Iraq by intuition

Political-affairs commentators across the English-speaking lands must be full of gratitude for America's Iraq war: it offers them something topical for their columns every week.

But what is the source of these commentators' expertise? Very few have reported from the region before this war, and under current conditions no serious reporting of, for instance, Iraq in Iraq can be done "" as opposed to America in Iraq, or Iraq in America, which is all we get in America's permanent election season.

It takes immersion to build up genuine knowledge. The finest and most informative works about Arabs are still those by colonial-era European (especially British) soldiers, spies, explorers and diplomats, such as Richard Francis Burton, who travelled to Mecca in disguise and translated the complete Arabian Nights, and Wilfred Thesiger, who wrote Arabian Sands (on the Bedouins), and The Marsh Arabs (on the Arabs of southern Iraq).

Mohammed Moulessehoul, the author of The Sirens of Baghdad, may not know Iraq well, but he is an Arab and a Bedouin, like the nameless protagonist of this book. An Algerian now resident in France, he took the pseudonym Yasmina Khadra (part of his wife's name) to avoid censorship by the Algerian army, his employer until 2000. He has written 20 novels, most set in his native Algeria.

Three recent books, however, have brought him attention in the West. The Swallows of Kabul is set in Taliban Kabul, The Attack in Tel Aviv, and now Sirens in Iraq. In all three, ordinary Muslims are exposed to events that leave them radicalised or damaged by radicalism. In Sirens, the main character is a young man from an isolated village whose life as a student in Baghdad is interrupted by the American invasion. He and other locals return home, where they experience the war only via radio and TV. There is fierce discussion but little action, until three events set the protagonist off on his mission to join the resistance.

First, the village idiot, a handicapped boy, is shot by trigger-happy GIs. Next, a marriage party is mistakenly air-bombed. Finally and decisively, American soldiers raid the protagonist's home at night, and his ailing father is humiliated before the family. He heads off to Baghdad to fight the Americans, and is picked up and groomed as a suicide bomber. The narrative ends at Beirut, from where he is to launch his own attack.

The sketchy, almost documentary atmosphere of this novel is partly due to Moulessehoul's unfamiliarity with Iraq. So readers will recognise specific events from the news coverage of Iraq "" the attack on the wedding party, for example ""which has the odd double effect of rupturing suspension of disbelief and looking the reader rudely in the face. It's like hearing a familiar story from the other side: the bears' version of Goldilocks' tale.

The language too is peculiarly inapt. Perhaps the translation is at fault, but the protagonist (the story is told in the first person) uses a language and, worse, idiom not conceivably his own. "Nobody slept a wink"? English is by nature a richly ironic language. It is awkward to hear it used by a putative suicide bomber, and the author has not tried to overcome this by using ways of saying and thinking that reinforce his actors' subjectivity. On the plus side, any Western-educated reader will immediately and disturbingly identify with the bomber who speaks precisely his language. It's compelling, and it almost works.

Yet Moulessehoul's sense of how an Arab thinks lends the book authenticity. He self-confessedly wishes to convey this lesson to "the West": that it does not know the Arab mind, what Arabs want and hold dear, the sources of Arab anger and fear, and that without this insight the West's project for West Asia is doomed.

True, but that the key is so simple "" the atavistic logic of honour "" is disappointing and also scary, because how to use the knowledge? The whole set-up recalls William Golding's profound Lord of the Flies, where the wrong and goal-oriented win out over the right and confused. My favourite character is Omar the Corporal, who like Golding's Piggy is fat and inept, yet clearsighted, truth-speaking and utterly loyal. Like Piggy his fate is harsh, but that he is there at all is reason to rejoice.

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THE SIRENS OF BAGHDAD

Yasmina Khadra
Random House
Pages: vi + 310; Price: Rs 350