By J. Keith Haney
Tidhar, Lavie. Osama. PS Publishing Ltd., 2011. £19.99. ISBN 978-1-84863-192-2.
Osama bin Laden has been a fact of life over this last decade. To most people, he was a video rumor aided and abetted by the occasional broadcast, as well as a terrorist or freedom fighter (depending on which side of the bombs you were on). He and former President George W. Bush created a world most people who remember the last couple of decades of the 20th Century barely recognise and, in the end, he got something other than what he wanted. The revolts of the Arab Spring had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda’s terror campaign and the man himself was killed by Navy Seal Team Six on May 2, 2011. His death effectively ended the War on Terror, for all intents and purposes, even if the fallout will continue to haunt us for at least the next decade (Witness Iraq and Afghanistan). So, why does a book that uses him in a fantastic fashion feel as flat and disposable as toilet paper?
The protagonist’s name is ‘Joe’. He’s a private detective in the Southeast Asian city of Vientiane, passing most of his days with a popular set of paperbacks called “Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante”. The books are written by Mike Longshott, who just happens to be someone that Joe’s latest client, a mysterious woman, wants to track down. By no means is this task easy. Longshott is never seen in public and maintains his ties through a series of post office boxes throughout the world. Then there’s something else: Joe occasionally gets glimpses of a world he doesn’t recognise…our world. The closer he gets to answers, the closer he may get to losing his mind.
The premise, overall, is a good one. Alternate realities are a major staple of Fantasy’s diet and adding a mystery can certainly spice things up. The problem is the execution, which is painful beyond words. Actually, words are the problem with this book, too many of them. Most of the chapters have the brevity of a Robert Bloch novel, never more than three pages. However, reading through them makes them feel like thirty pages worth of work. The narrative bogs down over two things, excessive description and circular thoughts that go nowhere. Here is a typical descriptive passage:
The darkness tasted like dark Arabica. There was a faint whirring sound far away, like a coffee grinder switched on, turning small roasted beans into a soft dark powder like a cloud-wrapped night. There was peace in that darkness. He was tied to a chair. He had been on that chair for some time. His hands and feet were tied to the chair. There was a sack over his head. It was very hot inside the sack. There were small holes cut into the cloth to let in air. The air tasted unused. The rope, where his hands were tied, cut into his skin.
As the above illustrates, the author repeats himself way too often, to the point where his readers want to scream at him that they got the point halfway through the passage. That this is merely one of several such passages makes the story drag at a glacial pace, overall, in spite of the various shootings, sluggings and other actions that happen throughout. Placed next to passages like the one above, the action never seems to register. It is the most egregious violation of Streck’s Rule 13 (to wit: “Omit unnecessary words”) that I have ever encountered.
The tracking of Joe’s thoughts also ensures that character development is given the same short shrift. What follows is one of too many examples of what the author mistook for profound thought:
But what was the trail? These were the facts: his name was Joe. He was a private investigator. He had been hired to find a man, and given more-than-adequate funds to do so. Everything else…These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe’s world. Everything else…He sat in the dining car and smoked and watched the lights of Paris, like a cloud of scattered moths, disappear in the distance. He had always liked trains. There was a sense of timelessness in the way they moved across a landscape, a comfort in their rhythm and their constant pattern, an order of sound and movement. The train’s whistle sounded and it made Joe smile. The dining compartment was half-empty, and beside the heavy weight of smoke he could smell brewing tea and floor polish, and as the train gathered speed the windows rattled, just a little, and the wheels turned with a soothing constancy and the windows steamed up and the car was like a cocoon, and he felt no desire to leave it.
While all the above conveys a hazy sense of reality and identity, the rest of the book never goes beyond this, as far as Joe is concerned. The reader finds himself wondering, about halfway through (if he’s particularly patient), why he should care if Joe is run over in the next scene. It is never enough to have an exciting answer to your great mystery. You also have to have enough invested in your detective or the mystery to want to find out what is really going on. You never get that with Joe or any of the other characters he interacts with. All of them are as substantial as shadows in fog.
But the single biggest mistake (one I have never forgiven Grant Morrison for doing with his creator-owned comic series, The Invisibles) is failing to reveal what the truth is. Oh, the ending gives plenty of hints but nothing solid, nor does anything get resolved about why Joe is there or what world he is living in. After 276 pages of come-ons, the reader deserves better than to have his intelligence insulted by feeding him a virtual repeat of the first chapter of the book, making him wonder what the point of reading it was.
Perhaps the author was trying to make a statement of the outlandishness of the times we’ve just passed through, or the ghost-like presence of bin Laden since 9/11 (even his death took place in shadows), or how we all wish we were living in any other world than the one we’re in. All of these are worth saying and expositing in fiction. But they have to be done right and, frankly, Osama fails to hold a reader’s attention. More’s the pity.