Today’s vitriol as tomorrow’s dystopia
As a future America tears itself apart, we see the personal reasons behind terrorism. Charles Cole explains.
The Second American Civil War (2074-2095) forms the background to Omar El Akkad’s fascinating first novel. Like the first Civil War, it is fought between North and South, and its primary cause is the secessionist South’s refusal to accept a major Unionist policy – this time, it is resistance to a bill prohibiting the use of fossil fuels. But there is a wider malaise in the South that provides more personal motivations, as we see in the story of the Chestnut family who relocate from their shipping container in the Mississippi Delta to a tent in a refugee camp.
Poverty and the displacement are significant factors in the South, where the rising sea is constantly encroaching – the Florida peninsula has completely disappeared – and ‘‘the planet’s un-breaking fever’’ of higher temperatures is killing trees and making it hard to grow vegetables. The South relies on aid ships from the world’s two superpowers, China and the African-Middle Eastern Bouazizi Empire. Such credible details of a future America are woven meaningfully into the narrative. Interspersed through the chapters, brief official war documents, interviews and histories become a crucial part of the story.
The disaster-marked Chestnuts become increasingly affected by the war, and Sarat, the adolescent daughter, develops into a determined guerrilla fighter. However, the characters do not appear fully rounded, perhaps because they are shown primarily as victims of circumstance. Efforts to show emotional connections are laboured and clumsy.
One can attribute elements of the story to El Akkad’s experience as a journalist covering Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring, particularly the splintering of the secessionist opposition into rival rebel groups, and the way in which the disaffected are easily recruited. In showing such things in a Western context (including biological and drone warfare), he helps increase our understanding of war-ravaged countries and demonstrates the more personal reasons why people become terrorists and suicide bombers.
He also shows how political allegiances can be motivated by quite simplistic thinking. The selfjustification of one character could have been voiced just as easily in 1861 or 2017: ‘‘I sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for – be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness – you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day...’’