Eerily familiar
American War repatriates a kind dystopia that the United States has already helped to create
American War By Omar El Akkad McClelland & Stewart 352 pp; $32.95
Triple- tap strikes are a particularly evil component of modern warfare. First, you bomb a target such as a wedding where you think a terrorist is hiding – and hope you don’t hit children or other innocent people who happen to be at the festivities. Then, you wait for nearby people to rush in to try and help, and bomb them. Finally, when a third group arrives, often an ambulance or other medical personnel, you attack them. Triple taps are used by Saudi Arabia in their United States- backed war in Yemen. The U. S. makes the Saudi bombings possible by providing guidance systems, plane refuelling and over $ 115 billion in arms sales during Obama’s tenure alone. The war in Yemen is brutal and vicious and has no end in sight. But it also doesn’t make headlines in the West. If it did: Omar El Akkad’s novel would seem less foreign.
Akkad describes a near- future United States where a second civil war breaks out over a handful of Southern states’ refusal to stop using gasoline when the rest of the country has shifted to renewables. The Northern ( Blue) states use drones that indiscriminately kill civilians. The South (Red) responds with suicide bombers that do the same. Akkad does a remarkable job of bringing the realities of war home. He focuses on the emotional toll of losing a family member and the appeal of joining an armed militia when growing up in a refugee camp. High-level political machinations are present, but usually only as they affect individuals.
It’s a poignant and artfully crafted dystopia: more Cormac McCarthy than Suzanne Collins. Akkad provides a human face for atrocities committed by both sides. A son who orders a series of brutal raids following the assassination of his father; a prisoner held in a Guantanamo Bay-like facility who is released and savagely tortures one of her torturers. Revenge is a driver throughout the book. Young men living in refugee camps in the South join militias to fight against the Blue. Young men in the North join the army and, as the militias become increasingly deadly yet hard to catch, eventually decide to attack the refugee camp itself.
The main character Sarat is particularly motivated by vengeance. Sarat starts the book as a six-yearold fleeing to a refugee camp. She’s just old enough to have a few sweet pre- war memories such as pouring honey into her pine porch and watching it run through the whorls like the river to the sea. Most of those memories are quickly corrupted, though: e. g. the image of her father climbing the roof to wipe down the solar panels every other day is forever altered by that of her brother desperately trying and failing to get to the roof once their father is killed.
The story is designed to be familiar in some ways. It’s partially inspired by Akkad’s time as a war correspondent in Afghanistan, albeit updated with some more futuristic elements ( climate change has destroyed entire cit- ies, broken the banks of rivers and moved the ocean inland).
The story is told from the perspective of a historian piecing together the history of the second American Civil War many years later. It’s punctuated with excerpts from government documents describing death counts from key attacks and meeting minutes where decisions to escalate the war were taken.
Books about the end of the world have dominated young adult and science-fiction for at least half a decade, but so far literary fiction has resisted that trend. American War is the first of several books coming in April that could change that. Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, Lidia Yuknavtich’s The Book of Joan and Zachary Mason’s Void Star are all books about dystopic future worlds that are getting early positive reviews. They may not have the commercial success of teen hits like The Hunger Games or Divergent, but they’re the first step in a literary landscape that is increasingly trying to offer answers for the many people who feel as though the world is headed to a dark place with the rise of Donald Trump.
American War’s major weakness is an imaginative failure when it comes to creating a believable year 2075. Rising seas and omnipresent drones make sense, but why are there no cellphones or internet? Why hasn’t language or clothing or music changed? There’s an odd mishmash of aughts Middle East and antebellum Civil War American South throughout.
But this actually speaks to one of the strengths of the book, which is how many of the things aren’t future problems, they are problems that exist today – just in another part of the world. Medical workers desperately trying to offer polio vaccinations, civilian deaths in drone strikes radicalizing family members, torturers becoming the tortured. Akkad provides a clear sense of motivation for each character, which makes their rationalizations easier to sympathize with. Sarat’s older brother Simon joins a militia for a million reasons: a sense of boredom, a desire for independence, a need to assert his budding manhood, an interest in fighting back against the forces that oppressed his family. Yes, it was a militia that killed his father but that doesn’t matter to Simon. For him, the larger evil is the Blues and so that’s where he’s channelling his anger.
Though this book is being treated as prophetic of what will happen to the United States if existing divisions continue to get worse, it’s really more descriptive. The United States has bombed or invaded at least 14 predominantly Muslim countries since 1980. American War is really just transposing those fights onto more familiar ground.