From disturbing view of future

today’s USA may be heading and a sharp rebuke to “America as it existed in the first half of the twentieth century: soaring, roaring, oblivious”.

However, the subject of the novel is not Benjamin but his aunt Sarat. When we meet Sarat, she is six years old and living with her parents, twin sister and older brother in a largely flooded Louisiana when her father, seeking official documentation to travel north, is killed in a rebel “homicide bomb”.

With the conflict threatening to engulf their home, the Chestnuts become refugees. The following section, set some years later, recounts the Chestnuts’ life in a refugee camp where the Svengali-like figure of Albert Gaines recruits Sarat to fight for the Free South against the North.

Although Gaines “educates” her in “the old mythology of her people”, Sarat is half-African American and half-Mexican so he unsurprisingly omits the vital role of slavery in the previous American Civil War. He succeeds in radicalising her: “How much of it was real and how much pleasant fantasy didn’t matter. She believed every word.”

Sarat rather too easily becomes a true believer, a living weapon in the fight against the North but it is not until her refugee camp is attacked, her brother grievously injured and her mother murdered that she becomes a fanatic.

Interspersed with the narrative are short news pieces, oral histories and government documents that provide context for the close-up view of war provided by Sarat’s viewpoint.

American War is an assured debut and El Akkad’s experience as a war reporter lends a grisly realism to proceedings. Despite some unrealistic dialogue and overly convenient plotting, it is a vivid and nightmarish vision of an all-too-conceivable future.