote that a reader unfamiliar with science fiction might assume it "was primarily influenced by Kafka, Borges, and perhaps Lewis Carroll," while Publishers Weekly called it an "offbeat and enigmatic thriller." It suits readers of Philip K. Dick's alternate histories, and anyone who wants a novel about terrorism that treats its victims and its perpetrators as people.
Historical Context & Significance
Osama won the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel at the convention in Toronto, against a field full of famous names: Stephen King's 11/22/63, George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, Christopher Buehlman's Those Across the River and Jo Walton's Among Others, which had already won that year's Hugo and Nebula. The small British house PS Publishing had issued it in hardcover in 2011, and Solaris brought out paperbacks in 2012. It was also a finalist for the British Science Fiction Association's novel award and the Kitschies' Red Tentacle.
The book came out of experience. Tidhar, born on Kibbutz Dalia in Israel in 1976, was in Dar es Salaam during the American embassy bombing of 1998 and had stayed in Nairobi in the same hostel as the al-Qaeda operatives, and he and his wife narrowly avoided the 2004 Sinai and 2005 King's Cross attacks. He has lived in Laos and Vanuatu as well as Britain. He went on to write A Man Lies Dreaming, which won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2015, and Central Station, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2017.
Where to get it
We may earn a commission if you buy through these links, at no extra cost to you.