John Updike and The Mind of a Terrorirst. - Rated 
"Devils" Ahmad thinks. "These devils seek to take away my God. All day long at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low down purple tatoos, ask, What else is there to see?"
So opens John Updike's book 'Terrorist,' which has been described as a political thriller which takes you into the mind of a terrorist. Certainly Ahmad is often easy to identify with. His opening thoughts, as he stands outside 'Central High', could be the thoughts of many westerners over forty, religious or irreligious, if you take out the reference to his God. The scene he witnesses and damns is common in many a town and city centre in England. However, I was willing to go along with the development of Ahmad's character to find out how he becomes a man, just eighteen, who is turned into a suicide bomber ready to make a gesture to equal the bombing of the twin towers.
We learn that he alone, 'feels Allah closer to him than the vein in his neck,' unlike the broken down unbelieving Jew who is both his counselor and soon to become very close to Ahmad's mother. She is an Irish lapsed Catholic who uses men and dabbles in oil painting to express her deeper self. Ahmad's Egyptian father, having failed to grasp the American Dream returned home while Ahmed was still a baby. It is through a photograph of him that Ahmad models his appearance of neat laundered shirt and black jeans each day separating him from the rest of his college peers except for Joryleen a black girl he is infatuated with who sings in the local pentecostal church and wears her religion as casually as she does her clothes.
We learn that Ahmad started studying the Q'ran at the age of nine with Shaikh Rashid, the cynical and dapper Imam who tells him that he should not pursue his studies but drive a truck. We have no background as to why the young boy wanted to take up his studies. Presumably we are meant to believe that it was the decadence of America portrayed in one scene as full of,
"Children among them wear towering hats of plastic foam, and those who might be their grandparents, having forsaken all thought of dignity, make themselves ridiculous in clinging outfits of many colors and patterns. Sunburned and overfed, some sport in complacent self-mockery the same foam carnival hats as their grandchildren wear, tall and striped ones as in the books by Dr. Seuss or headgear shaped like open-mouthed sharks or lobsters extending a giant red mitt of a claw. Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen sneakers. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers."
This is Ahmad's view of America after he has left college and taken a job as a van driver where he meets Charlie who inexorably draws Ahmad into his fate as a Holy Martyr. He will drive a van packed full of explosives, 'twice what McVeigh had', and detonate it in the weakest part of Lincoln Tunnel under The Hudson River.
As the day draws near we are taken convincingly into the horror of what is about to happen and we wonder if anything can stop it. The ending, when it comes is deeply unsatisfying and stretches credulity but the book has been written just well enough to get us to the end - albeit with many unanswered questions.
This is not Updike at his best and the novel seems opportunistic rather than an honest attempt to ask just what happened to plunge us all into the aftermath of '9/11' and what really drives young men to give up their lives taking thousands with them as an act of holy martyrdom.
A very disappointing read - Rated
I was so looking forward to reading this book as it had all the ingredients of a really great novel. It follows a Muslim boy as he struggles in an America he feels to be corrupt and sinful. There are many great observations in the book and these are probably what makes it worth reading. But for me at least, it fell far short of fulfilling its promise of explaining what exactly leads people to take extreme action in the name of religion, nor did it deliver the edge-of-your-seat conclusion I had hoped for.
I struggled to finish the book because I lost interest very early on, but I did soldier on to find out what happened in the end.
I'm afraid I don't recommend this book ... there are just too many good reads out there at the moment to waste time on this one (in my humble opinion)!
Our greatest living writer on top form. - Rated 
With Terrorist, the post 9/11 world has finally sparked John Updike into a motive dynamism more commonly found in the much tougher oeuvres of Mailer, Bellow and Roth. But what makes this book so remarkable is the successful and near seamless conjoining if this `greater subject matter' with his usual highly subtle brilliance - a limpid consciousness lifting from the page like a hologram the finer details of life.
It seams John Updike has taken a leaf from his own fictional alter ego Henry Bech - he's endeavoured to 'Think Big'. Terrorist is a substantial book that drives through the usual Updike terrain of beatific detail a big themed thriller. With his imperishable and matchless perceptual antennae tuned to his usual lyrical realism, there's also a meatiness some muscle hungry American critics have craved and failed to see in Updike before now, and it's deployed here in spades.
The impact of 9/11 on the Updike psyche has clearly empowered him to tell a few home truths. This is done through his foil for the proto-terrorist, a disbelieving Jew tinged with a world weary venom of his own. His hard hitting bite acts as a valid yet concerned contrast that effectively critiques the naïve purity of the young extremist Ahmad. It shows the parallel track on the American terrain where informed criticism steadily departs from the easily led otherworldly disdain of youthful religious fanaticism. But it also helps explain it: A remarkable achievement.
Our greatest living writer and on best form. - Rated
With Terrorist, the post 9/11 world has finally sparked John Updike into a motive dynamism more commonly found in the much tougher oeuvres of Mailer, Bellow and Roth. But what makes this book so remarkable is the successful and near seamless conjoining if this `greater subject matter' with his usual highly subtle brilliance - a limpid consciousness lifting from the page like a hologram the finer details of life.
It seams John Updike has taken a leaf from his own fictional alter ego Henry Bech - he's endeavoured to 'Think Big'. Terrorist is a substantial book that drives through the usual Updike terrain of beatific detail a big themed thriller. With his imperishable and matchless perceptual antennae tuned to his usual lyrical realism, there's also a meatiness some muscle hungry American critics have craved and failed to see in Updike before now, and it's deployed here in spades.
The impact of 9/11 on the Updike psyche has clearly empowered him to tell a few home truths. This is done through his foil for the proto-terrorist, a disbelieving Jew tinged with a world weary venom of his own. His hard hitting bite acts as a valid yet concerned contrast that effectively critiques the naïve purity of the young extremist Ahmad. It shows the parallel track on the American terrain where informed criticism steadily departs from the easily led otherworldly disdain of youthful religious fanaticism. But it also helps explain it: A remarkable achievement.
Still mulling it over! - Rated
This is possibly the best book I've read so far this year. I would like to know what goes through the mind of a young person who lays down his life for what he believes in. What view of other human beings can legitimise, in someone's mind, killing innocent(?) people along with themselves. John Updike tries to paint a real character. He does seem to wrestle with these questions and I'm grateful to him for doing that. The end of the book puzzled me, but the fact that I am still trying to work through what I read, some time after I finished it, says something. This book did it for me. I think I'll remember it.
|
