A prescient novel by Globe journalist
IN THE MARGINS
American War, Omar El Akkad, McClelland & Stewart, 400 pages, $32.95
This dystopian novel, set in the late 21st century, is by a Globe & Mail journalist who covered the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the trials in Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Missouri. El Akkad was born in Egypt and grew up in Canada. The second Civil War raged between the North which banned fossil fuels, and the South which still pumped it. Rising sea levels have wiped out the eastern seaboard, all of Florida and most of Louisiana.
Add in a president’s assassination and biological-warfare plagues, and the mighty USA has been reduced to a charity state, relying on donations from the Arab empire. Most of the book is told from the main character’s perspective, interspersed with documents: first-hand military accounts, trial records, compensation applications, etc.
When the story opens in 2075, Sarat is a six-year-old tomboy, unlike her twin sister, Dana.
Their father is killed when he applies to migrate to the North, and the sisters, an older brother, and their mother move to a refugee camp near the northern border. Camp Patience is filled with similar families, the victims of both the physical war (drones continued to attack long after their controllers had been lost) and of the environmental trauma of climate change. They clung to “keys to houses that no longer existed in towns long ago deserted.” Sarat is bored by the camp school and, as she grows into a teenager, becomes the protégé of Gaines, a veteran from the First Gulf War. When the camp is overrun by Northern soldiers, Sarat saves her sister in Gaines’s bunker but cannot save their mother. The brother has been shot but survives, and the three of them live as heroes in a shelter away from the camp. Sarat’s training and burning desire for revenge on the North leads her to assassinate the top-ranked Northern general. Eventually she is caught and shipped to a prison island, clearly modelled on Guantanamo.
Sarat returns after seven years in prison to an even less functional South, and writes her memoirs in a house built for her brother and his caregiver wife. PTSD still feeds her desire for revenge. This cannot end well.
El Akkad began writing this novel in 2014, long before the American election campaign and its startling result.
But readers will assume that the events of the last 18 months were in his mind as this novel was being drawn up. In one scene a character talks about inventing fake massacres to rouse his supporters. Terrorist attack on Sweden, anyone?
Late in the book, Gaines’s recruitment methods are explained. “Like if a kid was religious, he’d start talking to them about how it was God’s will for the South to emerge victorious. Or if they were insecure, he’d talk to them about the ever-accepting rebel family.” ISIS technique, surely.
In the April issue of Quill & Quire, the author writes: “The intent was to show that all people, regardless of ethnicity or religion or culture, respond to injustice in much the same way — they are damaged by it the same way, made angry and bitter and vengeful the same way.
"My contention is that there is nothing unique to America, or anywhere else, that protects it from the kind of xenophobia, violence, and affinity for authoritarianism to which whole populations are so deeply susceptible in times of crisis.”
Dystopian novels have drawn renewed attention of late. Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” written in 1984, reappears as a television series this month. Sales of Orwell’s “1984” spiked after the Trump election. Readers are scouring the predictions of futuristic stories for signs to explain their anxiety and dread. “American War,” likewise, deserves to be read and pondered.
A final quote: “You fight the war with guns; you fight the peace with stories.”