A timely take on the impact of terror
MONTREAL— As the fight to defeat the terrorist group Daesh continues, a timely novel set in the Quebec city that faced a troubling wave of disappearances and terrorism arrests in 2015 looks at the forgotten victims of radicalization.
Basculer dans l’enfer, which translates as Falling Into Hell, is the sixth novel by Jocelyne Mallet-Parent, a former teacher and deputy minister of education in New Brunswick who now lives in Quebec’s Gaspé region. It tells the story of two students from Montreal, Élise Dubé and Tariq Taboury, who fall under the sway of a terrorist group.
The book opens with Tariq setting off a bomb in the Montreal subway and Élise spiriting him away in a getaway car. They escape to France, Germany and then Turkey, where they are taken separately across the border into the ranks of a terrorist organization that has its own plans for the new recruits.
But the book’s power is demonstrating the impact on families when a young life is lost to extremism. They hide from the media and are absent in the literature about the scourge of terrorism, but the life of a parent is changed forever when a child chooses this path.
Montreal has had more than its share of radicalization cases. In January 2015, a group of students from Montreal’s Collège de Maisonneuve successfully fled to Syria. Soon after, there were court-ordered peace bonds against two men suspected of trying to join Daesh. A young couple will be tried this fall on charges they were planning to construct a bomb.
In May 2015 the RCMP foiled the attempt of 10 young people to leave the country, allegedly to join an overseas terror group.
The path to radicalization for the two young characters resembles in many ways the real-life cases laid out in court documents and studies into the phenomenon. Élise and Tariq are young, intelligent and strong-minded. They are fueled by an acute sense of injustice and they are seeking an outlet through which to act.
Tariq, whose family has immigrated to Quebec from Algeria, complains about racism. Élise was traumatized by her deceased father, who offered his teen daughter to child pornographers, a crime for which he was arrested and later killed in jail.
She meets Tariq and their secret relationship builds from learning Arabic to plotting the subway bombing.
“He put her in contact with those who had the answer she was looking for,” the narrator says. “Élise had finally found a cause.”
At the heart of the novel is the guilt the mothers feel when they learn about their child’s activities. Dr. Ariane Dubé is an accomplished surgeon and Fatima Taboury is a receptionist at a doctor’s office, but their children’s decisions put them on level ground.
Élise’s mother can’t help but acknowledge the nagging thought when she thinks of Tariq’s mother.
“Did this mother do something wrong? Did she mess up with her son? Was she a bad mother or is she asking herself the same questions, blaming herself? Or is she also trying to make sense of the incomprehensible?”
It is a particularly sensitive investigator, Insp. Alex Duval, who unravels the terror network behind the subway bombing, perhaps because he lost a son to suicide and then lost his marriage in the ensuing distress.
A terror investigation is equal parts politics and public security. But Duval is aware that he is also deconstructing a personal family tragedy.
“What will he say to his bosses? What will his bosses tell the elected officials? What will the officials tell the population?” he thinks. “And . . . what will he tell Ariane Dubé and Fatima Taboury?”
Novels — even those that take cues from the news — can tie up all the loose ends.
In Mallet-Parent’s book, the mastermind of the subway attack — a jihadist recruiter preying on students who attended the same school as Tariq and Élise — ends up in jail, though the culprits slip through an international dragnet.
In real life, Canada’s terrorism laws have been toughened, but criminal charges have been infrequent.
In the book, Tariq becomes a fullfledged terrorist, “a man stripped of his soul, become a robot, a killing machine.”
Élise is saved by a young man whose family has been massacred and who is to become a suicide bomber. He warns her she is to be a sabaya, or sexual offering for frontline fighters, and helps to smuggle her to safety.
She returns home, where she is convicted for her part in the subway bombing but works with radicalized youth upon her release.
“It is another cause in her sights,” the narrator says.
“To save lives rather than destroy them.” En Scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: awoods@thestar.ca