Terrorism and The Novel 2008

Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001
Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel

English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Abstract Since 1970, terrorism has become a prominent subject for English-
language novels. In an attempt to characterize the modern terrorism novel and the
cultural work it has performed, the authors have devised a typology of terrorism-in-
fiction from 1970 through 2001. Over a thousand novels were documented, including
both thrillers and mainstream works. A sample of twenty-five novels from the period
was then selected for careful reading, analysis, and comparison. Preliminary results
establish that though there is a great deal of diversity in terrorism novels, both in
what they do with terrorism and why, they are by and large focused less on politics
than on sentiment and less on the perpetrators of terrorism than on its victims. But
novels introduce an innovation in what has been called the “mythography of ter-
rorism” by introducing new types of “controlling consciousnesses” through which
terrorist violence is perceived.
The Representation of Terrorism in Fiction
Our question would seem to be straightforward: how, in the world of the

contemporary English-language novel, has terrorism been represented?
The question, however, has seldom been asked, and asking it involves
a number of complications. Although a great deal of attention, especially
since the 1980s, has been paid to the representation of terrorism in the
mass media, representations of terrorism in fiction have gone relatively
Funding for research on this project was provided by the British Academy, to which the
authors express their gratitude.
Poetics Today 29:3 (Fall 2008) DOI 10.1215/03335372-072
© 2008 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
388 Poetics Today 29:3
undocumented and uninterrogated. What novels have in fact been writ-

ten about terrorism? Who have they been written by and where and when
and how? In what genre and style? To what end? What has modern fiction
done with terrorism? Outside of the work of a handful of famous authors—
Doris Lessing, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and a few others—the critical
literature has been all but silent about this. Even in the case of discussions
of select novels, moreover, it has not been the terrorism in the novels that
has attracted critical interest so much as the terrorism outside of them.
What has monopolized critical interest is not, in other words, the representa-
tion of terrorism in fiction but the encounter of fiction with something in the
outside world, a “novel-writing” in its embattled relationship with “terror-
wreaking” (Foertsch 2004b: 288), a “force of literature” confronted with
the superior force of terroristic violence (Houen 2002: 18).
Yet terrorism has been internal to fiction too, and not just in the fiction
of the best or most famous authors. For novelists in the English-speaking
world, in works of great intellectual ambition as well as in most unam-
bitious and formulaic writing, terrorism has been good to compose with. It
has been handy subject matter for the composition of plots, the invention
of psychological conflict, the discovery of interesting locales, the devising
of timely themes, the rousing of political passions. Whatever the reality of
terrorism may be—and a good deal of criticism and theoretical work has
regarded terrorism as something that is in effect really real, a Lacanian
“real” defying symbolization (for example, Žižek 2002 and Baudrillard
2003)—fiction has taken up terrorism as a thing of its own.
But what is this “thing,” this narrative thing? What does terrorism do
in novels? What in fact is it, and how does it operate? How does it oper-
ate in the world represented in novels, and how does it operate symboli-
cally, in the context of the formal properties of novels and in the experi-
ences of writing and reading the texts? In the context of the mass media,
. The two book-length exceptions are Scanlan 2001 and Houen 2002. But Margaret Scan-
lan’s work, despite its rich treatment of historical and political context, is focused only on
about twelve novels, from DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) to Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate (1998).
Alex Houen’s work, which is especially strong on the philosophy of terror and the theory of
modernism, ranges over the whole of the twentieth century, from the novelist Joseph Conrad
to the poet Ciaran Carson, with stops along the way regarding the propagandism of Wynd-
ham Lewis and Ezra Pound as well as Walter Abish’s How German Is It (1980). So though both
touch upon it, neither writer quite addresses our main question as to how terrorism has been
represented in recent fiction. One other partial exception is a special issue of Studies in the
Novel edited by Jacqueline Foertsch (2004a). Apart from the introduction by Foertsch (2004b)
and an exercise in “typology” that is interesting but lacks methodological rigor (Kubiak
2004), each of the essays covers a single author and mainly a single text by that author. On
the media and terrorism nevertheless, there are such broad-ranging inquiries as Douglass
and Zulaika 1996; Juergensmeyer 2000; and Jackson 2005.
Appelbaum and Paknadel • Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001 389
William A. Douglass and Joseba Zulaika (1996) have discussed what they
call the “mythography” of terrorism: taken up by the press, by politicians
and policy makers, by television producers and filmmakers, terrorism is
inserted into an “enabling fiction,” a myth of terrorism and its causes, dan-
gers, and meanings, which ends up making its own realities. The result of
this mythography is not simply a distortion of perception; it is the replace-
ment of the perception of things with a reaction to representations. Policies
end up being made, wars even end up being fought, not in response to real
conflicts in the realms of social relations and politics, but in reaction to the
simulacra of conflict circulated in the media by way of a mythography of
terror.
Fiction, we perceive, both responds to this mythography and contrib-
utes to it, adding its own coloration to the mythic identity of terrorism.
Perhaps it challenges that mythic identity as well. Subjecting terrorism to
its own conventions and aspirations, the novel makes terrorism into a phe-
nomenon in the possible worlds it represents—an enabling phenomenon,
lending itself to the construction of plot, character, and theme—and it
makes terrorism at the same time into a symbolic function through which
it pursues its various writerly and readerly ends, generating suspense, sen-
timent, and even—yes—terror. What cultural work the novel thereby per-
forms with regard to terrorism (or “terrorism”) is one of the main issues
in which we have been interested. We engaged in this study with an open
mind, uncertain about what we would find but concerned to establish the
facts. Those facts would derive in the first place, we hypothesized, from a
determination of the typology of terrorism in contemporary fiction. What
types of terrorism appear in recent novels? What types of representation
are these types of terrorism submitted to? What varieties of narrative tra-
jectories and moral sympathies is terrorism recruited to serve? These ques-
tions too have seldom been asked, but it was to these, above all, that we
addressed ourselves.
Definitions, Further Questions, and Limitations
A number of difficulties arise when asking those questions, regarding both

what terrorism is and what novels do with it. The difficulty over deciding
on the nature of terrorism is perhaps the most pressing. For when we say
“terrorism,” we immediately raise notorious questions of definition. One
. A “typology” of “narrative terror” is briefly proposed in Kubiak 2004; but Kubiak is, like
other critics, thinking of terrorism as something outside of fiction and indeed as a phenome-
non (a “Real”) with its own narrative. Fiction itself, in his typology, is all of the same kind:
it consists of “narratives about terror” (ibid.: 295–96).
person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter; and though failed

insurrections are often perpetrated by fanatical “terrorists,” successful per-
petrators of terrorist plots sometimes turn out to be triumphant “revolu-
tionaries,” “liberators,” and even “founding fathers.” Clearly the idea of
terrorism usually requires a moral or legal standard according to which
certain acts or threats of violence can be confidently categorized as crimi-
nal, terrifying, or evil; but the standards are not universal, and confidence
in them is often lacking.
Terrorism, moreover, is both historically and geographically distributed,
so that terrorist acts and agents in one case may have very little in com-
mon with terrorist acts and agents in another. It is a large leap to assimi-
late the ten ragtag warriors of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in
1973, kidnapping Patty Hearst for the money, with the central command
of al-Qaeda in 2001, plotting the attack on the World Trade Center. Yet
the name of terrorism is normally applied to both sets of acts and agents.
Indeed, we should be hard put what to call the SLA or al-Qaeda if we
could not call them terrorists or if we could not call their acts of aggression
acts of terrorist violence. Apparently there are many terrorisms, differing
among themselves as to their means, ends, motives, and circumstances as well as
to the diverse kinds of targets—symbolic and real—against which they are
aimed and the diverse audiences that the symbolism of violence is intended
to reach. To complicate matters further, the word itself is value laden
and often a term of abuse: whether one is a freedom fighter or a terrorist
may depend not only on what side one is on, but whether one’s actions are
judged to be good or bad, strategic or futile, honorable or desperate.
Other difficulties are pressing too. When one considers the representa-
tion of terrorism in fiction, one immediately raises questions of both cover-
age and perspective. Coverage—an aspect of what Aristotle refers to in chap-
ter 7 of the Poetics as the “magnitude” of a plot—is extremely variable.
One novel may cover the progress of a terrorist conspiracy from beginning
to end; another might touch upon terrorist incidents while expanding on
some other subject or developing another sort of plot; and a third may
hardly represent a terrorist incident at all. And yet all three types of cover-
age may be found in novels that are very much about terrorism and its
ramifications. Ann Patchett’s romantic tragedy Bel Canto (2001) covers the
unwinding of a terrorist incident from beginning to an end. As the novel
opens, a group of terrorists besiege a public residence; then they occupy it;
over the course of several months they interact with their hostages; even-
. Discussions of the definitions of terrorism that readers of this journal will find especially
helpful include Crenshaw and Pimlott 1997, 1:12–22; Douglass and Zulaika 1996: chap. 4;
and Houen 2002: chap. 1.
tually they are driven out, or rather brutally brought down by an antiterror
squad, along with a few of the hostages caught in the cross fire; and that
is, except for an epilogue concerning a pair of the surviving hostages, the
end of the story. But in Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992), though terrorism is
also a main theme of the novel, the reporting of actual incidents is slight.
We do not see the terrorist at work; we only learn about the incidents
secondhand, mainly from brief press reports that the narrator-protagonist
has come across. Rather, the plot of the novel, mediated by someone who
knew the terrorist but had been out of touch with him over the years, is
an inquiry into the psychological possibility of a resort to terrorist vio-
lence. And again, what William Trevor’s My House in Umbria (2003 [1991])
narrates is hardly a terrorist incident at all but rather its aftermath. Early
on, in the carriage of a train, a bomb explodes, though planted by whom
or for what purpose is never made clear. The rest of the novel is about
the recovery of the survivors. The psychology of victimhood, trauma, and
healing is allotted a plot with an appropriate magnitude for its subject mat-
ter (one, says Aristotle [1995: 57], permitting “a transformation to occur,
in a probable or necessary sequence of actions”), where some characters
recover from the bombing and others do not. So the coverage of terrorism
in novels about terrorism can vary significantly, from the full coverage of
Bel Canto to the oblique treatment of My House in Umbria.
As for perspective, a novel may represent terrorist violence from the
point of view of the terrorists, of their victims, of uninvolved observers, of
counterterrorists, and of many others. Any number of moral, political, and
ideological frameworks may be brought to bear on the rhetoric of the fic-
tion; any number of kinds of protagonists can be recruited whose fortunes
the terrorism novel will be concerned to trace; and any number of focal
points may be developed to guide the reader into the novel’s mental and
physical world. Some texts may employ several of each. Bel Canto weaves
in and out of the mental worlds of a variety of characters with a variety
of agendas. It is an ensemble novel, with an ensemble of rhetorical frame-
works, protagonists, and focal points and with multiple sympathies. But
in another novel, frameworks and focalizers can be narrowed into a single
figure, like the hapless former secret agent, one of the “absolute friends”
in John Le Carré’s Absolute Friends (2003), whose life experience is the sole
center of attention along its sequence of events, over which (by the way)
he has little control. The reader is allowed a certain ironic distance from
the main character, but not a very great distance, and it is from within the
protagonist’s world or consciousness, and in sympathy for the protagonist’s
attitude toward life, that the action is made to unfold.
Such variations are crucial. Identification and empathy and their oppo-
sites, dis-identification and abjection (the simultaneous degrading and

rejecting of a figure), are central to the narrative missions of the terror-
ist novel. A novel can cause its readers to see, feel, or think from within
or without, for or against, self-reflectively or hardly reflectively at all. It
can encourage ambivalence toward a terrorist incident or irresolution
or indifference; or it can inspire pity and fear and indignation; or it can
even arouse the thrill of violence for its own sake. And the stakes involved
are high. The cultural work performed by fictions of terrorism is driven
in large part by what the fictions want their readers to identify with and
experience. Do we see and feel and think along with the unwitting terrorist
of Absolute Friends, the terrorist-sympathizing victims of terrorism in Bel
Canto, or the traumatized and outraged victims of My House in Umbria?
And do we then come to identify with such persons, whether terrorists or
victims or other witnesses to the violence, to recognize ourselves in them
and to recognize them in ourselves? Or do we, as in Doris Lessing’s The
Good Terrorist (1985), which is narrated entirely from the focal perspective
of the titular terrorist, both identify with the terrorist and object to her,
gradually coming to be appalled by her behavior and what she thinks she
stands for? There are cases like Robert Ludlum’s first Jason Bourne novel,
The Bourne Identity (1980), where, with Jamesian rigor, the narrative adheres
to the mind and perceptions of a man of violence, Jason Bourne, and with
equal rigor keeps clear from the experience of another man of violence, a
certain Carlos. With Jason Bourne the reader introjects a narrative self, in
spite of moral and psychological uncertainties attached to his person; with
Carlos, partly because (with one shady and ironized exception) he does
not focalize the narrative, partly because every enemy of Jason Bourne
is also the reader’s enemy, and partly because of the specifics of Carlos’s
characterization, the reader is placed in a position of dis-identification and
indeed has no choice but to “abject” him, in Julia Kristeva’s (1982: 1) sense:
“apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.” The very politics
of these novels may well be more a function of how the narrative manipu-
lates the reader’s allegiance to various characters and their causes than an
actual politics to which an author may subscribe or may want readers to
subscribe.
Given these stakes, a question arises about the quality of thought that
goes into different representations of terrorism. One novel may develop a
profound analysis of the nature of terrorist violence and its representation,
digging deeply into the causes of political conflict, or the impact of terror-
ist violence on the modern world, or the psychology and philosophy of the
people who may be involved in the violence and its aftermath. Another
may simply exploit terrorist violence for the sake of sensationalism or as a
pretext for suspense. Genre plays a role in this: “thrillers” will be disposed
toward sensationalism and suspense, “mainstream” novels will have other
interests (see Denning 1987). But the quality of thought per se is not a
necessary outcome of genre, for there are profound thrillers, like Graham
Greene’s The Honorary Consul (1973) and Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man
(1994), just as there are superficial mainstream novels. If genre imposes
limits on what a novelist can accomplish, so do many other aspects of the
novel. Ironic distance, historical astuteness, cultural sensitivity, political
agenda—all such things play a major role in determining the varieties of
literary terrorism. The kinds of representational forms, the standards of
excellence, and the degrees of distance, sophistication, engagement, sensi-
tivity, and political desire with which the fiction is produced are all key to
what narratives of terrorism may accomplish in any given case.
Finally, a question arises about our not-so-straightforward question.
What exactly are we trying to determine in asking how terrorism has been
represented in modern fiction? And why might a typology assist us in
determining it? We have had our own agenda in examining the terrorism
novel, which goes a little bit against the grain of most studies in modern
and contemporary literature. We do not object to the fact that critics might
inquire into the relation between fiction and a pressing issue in the external
world. Nor do we wish to find fault with the habit of focusing contempo-
rary fiction studies on a specific text or two or on the oeuvre of a specific
author. But we have been predominantly interested in the subject of ter-
rorism—of terrorism as a subject—within the context of the whole range of
literary production in modern times. And as we have addressed ourselves
to literary production in general, so we have conceived of literary produc-
tion as an aspect and vehicle of culture in general. Literary studies have up
to now been much more specialized than media studies with regard to the
cultural mythology of terrorist violence: they have been devoted to single
authors and single texts—hands down, in American criticism, the winner
is DeLillo and Mao II (1991)—and mainly concerned with the most promi-
nent, talented, or canonical of modern writers. That is one of the reasons
why terrorism, and the cultural mythology of terror, have been regarded
for the most part as phenomena on the outside of the novel. But we have
deliberately posed our question more broadly. We have operated on the
. Examples of work on Mao II include Baker 1994, Osteen 1999, Simmons 1999, Rowe
2004, and Walker 2004. Scanlan’s Plotting Terror (2001) takes its main theme from Mao II. See
Kelley 2005 for a partial exception to the anticulturalist bent of most critics responding to
terrorism novels. Kelley is concerned, in the context of the Northern Ireland Troubles, to see
how fictions of political violence may play a role in the making or unmaking of the culture
of political violence and, with it, of social inequality.
assumption that our literary culture as a whole, and not just specific liter-
ary cultures—the culture of highbrow fiction, for example, or of various
genre fictions—can and should be assessed. Also needing assessment are
both the place of literary culture in the larger culture of postmodernity and
the representation of that narrative thing we call terrorism.
Of course, despite our embrace of universalism, our study has been sub-
ject to a variety of limitations. We have restricted ourselves to fiction from
the English-speaking world, our own field of study and competence. That
means that whatever results may be suggested by our work, they only spe-
cifically apply to the literary culture of Britain, the British Commonwealth,
and the United States. Our “literary culture as a whole” is a collection of
initiatives that are dominated, commercially and qualitatively, by the pub-
lishing houses of London and New York and that are necessarily infused
with the habits, structures, commonplaces, and common experiences of
Anglophone culture.
We have also restricted our study to the period beginning in 1970 and
ending in 2001. There were several reasons for this. One was practicality.
Given the enormous number of texts we have been able to document, we
had to limit ourselves to a selective time frame, even at the risk of arbitrari-
ness. Another reason was history. The period from 1970 to 2001 constitutes,
we think, a unique chapter in the history of the representation of terrorism
in fiction, different in kind and intensity from the scattered representation
of terrorism of the previous decades and different in context from what
seems to have followed in the aftermath of 9/11.
Certainly, we have been able to document that interest in terrorism
among English-language novelists greatly increased around 1970, stimu-
lated by the rise of “left-wing terrorism” in Western countries, left-leaning
nationalist terrorism in the Middle East, and the outbreak of the Troubles
in Northern Ireland. In the previous two decades, political fiction had
other fish to fry—espionage, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war and
worldwide disaster. A relatively small number of novels about terrorist vio-
lence was published, with notable additions to the genre (to give an idea
of the range) including Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), Leon
Uris’s Exodus (1958), and Ian Fleming’s Thunderball (1961)—each of which,
in its own way, addresses Cold War tensions and the fight of the great
powers over imperialist hegemony. Terrorism was a resource for fiction but
. For overviews of these modern types of terrorism, see Hoffman 1998 and Lacqueur 1999.
Magee (2001) sees a similar rise in Troubles fiction in 1970; and Douglass and Zulaika (1996:
45–46) make the point that terrorism as a category, as a subject of discourse, takes on new
life at about 1970, citing studies showing that the preponderance of terrorism discourse takes
place in the media at this time too.
Figure 1 Number of novels published originally in English about terrorism,

1970–2002
not a common one. But beginning in 1970 terrorism became a common

subject, increasing year by year, with notable booms in the late seventies
and then again in the midnineties (see figure 1). Terrorism indeed became a
subject matter that was good to compose with, and for writers of all sorts—
left, right, and middle; highbrow, middlebrow, and popular; experimental,
conventional, and formulaic.
In the 1990s, to be sure, emphasis began to shift away from stories about
left-wing politics and its adversaries. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet
Union, incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing and the assassination
of Yitzhak Rabin, and the increase of attention paid by the media to right-
wing and religiously motivated terrorism, violence was no longer all but
automatically associated with the youth rebellions of the sixties and the
ideologies associated with them (anarchism, socialism, anti-imperialism,
anti-Zionism), and new sorts of terrorists began to occupy center stage.
Right-wing ultras in Northern Ireland, racist and reactionary paramili-
taries in the Americas, politicized mercenaries from around the world, and
religious nationalists from Asia and the Middle East all became frequent
characters. But emphasis did not shift entirely; familiar ideas about left-
wing terrorism still predominated in English-language fiction through the
end of 2001, and many novels of the nineties elaborate ideas and motifs
of the seventies and eighties. Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate (1998), for
example, is about religious terrorism in Jerusalem and in that respect a
work of the nineties, but its main characters are drug-addled idealists and
disaffected artists who seem to be rather children of the cultural revolution
. Indeed, Velcic (2004) has complained that terrorism fiction has been obsessed with left-
wing extremists at the expense of political balance and a genuine sympathy for left-wing
causes.
of the sixties. Not just the characters, but the very conventionality of the
story line in Damascus Gate—conspiracies of the left meeting conspiracies
of the right—is a development rooted in the fiction of the seventies and
eighties.
So, if there was not a single kind of “terrorism novel” from 1970 to 2001,
and several different trends of representation developed, there were many
continuities from novel to novel over the period, shared motifs, character
profiles, political values. There were even continuities in the distribution of
differences between novels so that, for example, deconstructive narratives
like Mao II or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) come to depend
upon the fictional accounts of terrorism from which they differentiate
themselves through satire, parody, and pastiche.
Since the end of 2001, it would seem, emphasis has shifted again, and
perhaps fiction’s entire relation to terrorism has undergone a sea change. A
time lag is involved: novels published in 2002 and 2003 and even later may
have been conceived and written before 9/11 and are often indistinguish-
able in kind from earlier efforts. But the number of novels on terrorism has
continued to increase from year to year, and many openly post-9/11 novels
have appeared, tales that thematize the events of September 11 or that
try to explicate what it means to live in a post-9/11 world. Thrillers like
Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan (2006) move espionage and suspense into
Islamist terror and the inner workings of (a highly fictionalized) al-Qaeda.
Mainstream works like Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), John Updike’s Ter-
rorist (2006), and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) attempt to
show how the temperament of life in Britain and America has changed
since 9/11, their main characters all undergoing crises of belief that can
be attributed to the events of 9/11. But how much of a shift is actually
exemplified by novels written after 9/11 is a subject warranting further
study. Our initial perception is that a great many works are still adopting
motifs and plots and even ideas about terrorism developed in the 1970s
and 1980s, if not earlier. (How different, after all, is Forsyth’s “Afghan,” but
for his Afghani disguise, from the secret agents of Cold War fiction?) But
again, the whole subject warrants further study.
Meanwhile, we present here a case study of a finite period, 1970–2001,
which seems to have established an identity for terrorism-in-the-novel that
is unique for its time, though still influential. What follows here is a report
on our methods, efforts, and findings. As a start, we have aimed to accom-
plish four things: one, to compile a bibliography; two, to acquire an over-
view of the field of terrorism fiction from 1970 to 2001; three, to determine
by analysis the categorical facts, motifs, and functions of terrorism fiction
in the period; and four, on the basis of this analysis, to devise a provisional
typology of terrorism fiction from 1970 to 2001 and to see what conclusions
may be drawn from the results.
The conclusions we have ended up drawing may be unexpected. For if
we have found, as will be seen, that the terrorist incident is determinative of
terrorist fiction generally, we have perhaps discovered no more than what
formalist analysis since Aristotle demands that we discover: the “soul” of
terrorism fiction, though in complicated ways, is the terrorist plot. But if
we have also found, as will be seen, that the main focus of most terrorist
fiction in our period is the target of terrorism and the injury it inflicts, we
have found something that had yet to be appreciated: most recent terror-
ism fiction in English is not about terrorism per se; it is about the political
legitimacy and moral integrity of the society to which terrorism’s victims
belong.
The Bibliography
In compiling a bibliography, we included not only novels about terror-

ists but also novels we could identify to be about terrorism, like My House
in Umbria. No terrorist appears in the novel; or at least, since one of the
main characters is suspected of involvement in terrorism by another char-
acter, the unreliable narrator, no known terrorist makes an appearance.
But the novel is certainly concerned with the aftermath of a terrorist inci-
dent and so was included. Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996) is
another case in point: except for a few shadowy agents moving about in the
background (literally lurking unseen at night, leaving threatening graffiti
behind them), no terrorist character appears there; but Eureka Street too
is certainly about terrorism and includes, if not terrorists conspiring and
planting the device, a vivid depiction of a bomb going off from the point of
view of the victims. Of course, a novel about terrorism may also be a novel
about other things. My House in Umbria is predominantly a character study,
mainly of the narrator herself, while Eureka Street is a politically minded,
satiric portrait of Belfast during the late stages of the Troubles. Similarly,
Walter Abish’s How German Is It (1980) recounts several terrorist incidents
but is fundamentally about the character of the “new Germany” of the late
1970s, as much notable for its programmatic repression of memory as for
its experience of politically motivated sabotage and murder (see Peyser
1999; Houen 2002: chap. 4). Or to give yet another example: Ludlum’s
Bourne Identity features terrorists and counterterrorists and even state ter-
rorism, but its representation of them is so implausible that one may be
tempted to say that it is not about terrorism at all. It is rather, like many
other works of the period, a character study, tracing the progress of an
amnesiac in search of himself. But terrorist behavior is rampant in the
novel, and terrorist violence is the motor of most of the twists and turns of
the plot; and so Ludlum’s novel too had to be included.
What we wanted to document in our main bibliography were novels in
which at least one aspect of terrorism played a major role, such that the
novel as a whole could be said to depend upon it. (None of these novels
just mentioned is conceivable as a novel—or even as a character study—
without the references to terrorism it contains. Yet this might not be said of
books like A. N. Wilson’s debut novel, The Sweets of Pimlico [1977], where a
terrorist bombing acts as a decorative interruption in the main plot.) What
constitutes a “major role” in the construction of a fiction is, to be sure, a
judgment call; and one could do a worthy study, too, of novels where ter-
rorism plays a minor role or where, as in the case of The Sweets of Pimlico,
terrorism fails to play a major role: that is, does not succeed in presenting
a political message (to either characters or readers) or in arousing political
terror. But in part again because of practicality, we have stuck doggedly to
studying fiction about terrorism and terrorists, and it has been part of our
bibliographic work to make judgment calls of this kind.
Confining ourselves to novels originally published in English between
1970 and 2001, we also found it necessary to limit ourselves with respect
to genre. We excluded four types of fiction that deserve study on their
own: children’s fiction, young adult fiction, science fiction, and graphic
fiction. Each of them, we felt, represented terrorism by way of a paradig-
matically unique field of vision and addressed itself to a readership with
unique expectations. Though science fiction presented a number of tempt-
ing examples, it presented obstacles to the kind of analysis we wanted to
do. It is hard to know how to characterize characters as terrorists or violent
incidents as terroristic when the frame of reference of present-day earth-
bound politics is missing, or when many of the laws of physical, biological,
and psychological causality that readers otherwise take for granted are
deliberately being violated or stretched. So we regretfully excluded them
from our analysis. We nevertheless included works of speculative fiction
so far as they could be said to be written in keeping with the expectations
of the usual readership of mainstream fiction and with the usual respect
paid in it to geopolitical reality and physical and psychological causality.
So, for example, Wallace’s Infinite Jest was included, dealing as it does with
characters and events just around the corner from the present-day world,
but Paul di Filippo’s Ribofunk (1996) was not because it deals with intelli-
gent beings of the future who are not human and who live according to
otherwise unknown physical laws. We also, though with some hesitation,

included in our master bibliography works of historical fiction, like Russell
Banks’s Cloudsplitter (1998), about abolitionist John Brown, and Paul West’s
A Fifth of November (2001), about the Gunpowder Plot. We believe that his-
torical fiction belongs to the literary mainstream and has made an impor-
tant contribution to the novelistic mythography of terrorism. However,
our results on historical fiction at this point are incomplete; searching for
terrorism novels about the past raises additional problems of heuristics—
how to find and locate this subject we now call “terrorism” in noncontem-
porary contexts—and we have not been able to solve them. We have there-
fore included historical fiction in our master bibliography but omitted it
from our pilot study of the typology of terrorism in modern fiction.
All told, then, our master bibliography excludes children’s fiction,
young adult fiction, and science fiction but includes thrillers, mainstream
novels, historical novels, and works of speculative fiction that accord with
mainstream fiction in their reality and readership. The bibliography is
not definitive. No doubt it suffers from omissions, and no doubt some
novels that we identified as being about terrorism, given the many clues
we worked from—publishers’ comments, library catalog subject classifica-
tions, keywords, reviews, blurbs, first pages—would be shown, on deeper
assessment, not to be really “about” terrorism according to our parame-
ters. Nevertheless, in its current state the bibliography provides a valuable
approximation of the number and kinds of terrorism novels published in
English from 1970 to 2001.
The bibliography includes over one thousand works; as of this writing,
the precise figure is 1,081. Novels about terrorism have been published in
a steady stream beginning in 1970, with lows of eleven in 1970 and 1972
and highs of seventy in 1998 and 1999. (Again, see figure 1; before 1970, the
number of terrorism novels published was quite small, between one to six a
year.) Most of these novels are thrillers, but a good number of mainstream
novels appear throughout the period, with especially strong showings in
the late seventies and late nineties. It is during these periods of increase
that distinguished novelists were more likely to contribute to the showing:
Paul Theroux, V. S. Naipaul, Mary McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Walter
Abish in the late seventies, for example, and Philip Roth, Patrick McCabe,
and J. M. Coetzee in the late nineties. (It bears noting that a slight drop
off from 2000 to 2001 was followed by a significant but by no means over-
whelming increase in the years after 2001, with the number of novels going
. Magee (2001) reports a similar lull followed by an outpouring in the seventies of novels
about the Troubles—not all of which of course are about terrorism.
up from the high of sixty in 1999 to a high of eighty in 2003.) The relation
of the outpouring of terrorism fiction during certain years to actual events
on the ground is not immediately clear, and that too would require further
study. It is not the case that terrorism novels follow directly upon funda-
mental changes in the structure of global politics or react directly to terror-
ist events; yet certainly they respond to them. Or rather, more accurately,
they respond to the simulacra of historical change and the history-bending
incidents for which terrorism is so notorious, “events” in parentheses (see
Derrida 2003 and Frow 2003). Novels intervene in the mythography of ter-
rorism; they make changes and additions to it; but they also repeat it.
Narrating Terrorism: An Overview
It is to be remembered that novels are not the only media in which terror-
ism is commonly narrated. So much media attention is paid to terrorism,
and so little direct experience is possessed by the people writing the novels
about it, that the novels may be more accurately said to re-narrate the sub-
ject, basing themselves on previous narrations as likely to be discovered
in the media as in previous literature. In Cannibals and Missionaries (1979),
Mary McCarthy based her story of the hijacking of an American plane to
a remote part of the Netherlands on news accounts of a siege of the French
Embassy in The Hague (Scanlan 2001). In Bel Canto, Patchett based her
story of a hostage crisis in a fictionalized Latin American nation on news
accounts of a hostage crisis in Peru (Patchett n.d.). Philip Roth’s Ameri-
can Pastoral (1997), taking place in suburban New Jersey, is one of many
novels based on news accounts of an explosion in a Manhattan townhouse,
where members of the Weathermen group were storing weaponry (Parrish
2005). (Readers may recall that Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent [1907] was
inspired by a newspaper item as well.) Terrorism may be deployed in mod-
ern novels as signs of reality, the quasi-Lacanian “real” cutting through
the sutures of the “imaginary”—without the spectacles of psychoanalytic
jargon, that may well be the way Roth regards it—and it may supply occa-
sions for profound reflections on the realities of conflict, inequality, and
violence in the world. But terrorism in the novel is largely a re-narration of
the mythography of terrorism that precedes it.
The mass media is not the only source of inspiration for novelists, as
we have indicated, and it is not the only vehicle of the terrorist mythogra-
phy. Novels themselves are another source and obviously therefore another
vehicle of the mythography and the response thereto. Greene’s The Hon-
orary Consul involves a retelling of the story of a dipsomaniac diplomat in
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947). J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of
Petersburg (1994) is all about Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the writing of Demons
(1872; also known in English as The Possessed ). Novels are a part of the
legend of terrorism that novelists adopt. And other art forms, like film and
theater, no doubt play a role in the formation of terrorist novels as well. It
is not unlikely that Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto (1998), which places
a transvestite in the middle of Irish Republican Army–sponsored terror-
ist violence, was inspired by the Neil Jordan film The Crying Game (1992),
which also juxtaposes transvestism and the IRA. ( Jordan in fact directed
the film version of Breakfast on Pluto [2005].) Literary fiction often proposes
itself as an antidote to popular culture or an adversary to it. Some of the
most critically acclaimed terrorism novels, like Mao II, have deliberately
thematized their own literariness, their self-conscious attachment to a high
art tradition representing a resistance to mass culture today. But all terror-
ism fiction, literary or popular, is itself a part of culture in the widest sense
of the term—a part of how modern society generates and circulates social
and symbolic meaning—and it is inevitably imbricated in the mythogra-
phies of the culture at large, which circulate their meanings by way of a
large number of media, from talk radio and film to news magazines and,
alas, other fiction. So terrorism fiction responds to the mythography of
terrorism; it imbricates itself within it; and it makes contributions to it,
adding its variants, its elaborations, its avenues of development and circu-
lation. It does not and cannot stand apart from it.
Not surprisingly, the mythography to which novels respond and contrib-
ute is frequently paranoid, obsessed with fantastically exaggerated dan-
gers. Before the 1970s, the most famous novels about terrorism commonly
depicted terrorism as a type of philosophical and psychological derange-
ment and hence not much to worry about, except insofar as philosophies
and psychologies can be worrying. The terrorists in novels like Conrad’s
Secret Agent (1907) are in fact capable of little; they suffer from indolence
and aimlessness, and the police have their number. In G. K. Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a presumably dangerous terrorist con-
spiracy turns out to be wholly an invention of counterterrorist and counter-
counterterrorist agents spying on one another. The only terrorist threat,
for Chesterton, is the fear of terrorism (Melchiori 1985). Even in Greene’s
The Quiet American, the main terrorist (the American of the title) is inef-
fectual; he causes death and destruction but misses his targets and does
not accomplish any political goals. Twenty years later, in post-1970 fic-
tion, however, terrorists are often magnificently adept at inflicting harm on
others and challenging the security and the politics of their adversaries. It
is not just that they succeed in causing damage; they succeed implausibly,
stringing up success after success, engaging in more and more elaborate,
ingenious, and unlikely conspiracies, and causing all sorts of implausible

disruption. That a certain formal realism, including attention to realis-
tic detail, may nevertheless convince their readers to take the fantasies of
danger seriously, to see plausibility and vitality in them, is not in dispute
(see Sternberg 1983). Nor is it in dispute that, though the fictions exagger-
ate, what they exaggerate is itself something real to the external world.
Terrorism disrupts, damages, kills. But in its implausible exaggerations,
the fiction is often unmistakably a fiction of fear, nightmarish in its con-
cocting of terrors, ghoulish in its concocting of agents of mass destruction.
Nor is the fear only directed at terrorists; counterterrorists too, who match
or overmatch the implausible might of the terrorists plot for plot, are
often the object of exaggerated fears. If a certain “Carlos,” who, based on
news accounts of the infamous Carlos the Jackal, appears in a great many
other novels besides The Bourne Identity, is a superhuman agent of death
and destruction, so also may be agents of America’s CIA, Israel’s Mos-
sad, Britain’s MI6, or independent vigilantes. Le Carré himself is guilty of
this on occasion. In The Little Drummer Girl (1983), the terrorists are always
brilliant at what they do and agents of the Mossad even more brilliant; in
Absolute Friends, terrorists plan great and terrible and unlikely things (a kind
of armed counterinsurgency against globalization based in Heidelberg),
and it turns out that the CIA has already all too ingeniously planned it
for them; at the end of the story, CIA operatives eventually expose the
friends’ conspiracy with a spectacular and deadly explosion in order to
foment antiterrorist hysteria. The power of law enforcement agencies to
outwit and contain evil is sometimes meant to be reassuring: an exagger-
ated danger, trumped by an exaggerated power of law enforcement, both
gives form to paranoia and resolves it. But the power of law enforcement
is sometimes just as frightening as the power of terrorists and is meant to
be so. Antiterrorism is what we need to be alarmed about, Absolute Friends
suggests—look what it did to poor Mundy and Sasha, those well-meaning
former spies! The magnification or exaggeration of the competence of
counterterrorism is part and parcel of the same paranoid style of narration
that leads to an exaggeration of the dangers of terrorism.
This style takes off from the first classic of the period, Forsyth’s The Day
of the Jackal (1971), a thriller that is still widely read and imitated. The ter-
rorist conspiracy there is perpetrated by a well-funded and well-organized
junta of disenfranchised military men (a fictionalized version of the OAS or
Organization de l’Armée Secrète) aiming to assassinate Charles de Gaulle; the
. Le Carré has commented on the exaggerated premises of his novels on many occasions;
but see Lacqueur 1983.
assassin they hire in one of their many attempts—and there will be more,
the novel seems to assure us, although on the historical record there were
only two assassination attempts ever associated with the OAS group—is
a cold-blooded, ingenious, unidentifiable, all-but-unstoppable killer of no
certain nationality, political allegiance, or passions. He is in effect a socio-
path, an affect-deficient serial killer working for the money, with whom no
humanism can negotiate. Yet he is nevertheless able to charm the pants off
the people he meets everywhere he goes—including, literally, the pants
of the women he meets. He is a sociopath with excellent social skills and
all the more dangerous for it.
Still more paranoid, and unsettling, is Thomas Harris’s Black Sunday
(1975). (This is the same Thomas Harris who would go on to create the
cannibal character Hannibal Lecter.) The terrorists in this case are a dis-
enfranchised and deranged Vietnam veteran and members of a Pales-
tinian group. The plot is to blow up a New Orleans sports stadium during
halftime at the Super Bowl, with the aim of murdering thousands. The
deranged Vietnam veteran—angry at the American government and its
people for having been abandoned to obscurity after his participation in
the war—is a genius of mechanical engineering and a masterful dirigible
pilot. The main Palestinian terrorist, who accompanies the veteran on his
journey toward terror as an agent provocateur, is a beautiful, buxom, over-
sexed young woman who will stop at nothing in order to harm Americans
and attract publicity to the Palestinian cause. (Of course, in an echo of
the biblical story of Samson, she is named Dahlia.) The idea of killing
Americans sexually excites her. Indeed, as Dahlia records a terrorist mes-
sage for distribution to the media, a fellow terrorist and lover sees that she
became “visibly aroused as she talked into the microphone” (ibid.: 16). As
she continued, her “face was flushed and nipples were erect.” This Semitic
Mata Hari is not only sadistically oversexed, she is also the beneficiary
of a perverse, impossibly voluptuous physiology: “Dahlia’s breasts were
large, and their curves were not the curves of a vessel but of a dome, and
she had a cleavage even when they were unconfined” (ibid.: 17). It almost
goes without saying at this point, but the narrator feels obliged to inform
us nevertheless, that “her nipples darkened as they came erect” (ibid.: 34).
Paranoia over political conflict thus merges in this landmark book with
sexual panic: a fear of danger at the hands of terrorists, exaggerated into a
conspiracy on a magnificent scale, is matched with a fear of female sexu-
ality, exaggerated into a body of magnificent scale, where nipples turn into
phalluses, and creatures of culture (the cleavage, articulated by a cut in a
woman’s clothes) become a fact of nature, like the domes and valleys of
Yosemite.
But paranoia is not the only register of the mythography of terrorism

prominent in Anglophone culture, nor is it the only register in Anglophone
fiction. There are noirish treatments of the subject; there are comic treat-
ments, satiric treatments, melodramatic treatments, romantic treatments,
tragic ones, and so forth. Novels take up the subject of terrorism by way of
a variety of genres, from the adventure story to the psychological drama;
and they adopt a wide variety of tones and express an equally wide variety
of moods. The metafictional epic Infinite Jest is very funny. The police pro-
cedural Kaddish in Dublin (Brady 1992) is very bleak. And as there are differ-
ent genres and registers, there are also many different kinds of engagement
with terror, different ways of disclosing it as a feature in the world of the
novel and the external world it implies. Cannibals and Missionaries engages
with terrorism philosophically: the puzzle of nihilism with regard to its
strange affinity with artistic creation, on the one hand, and radical politics,
on the other, is what predominantly engages McCarthy over the course of
the work. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), by contrast, terrorism
is encountered as a psychic, if not psychopathic, impulse of the doppel-
gänger within. And in the detective novel The Last Red Death ( Johnston
2003; but this is clearly a novel conceived before 9/11), terrorism is at once
a frightening force of woe connected to ancient traditions of ritual violence
and the expression of a romantic love of country; the novel engages with
terrorism and its ultimate frustration at the hands of law enforcers as a
metaphor for the destiny of Greece since the Second World War.
On a more prosaic level, in the worlds that the novels represent there
are the facts of the nature of the terror. English-language literature mainly
limits itself to the usual suspects: Palestinians, above all, but also IRA
recruits, Irish Ultras, postsixties anarchists in America and Europe, and
Latin American communists. There are a few oddities, like the alliance
of Florentine mafiosi and American paramilitaries in John Gardner’s
Cold (1996), a James Bond thriller, and the millenarian temple bombers
in Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate, a mainstream novel set in Jerusalem and
structured as a thriller—it ends, excitedly, with the prevention of a bomb-
ing (see Alter 1998). And in some texts, the terrorists are professionals: the
“Carlos” in The Bourne Identity runs a professional assassins-for-hire opera-
tion; in George Jonas’s Vengeance (1984), which is the basis of the Steven
Spielberg movie Munich (2006) and which can perhaps better be read as a
novel than as a work of journalism, the Israeli counterterrorists come to
rely on a shadowy, apolitical French underground of accessories to murder
for hire.
There is the important exception of the unidentified terrorist. In My
House in Umbria, Eureka Street, and some others, the character of a terrorist
responsible for one atrocity or another never appears, little if any effort is
expended to discover the terrorist’s identity, and the point of the novel is in
fact to underscore either the randomness and anonymity of violence in the
modern world or, as in Eureka Street and other Troubles novels, the point-
lessness of traditional political commitments—left against right, Catho-
lic against Protestant, separatist versus unionist—which end up causing
all the pointless violence (see Steel 1998; Magee 2001; Kelley 2005). Such
novels deliberately efface the identities of the terrorists and with them the
political issues and organizations involved: all that really matters is the
suffering that terrorism causes.
Among the more intellectually ambitious mainstream novels concerned
with identifying them, the terrorists are commonly homegrown anarchists,
and it is the task of the novel, whether by way of a distancing register like
satire or a double-edged register like noir, to explore the relation between
ourselves—the normative characters of lawful society—and our anarchists,
people from us and of us who nevertheless blow things up. “They have
money,” an American terrorist in DeLillo’s Players (1979: 107) says about his
target, the New York Stock Exchange, to the main character, who works
at the stock exchange. “We have destruction.” Or, as we find in the case of
Paul Theroux’s The Family Arsenal (1976: 75), when a pair of young working-
class terrorists go on a walk through London’s glittery West End and imag-
ine themselves blowing everything up, annihilation is self-assertion.
“London’s great” [says one of them].
“Fantastic.”
It was the only way [reports the narrator] they could possess the city, by
reducing it to shattered pieces. Exploded, in motion, it was theirs. The grandest
buildings held them, because in that grandeur, in all the complication ornate-
ness required, were secret corners for bombs.
The rage for destruction we see in cases like this, the lust for assertion
through negation, is the nearly universal hallmark of the terrorist in main-
stream novels. It motivates the terrorists in novels as diverse as The Good
Terrorist, Resurrection Man, The Master of Petersburg, Fight Club, and American
Pastoral; and it challenges the normative characters of the story, as well as
the readers of the novel, to remain aloof, a task at which it is not always
easy to succeed. That impulse to affirm ourselves by destroying the serenity
of others, is it not common even among peace-loving people? Aren’t ter-
rorists only acting out our own repressed wishes to destroy and kill? So
many novels ask. Yet in works like The Honorary Consul and Bel Canto, where
terrorists are both major characters and sympathetic, their motives are
shown to be far removed from the impulse of psychological and philo-
sophical nihilism. They are idealists pure and simple; their choice of ter-
rorism is only a choice of tactics, which the terrorists themselves regret
having to use. But they are ineffectual idealists. Novels like these, harking
back to works like The Secret Agent but casting a more friendly eye on their
characters, give us bunglers for terrorists—in both Greene’s and Patch-
ett’s novels, bungling Latin Americans—who do not really understand the
idealism that motivates them and have never really thought through the
tactics they have decided upon. Our sympathies can be drawn to the ter-
rorists since, while they have many grievances that we can acknowledge
and a courage to fight for their convictions that we can admire, they are
not really dangerous.
The first conclusion to be drawn from our survey of terrorism fiction may
simply be that the fiction is very diverse. There is no one kind of terrorism
novel, no one kind of terrorist, no one kind of terrorist conspiracy, and
no one kind of thematic engagement with terror. There are many genres:
the police procedural, the romantic tragedy, the epic adventure story, the
comedy of manners, among others, along with metafictional variations, as
in the case of Mao II, which riffs on the adventure story while telling the
actual story of a novelist who is uninterested in writing about adventure.
As for “registers,” our word for what Northrop Frye (1957) called “mode”
but which we also associate (Frye is vague on this) with mood and tone,
there are as many registers present among terrorism novels as in any other
kind of fiction. If a police procedural, for example, can be comic, roman-
tic, tragic, or ironic (to use Frye’s main categories), so can a terrorism novel
expressed through the genre of a police procedural be comic, romantic, and
so forth. The register we call “noir,” typified by a cynical bleakness which
both attracts and repels the sympathy of readers, is especially common in
terrorism fiction, as in the case of DeLillo’s Players and Mao II, McNamee’s
Resurrection Man, Brady’s Kaddish in Dublin, and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s
Ghost (2000). But so is the register of melodrama, which pulls on the heart-
strings of its readers. Melodrama—and we use the word descriptively, not
judgmentally—is characteristic of epic suspense-adventure stories like The
Bourne Identity and The Little Drummer Girl and detective stories like The Last
Red Death.
Moreover, there is a wide range of intellectual seriousness exhibited by
terrorism. Some novels simply are not meant as earnest engagements with
the idea, reality, or myth of terror. Gardner’s Cold makes little attempt
to think about terror or to ask the reader to do so. But it contains hijack-
ings, bombings, drug running, all aimed toward undermining the Ameri-
can government and the system of international trade. Bret Easton Ellis’s
Glamorama (1999) is similarly disengaged, though for different reasons. Cold

revels in the absurdity of its James Bond adventure, its fabulous villains
contending against a fabulous hero; Glamorama, where the terrorists are
fashion models who blow up buildings and torture innocent citizens, tries
to make sophisticated high comedy of its story, and for some readers per-
haps it succeeds, as for some readers American Psycho (1991) succeeded in
spinning out a satire of the world of wealth and glamour. But it is not, and
does not try to say anything, earnest about terror. By contrast, a work like
Lessing’s The Good Terrorist is full of political angst, solemnly striving to
understand how children of the prosperous sixties could turn to violence.
Roth’s bourgeois tragedy, American Pastoral, is similarly perplexed and simi-
larly earnest in trying to overcome its perplexity.
So terrorism novels have been very diverse. But there are limits to the
diversity among all the novels, and patterns to be discerned. These novels,
for one thing, are limited geographically. They occur almost entirely in
Europe and the British Isles, the eastern seaboard of the United States, and
a corner of the Middle East, with some attention paid to Latin America
and almost none to such catastrophic sites of terrorist activity as Sri Lanka
and Algeria. Little ever happens in Asia or sub-Saharan Africa or, for that
matter, in such parts of the English-speaking world as Texas, Canada, or
Australia. For another thing, the terrorists are almost always culled from
the same list of suspects: Palestinian nationalists, European and American
anarchists, Irish Republicans, and Latin American communists as well as,
in thrillers, terrorists for hire, the latter often glamorously European assas-
sins. Those who do not fit into the pattern, like the intellectual Liberty
Bomber in Auster’s Leviathan, an East Coast liberal, are among the least
convincing of the terrorists on show, despite all of Auster’s psychological
realism. (Perhaps Auster would agree: one of the themes of the novel, as
mentioned before, is how inexplicable the Liberty Bomber’s turn to terror
actually is. Neither political need nor psychological disturbance can take
us from the life of a liberal East Coast intellectual to the life of some-
one who sets off bombs.) In any case, the mainly European, Palestinian,
and South American identities of terrorists and the mainly European and
Middle Eastern locations of terrorist activity in these novels obviously
reflect the preoccupations of American and British writers. The life experi-
ence of authors is crucial in this, it almost goes without saying. But the
selective channeling of life experience into fiction is crucial too. Anglo-
phone writers have by and large channeled their fiction making toward
. The most important exception concerning Sri Lanka is Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. Southeast
Asia is the focus of terrorism in Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2002).
Palestinians rather than Algerians, toward anarchists in Germany rather

than anti-Muslim nationalists in India, toward murderous intrigue in the
underworld of New York City rather than the setting off of truck bombs in
Oklahoma City.
There are other limits to the diversity of these novels as well: limits
of political orientation, of narrative perspective, of plot development, of
empathy and sympathy. These limits appear first of all in what is not by and
large represented in these novels. Few of them, for example, narrate their
tales from the point of view of terrorist ideology or the internal psychology
of someone devoted to such an ideology. The Little Drummer Girl attempts
to do this in the sense that it attempts to articulate and justify a Palestinian
attitude whereby terrorism is a rational and worthy policy, a plausible poli-
tics by other means; but the novel does not attempt to do this in the sense
that it ever uses a Palestinian terrorist as the focalizer of the narrative or as
a protagonist whose fortunes the narrative is concerned to document.
Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist is a chief exception among all the
novels we have examined. From beginning to end, the novel follows the
day-to-day experience of the titular terrorist, Alice, a middle-class woman
who has dropped out of society to work as a radical militant. Hers is the
controlling consciousness of the novel; we never see anything but from her
focal point of view, and we never think or feel (via a style indirect libre) but
from within the limits of her consciousness. Moreover, the narrative care-
fully delineates the development of ideological and tactical belief within
the main character and her fellow radicals. But by the careful manipula-
tion of dramatic ironies—as we watch Alice steal money from her well-
meaning father, who is a true socialist, for example, or observe Alice’s
aberrant, frigid sexuality, or finally see her take pleasure in a random act
of violence—Lessing’s novel causes the reader, as we have said, to reject
both the ideology and the behavior of her eponymous terrorist. So Less-
ing’s novel fully explores the mentality of a terrorist, but only to reject it.
A novel that takes its readers into the seeing, feeling, and thinking of a ter-
rorist, and that does so sympathetically, however nuanced or ambivalent
its sympathies might be, as, for example, in Albert Camus’s stage play Les
justes (1949) or Sahar Khalifah’s Palestinian novel Wild Thorns (1984)—such
a thing is rare indeed in English-language fiction.
In most novels, the controlling consciousness is assigned not to terrorists
and political activists who might sympathize with their cause, but to a hand-
ful of other kinds of characters: victims, bystanders, law enforcement offi-
cials, reporters, and a special category, popular among mainstream novel-
ists (to be discussed below): inadvertent collaborators. These focalizers are
most commonly white, male, middle-class Americans and Britons, though

often they are also marginal figures: white men on the edge, whether an
outriding agent like John Gardner’s version of James Bond, a disenchanted
intellectual from Buenos Aires or New York (as, respectively, in Greene’s
The Honorary Consul and Stone’s Damascus Gate) looking for the meaning
of life in provincial Argentina or the old city of Jerusalem, or one of the
“players” of DeLillo’s Players, a stockbroker seeking thrills in the under-
world of political conspiracy. Such focalizers, from victims to inadvertent
collaborators, come into contact with terrorism and terrorists, but they do
not attempt to engage in terrorist activity. They observe, they experience,
they converse, they get in the way. They suffer and survive. But they do not
set off bombs or engage in conspiracy to set off bombs. Terrorism novels
have been many things in the English-speaking world, but they have shied
away from the representation of terrorism and terrorists from the psycho-
logical, moral, and epistemic perspectives of terrorists.
A Sample
To explore the patterns discernible among the different texts, we devised

a sample study of twenty-five novels, the novels chosen as representative
exemplars, the number chosen at what we believed would be the outer
limit of what could be managed for purposes of analysis. We wanted to
compile a group of works from as many perspectives and as many kinds of
literary ambition as possible. This meant including some little known texts.
William O’Rourke’s Notts (1996) was thus chosen as a sample academia
novel, one about lecturers and professors and academic life; and Kaddish in
Dublin was chosen as a sample police procedural. We also wanted to high-
light works that have been especially influential or widely read. Therefore
The Day of the Jackal is included in our sample, as are Black Sunday and The
Bourne Identity. In addition, we wanted to include as many texts of gener-
ally recognized literary merit as possible, especially when they have proved
influential. Therefore Mao II had to be on our list, as did American Pastoral
as well as the earlier experimental novel How German Is It, celebrated for its
technical inventiveness. Inevitably we excluded some prominent works—
on the highbrow side DeLillo’s Libra (1988), on the popular side Tom
Clancy’s Patriot Games (1993)—but we felt that their perspectives were at
least represented by other texts. We decided, again, not to include histori-
cal novels in our sample or to consider novels where terrorism plays such
a minor role that they did not qualify for our master bibliography. What
we hoped was that, with a representative sample of terrorism fictions—not
perhaps a statistically representative sample but one that reflected our own
art of reading and selecting—we could establish a general typology of the
representation of terrorism. Our typology appealed to both semantic or
content-related as well as syntactic or form-related parameters. We had to
determine what it was that these novels were representing—Palestinians or
Basques, bombings or murders, successful exploits or unsuccessful ones.
But we were above all interested in how these novels went about their busi-
ness in, as it were, the syntax of terrorism that they developed. That in
addition led us to focus on a combination of the what and how: the point of
view through which the stories were told.
With twenty-five books matched together, chosen according to criteria
of diversity, representativeness, influence, and merit, we surveyed each
work with regard to nine categories that seemed essential to understanding
how these novels represented terrorism. Thus we wanted to know, first of
all, what kind of novel it was, regarding, first, genre and, second, register or
mode. (We did not count on strict accuracy in these categories but believe
that the labels at least serve as identifying marks for the novels: it is just
as important to know that How German Is It is a postmodern fiction and a
satire as that The Day of the Jackal is a thriller told straight as a paranoid sus-
pense story.) Turning next to the contents of the novels, we wanted to know
where most of the action of each novel took place. In addition, for each
novel we wanted to know what the dominant action was; that is, what if any
decisive action was critical to the development, turning, and resolution
of the plot, whether this action was a terrorist incident or not. We called
this the climactic action. Also, we wanted to know what terrorist incidents the
novel represented, a hostage taking, a bombing, and so forth (which may
or may not comprise the climactic action of the story). In addition, we
wanted to know who the terrorist or terrorists were and who the targets of
the terrorist violence. We then inquired into different motives, methods, and
objectives of the terrorists in each case, looking at how these three categories
were either tied together or separate. A motive in a novel was frequently
personal—money, anger, personal revenge, psychopathy—along with or
in place of political conviction. Methods ranged from kidnapping to rocket
bombing. Objectives ranged from the release of political prisoners to nihilist
destruction for its own sake. How were motives aligned with objectives,
we wondered, and how, if at all, were motives and objectives aligned with
methods? And finally, though we put this in the first position of our chart,
since for us it is the most critical category, we wanted to know the identities
of the protagonists and controlling consciousnesses of the novel. Though
narrative style and voice vary significantly, in every novel we sampled the
protagonist is also the controlling consciousness, the Jamesian filter or nar-
rative focalizer through which the world of the novel is most dominantly
perceived and experienced. This was the case even for the ensemble novels
we selected. Since terrorist violence is frequently a conspiracy and fre-
quently targets a number of victims at once, the terrorist novel lends itself
to an ensemble of characters, and some of our novels, like Cannibals and
Missionaries and The Family Arsenal, thus have an ensemble of protagonists
and focalizers. Cannibals and Missionaries, for example, observes the central
action of the story from the point of view of about a dozen different char-
acters and by the same token dramatizes the fortunes of a dozen different
protagonists.
A full chart of the sample is in the appendix. But a selection from it,
taken from the period 1975 to 1980, is presented in table 1. In this particular
case, all of the novels are American; and most of the terrorists belong to
one of two groups of known terrorist perpetrators, either Palestinians or
a network of post-sixties radicals that we may loosely call anarchists. The
novelistic as well as the real Carlos can perhaps be said to have belonged to
both groups at once (though the novel is unclear on this point); and in two
novels, homegrown perpetrators—northern European anarchists and an
American veteran—are linked with Palestinians. This linkage is a common
feature of terrorism novels for most of the seventies and eighties, even if it
has little historical veracity: it thus provides clear evidence of a mythology
at work. But even more interesting are patterns in the formal parame-
ters of the novels. In all but one case, a violent event—a bombing or a
shoot-out—provides not just a striking incident or a thematic subject but
the climactic action of the narrative. Even the exception, DeLillo’s Players,
requires violence to come to a resolution, the suicide of an important char-
acter juxtaposed with an abandoned bombing attempt. If terrorism novels
follow no single master plot, they have nevertheless been inclined to adopt
the pattern of violent culmination, whether in the case of successful ter-
rorist adventures (How German Is It), prevented or otherwise unsuccessful
terrorist plots (Black Sunday, Bourne Identity), or ambiguously unsuccessful
plots (Players, Cannibals and Missionaries: in the latter, a failed extortion plot
culminates in a suicide bombing that manages inadvertently to harm a
number of hostages and deliberately to destroy important works of art).
As for what for us has been the most critical category, protagonists and
focalizers—usually merged here into the same figure—a very clear and
common pattern emerges from this five-novel sample. Thrillers tend to fol-
low the action and observe it from the point of view of terrorists, counterter-
rorists, and victim-avengers, especially the last. The mainstream novels tend
to opt, instead, for the point of view of victims, inadvertent collaborators, and
victim-collaborators. Among the thrillers, The Bourne Identity is thus rendered
Table 1 Typology of five novels
Motives/Methods/
Controlling Terrorist Identity of Identity of Objectives of
Date/Title/Genre Consciousness(es) Climactic Action Incident(s) Terrorist(s) Target(s) Terrorist(s) Location(s)
1975/Harris, Black Terrorists and Bombing (but pre- Mass-murder Vietnam American Anger/Bombings/ United States
Sunday/Thriller— counterterrorists vented from striking bombing veteran and citizens at Super Revenge/ Liberation of (eastern sea-
paranoid suspense main target) Palestinians Bowl Palestine board, New
Orleans)
1977/Delillo, Players/ Inadvertent (Nonpolitical) sui- Intended Anarchists Floor of New Anarchist instincts, United States
Postmodernist literary collaborator cide of minor char- bombing of York Stock boredom/Bombings/ (New York)
fiction—noirist satire acter, escape from private prop- Exchange Revolution or nihilist
political intrigue of erty, with destruction
another execution
1979/McCarthy, Can- Victims Suicide bombing Hijacking, Dutch and Western liberals Political conviction, Netherlands
nibals and Missionaries/ hostage taking, German will to power/Hijack-
Literary fiction— extortion anarchists, ing/Release of pris-
comedy of manners Palestinians oners/Removal of
Netherlands from
NATO
1980/Abish, How Inadvertent Shoot-out, murder of Bombings of Anarchists German Anarchist instincts, Germany
German Is It/Post- collaborator-victim innocents government (mod- citizens and revenge/Bombings (various
modernist literary property eled after infrastructure and shootings/Revolu- towns)
fiction—satire, black Baadher- tion (?)
comedy Meinhof )
1980/Ludlum, Bourne Counterterrorist Shoot-out and Assassinations, “Carlos” and Hero (a counter- Money/Shootings, France,
Identity/Thriller- escape extortion his network terrorist), bombings/None Switzerland,
romance miscellaneous United States
government (eastern
officials seaboard)
through the eyes of Jason Bourne, counterterrorist, suffering from amnesia

and the target of both terrorists and other counterterrorists, all of whom
want to kill him. The focalizer Bourne is also the sole protagonist, pitted
against a vast array of known and unknown antagonists. Black Sunday, also
a thriller, is imagined through the eyes of a Vietnam veteran determined to
wreak his revenge on America, a Palestinian agent similarly determined,
and a counterterrorist official, an agent for Mossad. The three focalizers
are also the three mutually antagonistic protagonists of the narrative, each
seeking to win the day for his or her cause (the counterterrorist wins, but
at the cost of his life). Most of Eric Ambler’s thriller The Levanter (1972) is
an autobiographical record dictated by a Mediterranean businessman, a
victim-avenger who is kidnapped by a Palestinian terrorist cell but ulti-
mately works his revenge on his captors, preventing a plot to set off a
mass of coordinated explosions in Israel and, at the climax of the novel,
shooting the terrorist ringleader to death. As autobiographical narrator,
he adjudicates the facts and moral issues of the story and serves (in his nar-
ration) as both its protagonist and main focalizer.
Compare, then, the mainstream or literary fictions. In Players, one of
two main characters, motivated mainly by boredom, ends up assisting an
anarchist group by providing them with money and intelligence; so he
is, clearly, a collaborator, if also somewhat inadvertently so (he happens
upon the terrorists, and so they get him involved in their activities). In
Cannibals and Missionaries, a group of political watchdogs traveling to Iran
are kidnapped by a group of anarchists and Palestinians; some of them
die, all are traumatized. So they are victims, although, as sufferers from
the Stockholm syndrome, they also become inadvertent collaborators. In
How German Is It, the main character is the target of several attacks by a
group of anarchists; so he too is a victim. But he was once married to one
of them, and before turning state’s evidence against them, he participated
in a number of their social activities, if not in any acts of violence; so he is
also something of a collaborator. Moreover, terrorist violence follows him
around as if he were still a part of the group, the terrorists perhaps wishing
to incriminate him by association with their activities. So he is what we
term a collaborator-victim.
It is important to reiterate that all the collaborators in these fictions
collaborate more or less unwittingly. They are not themselves terrorists
or affiliated with terrorist ideology. Instead, they find themselves acciden-
tally involved with terrorists and then find themselves more or less inad-
vertently helping the terrorists in the latter’s plans or objectives. These
inadvertent collaborators are not exactly “helpers” in the narratological
sense—like nurses and fairy godmothers in folktales who help the hero-
ine in her mission—because they are themselves the protagonists whose

fortunes the narratives are concerned to trace. Nor are they helpers in the
sense that they favor the terrorist cause to which they have found them-
selves recruited and to which they find themselves giving assistance. They
are more likely to respond to the needs of the terrorists as people who
need food and shelter or friendship than to the goals of the terrorists as
political agents or to the tactics of terrorists as militant radicals who turn
to violence.
Inadvertent collaborators are similar to several other categories of pro-
tagonists and focalizers to be found in many novels, though not in the five
listed above. The additional categories, which comprise other protagonists
and focalizers who are juxtaposed with terrorist incidents without playing
an active role in them, will be found in the appended full typology: most
notably, the observer (often a journalist), the bystander, and the combina-
tions bystander-observer and bystander-victim. Again, none of these figures is
affiliated with terrorist ideology, but each is somehow involved with ter-
rorist activity. Observers and bystanders are on the scene; but they are not
directly targeted or harmed by terrorist violence. The observer sees the
violence or at least observes the hatching of a conspiracy to commit violent
acts. The bystander does not even observe the violence or the conspiracy
to commit a violent act, though the narrative places him or her in conti-
guity with it. He or she hears an explosion, or feels the shock waves, with-
out quite knowing what is being heard or felt. However, the bystander-
observer is both in physical contiguity with the violence and in the position
of an observer, and the bystander-victim is in contiguity in such a way as to
be either immediately or eventually victimized by it. Not exactly targeted
by the violence, as the victim (say) of an assassination is, the bystander-
victim is on the scene of terrorist violence and harmed by it.
These distinctions are absolutely central to the project of narrating ter-
ror, hence to its typology. Who sees and feels and thinks and whose for-
tunes the narrative is concerned to trace are as important to the meaning
of terrorism in these texts as are the terrorist incidents themselves. Imag-
ine Black Sunday narrated from the point of view not of the mad dirigible
pilot aiming his aircraft into the arena of a Super Bowl game but of a
sportscaster announcing the play-by-play. Imagine My House in Umbria nar-
rated from the point of view not of the victims, who never knew what hit
them or why, but of the Italian psychiatrist who observes and medicates
them. Imagine American Pastoral narrated from the point of view not of the
all-American Seymour “Swede” Levov, the handsome, successful, kind-
hearted, and liberal businessman, but of his daughter Merry, the stutter-
ing terrorist. In each case, though the terrorist incident would remain the
same—an aircraft dive-bombing into a stadium, a hidden bomb explod-

ing in a train or a local post office—the novel would tell a different story
about it.
And not just a different story: for what is at issue is the presence of terror
and violence in the possible world of the fiction. When novels narrate ter-
rorism from the point of view of ruthless single-minded terrorists en route
to a fully transparent act of destruction, they are in effect representing a
logocentrism of violence. Intention, action, and meaning are all one thing,
and only one, in these novels, and they are fully present to one another:
violence is transparent to itself both as physical destructiveness and as a
meaningful, symbolic action. But when a mere bystander or bystander-
victim is the controlling consciousness of the narrative and the protagonist
whose fortune the narrative is concerned to trace, the violence loses its
transparency. The intention may be absent. The action may be only par-
tially or inexactly observed. The meaning of the action may be opaque.
“Holy fuck!” says a typical bystander while at home in Belfast, after hear-
ing the “thunderous boom” of a terrorist bombing in the course of Alex
Ashe’s An Acceptable Level of Violence (1998: 25). The narrative goes on: “He
had been sitting at the table studying the prices of second-hand cars in the
paper. ‘Get the news on!’” What is dramatized here is the common gap
between violence and meaning, which characters then commonly try to
bridge by recourse to the media or another source of information. If the
violence has an immediate impact, its meaning is deferred; the nature of the
action itself is not entirely clear and the intentions behind it a mystery.
Who sees, feels, and thinks is thus related not only to the drama of the
terrorist incident, but also to its logos. Black Sunday hurls us smash into the
impending explosion, which will bring to the fullness of time the intentions
of the protagonists involved, the mad dirigible pilot getting his revenge
once and for all on the American people, the Palestinian Mata Hari arriv-
ing at her jouissance of rage. Texts like An Acceptable Level of Violence or, in
table 1, How German Is It insist on a gap between the actual moment of the
violence and the intentions and meanings that might be attached to it. The
story of terrorism in such novels is not the story of violence planned and
exacted, but the tale of a disruption, a tear in the “fabric of everydayness”
(Houen 2002: 199–201). It is as much a story of something missing or taken
away—a continuity in everyday life, a familiar landmark, the life of a loved
one—as it is a story of assertive aggression. Indeed, as we will see below,
for most novels it is the disruption that is decisive. And so it is not the ter-
rorism that is fully present in the novel, but terrorism’s effects.
The Typology of Terrorism
With our sample selected, our categories applied, and our results tabu-
lated, we generated a full chart of the typology of terrorism in twenty-five
novels, presented in the appendix.
Again, one of the first things to observe is the diversity of approaches
to representing terrorism in these novels. The novels approach the subject
from many directions and express many different kinds of narrative trajec-
tories. We encounter here still more kinds of protagonists and focalizers:
the victim-avenger of The Levanter, who is robbed, abducted, and tortured
by terrorists but who escapes and eventually exacts revenge; the detective
of Kaddish in Dublin, a special kind of observer, since he is an observer only
after the fact, a follower of clues. We encounter a great variety of combi-
nations among protagonists and focalizers. Resurrection Man is told from
the point of view of both terrorists and newspaper reporters, though the
latter provide the narrative anchor and moral center of the novel. Breakfast
on Pluto is narrated from the perspective of a character who is sometimes
deranged and who is both a bystander-victim (having been wounded but
not targeted in a terrorist attack) and a collaborator (having been involved
more or less unwittingly with terrorists in Ireland from an early age). We
also encounter a variety of motives for the turn to terror. One motive that
shows up from time to time is Oedipal conflict; terrorists, as in American
Pastoral, act out a resentment toward their parents and parental sexuality
by turning to violence against society. But some terrorists turn out to be
instinctually anarchistic. Whatever their family life may have been like,
we learn nothing about it, and what is relevant is the anarchist impulse
in itself, causing the German rebels in How German Is It, for example, to
engage in random shootings and bombings and the American vandals in
Fight Club to engage in random sabotage and arson.
What ties all of these novels together is the centrality of a terrorist inci-
dent. Or to put it more strongly, the incident itself is determinative of the form
of the terrorism novel. All of our novels, with two exceptions that prove
the rule, include at least one major terrorist incident, a bombing, a kidnap-
ping, or an assassination attempt, targeted against noncombatants; and
this terrorist incident is central to the development of the novel as a whole.
One exception is O’Rourke’s Notts, where suspected terrorists, believed to
have transported a bomb to a residential neighborhood, are assassinated
by a counterterrorist team; so a violent terrorism-related incident takes
the place of a genuine terrorist incident and indeed is represented via the
same fictional conventions that terrorist incidents usually are, performing
the same narrative function as a terrorist attack. The other exception is
Theroux’s Family Arsenal, where a grudge leads a collaborator to blow up

the terrorists with whom he has been fraternizing and his own murder is
prevented when the terrorist about to murder him is himself shot at the
hands of an unidentified assassin. In the case of both exceptions, that is,
though a conventional terrorist incident may be lacking, another incident
similar in kind and intensity, indeed a counterterrorism incident, assumes its
place and plays the same formal function. Though a novel about terror-
ism lacking a terrorist incident is certainly conceivable, none of our novels
seems able to do without the incident or counterincident and the function
it formally serves.
There are some novels, to be sure, where a terrorist or counterterrorist
incident does not constitute the climactic action of the novel: indeed, the
two DeLillo novels, Players and Mao II, and three notable novels from the
period 1996–97 (Eureka Street, American Pastoral, and Glamorama) all seem
to lack any kind of climactic action whatsoever. If American Pastoral, for
example, comes to a climax, it is only anticlimactically, when a drunken
woman, who has nothing to do with terrorism, stabs but does not seriously
wound an elderly man in the forehead with a fork, the elderly man having
nothing to do with terrorism, either; or else, it climaxes when the father
of the terrorist comes to confront his daughter after many years, finding
her in hiding and discovering that, though she has long since given up vio-
lence and terror, she may well have gone insane. (These two incidents are
parallel, showing daughter figures defying father figures, much as the real
terrorist explosion in the novel is shown to be an act of father defiance.)
But novels like American Pastoral deliberately stand apart from the crowd,
removing themselves from the relatively naive conventions of plot-driven
fiction. If they are about terrorism, these novels are also about something
else, a wider theme of which terrorism is only a symptom and which
requires that terrorist violence not be allowed to drive the main plot of
the story to its conclusion. It is probably fair to say that DeLillo, Robert
McLiam Wilson, Roth, and Ellis have all deliberately resolved their novels
into a sort of anticlimactic vacuum, have all subordinated conventional
action, including the conventional representation of climactic political vio-
lence, to the unresolved and tragically empty conclusions of psychological
and philosophical drama and metafictional form. Yet at the core of all
these novels there is nevertheless a determinative incident: a bombing, a
kidnapping, a torture scene, which very much succeeds in having a lasting
and definitive impact on the lives of the protagonists and the course of
their narrative journeys. So, again, it can be said that the terrorist plot is
the soul of the terrorism novel.
Other typological details further tie these novels together. In each case,
it is crucial for the novel to provide the terrorist incident with an identity.
Or rather, it is crucial to provide two sorts of identity: for on the one hand,
every novel in our sample specifies a political identity, an affiliation of the
incident with a political faction and the purposes for which the faction is
agitating; and on the other hand, every novel also provides the incident
with what may be called a characterological identity. The political identity of
the terrorist incident is often drawn blandly or unreflectively. It is enough
in some novels to say “IRA” or “Palestinians”—or, in the intentionally
ridiculous and apolitical Glamorama, “fashion models” (see Michaels 2003).
The political realities behind terrorist incidents are seldom expanded
upon in these novels, and when they are, the convictions of the terrorists
are commonly belittled, parodied, or rejected. In Lessing’s The Good Ter-
rorist, as we have seen, a critique of the ideas behind terrorist incidents,
even while we view them up close, from the perspective of the terrorist, is
part of the message of the novel. In The Levanter, the most moving part of
the novel involves an interview of a terrorist by a liberal journalist, devised
in order to demonstrate, with both clarity and indignation, how futile and
even juvenile the political position of Palestinian revolutionaries can be.
The rest of the novel serves to illustrate that premise. In American Pastoral,
where the politics of the terrorist are rendered clearly, and at least in part
as reasonable, the point is the absolute ineffability of the incident; the gap
between an idea and an action, a political position and a strategy of ter-
rorist aggression, or a political desire and an act of destruction cannot be
crossed by way of politics itself. There is no political necessity for a resort
to terrorism, this and many other novels make clear. There is not even
a political advisability or plausibility for the resort to terrorism, for the
terrorist act proceeds from a motive beyond political calculation. Thus
the political identity of terrorist incidents in such novels is almost always
unsatisfactory, even if it is also a necessary correlate of the terrorist inci-
dent. The Little Drummer Girl is the one exception to the rule. If the suffer-
ings of Palestinians and the political need to take violent action in favor
of their cause are spelled out clearly and sympathetically there, in all the
other novels of our sample the political premises behind terrorist identity
are either left in the dark or unmistakably repudiated.
But if the incidents have unsatisfactorily obscure political identities,
they usually come with expansive characterological identities. The inci-
dents have agents and agency. The perpetrators have names, backgrounds,
bodies, and minds; and these embodied, historically and ethnically situ-
ated individuals have objectives and motives. There are short-term goals
they wish to accomplish—to free prisoners, to send a message, to exact
revenge, to intimidate a population, to “bring the war home,” or to send

the Troubles back to the imperial capital (London) where they originated.
And there are motives, sometimes very deep ones, impelling them toward
their goals and the strategy of terrorist violence. The Oedipal conflicts in
American Pastoral and The Good Terrorist have already been noted. In Cold, a
combination of greed, will to power, authoritarianism, and bigotry, more
or less plausibly brought together in the personalities of the chief villains,
lead organized crime figures and paramilitaries to team up, shoot up air-
planes, kidnap government agents, and plan bombings. Not surprisingly,
perhaps, when novels take up terrorism as a theme, though often short on
insight into the political causes or implications of terror, they provide ter-
rorism with biographies, psychologies, idiosyncratic tics, objectives, and
tactics, which together add up to novelistic character.
In novels like My House in Umbria, where the terrorist incident is uniden-
tified, this is perhaps not the case; there is no character there. In two other
texts, How German Is It and Mao II, where the very ideas of character and
ideology are put into question—the coherence of belief systems and per-
sonality is deconstructed—this may not be the case either. But at least
the ghosts of political identity and character haunt such victims novels
as My House in Umbria; and they haunt the narration of How German Is It
and Mao II too, even as these two novels set out to disassemble them. The
“something missing,” the tear in the fabric of everydayness that the victims
of terrorism suffer, includes the absence of an explanation of why they
have suffered, a premise according to which someone might have believed
in terror or have been impelled by personal circumstances to engage in
terror. Not only are the victims innocent; they suffer from being unable to
point to who is guilty and why. It is probably no exaggeration to say that,
when the terrorist incident lacks identity as either a political ideology or a
character-driven agency, the novels operate around the idea that it is just
this lack of an identity that renders the incident dreadfully absurd. Here
the victims suffer for no reason at all.
Two theses, then, are being ventured here: first, that the form of the
terrorism novels in our sample depends on the representation of a ter-
rorist incident, or else a parallel counterterrorist incident; second, that
in narrating terrorism, the form of the novels requires that the incident
be identified by way of both its political ideology and the personality of
its perpetrators. The place of this incident in the narration, admittedly, is
subject to considerable variation. The incident sometimes comprises the
climactic action of the novel—a final explosion or shoot-out that drives the
plot to a conclusion. But sometimes the incident is rather the turning point
of the story, prior to a resolving conclusion; and elsewhere it is an initial
event which conditions all that follows. Moreover, the event can occupy
either the foreground or the background of the story and its discourse. In
American Pastoral, the terrorist bombing that determines the action of the
novel happens offstage (indeed, no one even witnesses it); in the police pro-
cedural Kaddish in Dublin, though the climactic action consists in the shoot-
ing of the terrorist, the terrorist incident itself, the murder of a journalist,
happens before the story of the novel begins. It is the discovery of the dead
body of the victim that opens the narrative. Some novels, from thrillers like
Black Sunday to the academia novel Notts, foreground the violence, placing
it front and center; others reflect back on the violence, which itself takes
place behind the scenes or even before the action and is talked about rather
than shown.
But however the terrorist incident is represented and assigned an iden-
tity, it is central to the form of the novel as a whole. And crucially, in most
if not all of the novels in our sample, the significance of the incident depends not
on the meaning of the act for the terrorists, but on the injury it causes (or was intended
to cause) to its targets along with the identities of the targets themselves. That
is our third thesis. Terrorism novels are by and large organized around the
experience of victimization. That may seem to be counterintuitive. After
all, the terrorist conspiracy is the soul of the terrorism novel. But the sig-
nificance of the terrorist conspiracy, the reason it is important to the novel,
and shown to be important to the reader, is almost never a function of the
conspiracy itself. Nor is it a function of what we are able to learn about
the terrorists, about their personalities, grievances, or tactical aims, or a
function of the large-scale political conflicts of which their behavior is a
symptomatic expression. These novels ground the unfolding of their plots,
the development of their themes, and the focus of psychological tension
in the injury that terrorist incidents have caused or might have caused
had the terrorists succeeded. What is most important about an episode of
violence is not what it means to the perpetrators or what it signifies about
political conflict in the modern world but whom it hurts, and how it hurts,
and even, at the most fundamental level, that it hurts. The significance of
the violence is the violation.
How a novel organizes itself around the injuries of terrorist violence is,
like so much else, subject to considerable variation. A novel may culminate
with this injury or begin with it: a dominant pattern, as we have seen, is
for this injury to occur as a culminating and climactic action, although
another common pattern opens with the incident and works backward
from it. The novel may also dramatize an escape from injury: part or all
of a terrorist attack may be averted. At the end of Black Sunday, five hun-
dred people are left dead, but the eighty thousand people initially targeted,
including the president of the United States, remain unharmed. At the end
of Brian Aldiss’s Remembrance Day (1993), a domestic tragedy, some of the
main characters are left dead, some are injured, and some survive an IRA
bombing. Some are not even there: they are inadvertently absent from the
scene where other main characters are harmed, the randomness of death
at the hands of terror being the main point that the novel dramatically
drives home. At the end of a novel by Henry Porter also named Remem-
brance Day (1999), a conventional thriller, the day is saved, a conspiracy is
averted, and no one is hurt except the terrorist himself. (An earlier terrorist
incident in the novel was quite destructive: but the victim-avenger, Con
Lindow, an Irish scientist, finds out who was responsible and catches him
in the midst of carrying out a plot of even more devastating violence.) In
all cases, however, whether a terrorist disaster is realized or averted, placed
at the climax of the narrative or elsewhere, it is from the fact of injury or
possible injury that most of the novels develop their themes, orchestrate
their plots, and manipulate the reader’s sympathies.
The main exception would seem to be The Little Drummer Girl. It goes to
a lot of effort, as we said, to show why Palestinians have resorted to terror
against Israel, and it even develops a kind of moral calculus of harm: so
many Palestinians killed, displaced, or oppressed by Israelis as a matter
of state policy is represented as the moral equivalent of so many civilian
Israelis targeted and killed or otherwise harmed by Palestinians as an out-
come of terrorist resistance. But even so, The Little Drummer Girl focuses
its energetic indignation on victimization. If there is a moral equivalence
between state-sponsored oppression and state-defying terrorism, the novel
unmistakably argues, they are both equally bad, because they destroy
innocent lives. The novel even furthers the point by displacing the logic of
victimization onto its surviving heroine. If Le Carré’s thriller begins with
the brutal bombing of the home of an Israeli diplomat and ends with the
climactic shooting of the Palestinian terrorist responsible for the bomb-
ing, it directs its ultimate pathos toward the “drummer girl” of the title,
an English actress and reluctant double agent. Having pretended to be a
terrorist, and having made love to the terrorist just before he is shot in cold
blood, she suffers a nervous collapse. The novel ends with the drummer
girl and another double agent traumatized by the experience and com-
pletely estranged from any values—for or against the Palestinians or the
Israelis or any idea of social or political justice, for that matter—in pursuit
of which they had served as counterterrorism agents. In the final analysis,
it is most importantly the little drummer girl, and not the actual victims
of terrorism and counterterrorism, the dead Israelis and Palestinians, who
has been violated by the violence of the novel. She has lost her innocence
entirely. And it is she to whom the reader’s sympathies are most attracted.
(In fact, the book ends with an allusion to the end of Paradise Lost and
Milton’s Adam and Eve, as she and her male partner walk hand in hand,
guiltily into life.)
Without exception, the novels in our sample draw the reader into a moral
and political affinity with the victims of terrorist or (on occasion) counter-
terrorist violence. It matters of course whether the victims are Americans
or Israelis, Irish Catholics or English Protestants, just as it matters whether
the perpetrators of the violence are paramilitaries, nationalists, religious
fanatics, rogue agents of the CIA, or MI6 agents acting on orders from the
highest circles and whether the perpetrators are aiming to establish world
hegemony or, more humbly, to avenge the death of a brother, demoralize
Muslims, or forestall the killing of a known target. But the novels in our
sample are united in this: they take the side of the victim: they see the sig-
nificance of violence in the harm it causes. Whatever political meanings
may be associated with the violence, the violence in itself, the violence as
violation and injury, is paramount, almost as if the violence were discon-
nected from political meaning.
Indeed, many novels, as we have seen, imply that the terrorist violence
they represent is devoid of authentic political meaning. The terrorists do
not have a good enough excuse for what they do. And more to the point, as
the significance of what terrorists (or counterterrorists) do is found not in
the act of asserting a political meaning but in the sufferance of the injuries
it causes, so the real politics of these novels comes to be, all but exclusively,
a politics of the victim. Most of these novels sentimentalize terrorism in
just this sense: terrorism is something that the reader is caused to want
to prevent or to undo on behalf of its victims; terrorism is something that
causes terror and pity and anguish and that cries out for relief: relief for
the victims and for the readers who identify and sympathize with them. It
is for this reason that we make our claim that terrorism novels commonly
sentimentalize terror. They make it into a pretext for feeling; and not just
the feeling of suspense but also of affective solidarity between the reader
and the fictional beings whose welfare and/or suffering the narratives
document. It is for this reason too that we claim that most of these novels
implicitly argue on behalf of the moral and political legitimacy of the side
the victims are on. The victims have never done anything to deserve what
befalls them; they are victims pure and simple. Nor do they ever stand for
something which might rightfully be targeted by political violence or par-
ticipate in a political society whose members may justifiably be targeted by
terrorist violence. Without necessarily making overt arguments, or having
characters make overt arguments, about the political or moral legitimacy
of the society to which terrorism’s victims belong, the novels recruit us

to the side of victims, terrorizing us along with them, and in so doing
implicitly enlist us against the perpetrators, rendering illegitimate the ter-
rorists’ political aims often even without stopping to say what they are.
The reader of this essay may want to respond here that this is how it
should be. Novels should be on the side of the victims of violence. Nor do
we wish to disagree. But we think it apposite to note how, in our sample,
terrorism functions as a subject of fiction, possibly differing from private
crime in this respect. For the criminal mind, and sympathy with crimi-
nality, may not be as foreign to crime novels on the whole as the terrorist
mind and sympathy with terrorism are to our sample of terrorism novels.
In any case, by focusing on the injuries caused or threatened by terrorist
violence, in making the meaning of the violence its violation of everyday
life rather than its expression of political or social conflict, most of these
novels demand that we assent to the illegitimacy of the politics on behalf
of which terrorism is deployed and by the same token, though perhaps
more on the level of affect than idea, that we assent to the legitimacy of the
side against which terrorism is deployed. After all, they are victims! Ter-
rorism in the terrorism novels under scrutiny, we submit, thus functions as
a pretext for engaging the reader sentimentally on behalf of the victims it
represents. It makes the novels good to feel with and seldom leaves any doubt
about whose side, in the political and social conflicts that erupt into terror-
ist violence, feeling good with ought to be enjoined.
This is not to say that novels do not often work this logic of legitimation
and delegitimation unintelligently or one-sidedly. Some of the thrillers
in our sample, it is true, may well be accused of oversimplification. The
good guys fight the bad guys; innocents may suffer along the way, but the
good guys win: James Bond and Con Lindow alike outsmart the paramili-
taries and the forces of reaction they represent; Jason Bourne outsmarts
both Carlos and the state terrorists of the CIA. But from a typological
and narratological point of view, what is perhaps most important to notice
is not whether a novel oversimplifies the terms and stakes of its conflicts,
but how it goes about the business of narrating the conflicts involved in
stories of political violence. And there we find not only many nuances in
many novels, but also something of a key to how modern novels operate
in response to political terror in the contemporary world.
Thrillers, it was earlier observed, tend to represent their tales through
the controlling consciousness of either a terrorist, a law enforcement offi-
cial, or a victim-avenger: all figures who are involved not just in the com-
mission of violence (whether the legal violence of law enforcement or the
criminal violence of terror or vengeance), but also in the assertion of a
certain moral code or moral order by way of violence. James Bond does
his job by restoring law and order. So does Con Lindow. And as for Jason
Bourne, that is at the very least what he is trying to do, Bourne’s additional
problem being that he is unsure what law and order is in his case or who
besides himself might represent it, if even he represents it. But most of the
other controlling consciousnesses of the sample novels—protagonists and
focalizers of the narratives in which they appear—have a more ambiguous
relationship both toward law and order and toward political criminality.
Even if they are victims of a terrorist incident, they are often placed in an
associative proximity with political criminality; and many controlling con-
sciousnesses—the inadvertent collaborator, the bystander, the observer,
and various combinations thereof—are rendered complicit or nearly com-
plicit with political violence.
Each protagonist and focalizer, whether victim, observer, collaborator,
or bystander, is either embedded in or in proximity to the determining
incident and the injury it portends—they are there at the incident or beside
the incident. The inadvertently collaborating protagonist of The Honorary
Consul, a medical doctor in exile, is brought into the kidnapping that the
terrorists of the novel carry out, and his being brought down by counterter-
rorists along with his kidnappers in a shoot-out is the climax of the novel.
Yet, though he is never responsible for anything, he nevertheless finds him-
self engagé in the political conflict into which he has been absorbed, as
Graham Greene characters are wont to do: he is sympathetic with the ter-
rorists, he even admires them, and he comes (like many hostages in these
novels) to identify with his captors; he helps them as best he can; he tries to
resolve the conflict for them. So he becomes complicit with them, though
not at first by choice; and he even recognizes, while he tries to side with
them, that in his own life he has been torn between standing for what they
stand for and standing up for a bourgeois order of things that is partly the
cause of their discontent.
Again, the protagonist of American Pastoral, businessman Swede Levov,
another inadvertent collaborator, stands (he believes) for everything that
terrorism is not; and yet he is the father of a terrorist, he assists her while
she is in hiding, and he has himself been a supporter of some of the same
political positions as his daughter. Collaborating to that extent, having
promoted in his daughter a kind of liberalism which lent itself in the six-
ties to radicalization and violence, and in the end trying to protect her
from law enforcement officials, he provides the narration with a multi-
faceted proximity to the reality of terrorist violence: responsible but not
responsible, contiguous but not a part of it, affected but not impacted. In
fact, just as the little drummer girl is the real victim in the Le Carré novel
devoted to her, so, American Pastoral implies, is Swede Levov the real victim
of his daughter’s terror. One of the main characters of the novel, Swede’s
brother, overtly makes this claim, saying that Levov—the collaborator and
not the man killed by the bombing—was the real victim of his daughter’s
violence.
Meanwhile, in an ingenious variation, the protagonist and focalizer
of Breakfast on Pluto, an Irish transvestite with a poor grasp of reality, is
enmeshed nearly from birth but only as an almost unknowing collaborator
on the side of the IRA, with the reality of the Troubles, and thus provides
a canny perspective, neither involved nor uninvolved, on the Troubles in
general. At the catastrophic incident of the novel, a deadly bombing in
a London nightclub, the protagonist, “Pussy” Braden, confused as ever,
is present as a bystander. His un-responsible proximity to the incident—
the bombing rips his stockings, burns his legs, and shocks the hell out of
him—is symbolic of the position of the peaceable Irish subject in the midst
of terrorist violence, who is unable to rid himself of a terror for which he
has no taste or desire. That Braden is then accused by British police of
having planted the bomb is symbolic of the complicity of all the Irish (from
the perspective of British law enforcement officials) in the violence of the
Troubles, even if all they wish for is that the Troubles would go away.
The thrillers, as we have seen, sometimes focus on the injury differ-
ently. The counterterrorist officials and avengers are out to eradicate the
culprits and thus “bring them to justice,” as President George W. Bush
has often put it, and perhaps at the same time prevent an incident from
happening. But all these novels, cheap thrillers and literary masterpieces
alike, identify terrorism as an act of violence perpetrated or intended to be
perpetrated against innocent victims. That is what terrorism is for all these
texts: aggression whose guilt can be identified by its political affiliations
and explained or colored by its characterology but whose main culpability
resides in the violating act itself, perpetrated against the innocent. And so,
too, this is what terrorism does for all these novels: it wounds. It wounds its
direct targets; it wounds the bystanding public; and it wounds the nebu-
lous audience to whom it is sending its disruptive, destructive messages. It
is perfectly conceivable that a novel about terrorism would be focused on
the legitimate grievances and objectives of the terrorists, as, for example,
in the Palestinian Wild Thorns, whose culminative act of violence comes at
the death of a Palestinian who has always been peaceable and apolitical
but who finally joins with the terrorists and so is shot to death. But none of
the novels in our sample, with the possible exception of The Little Drummer
Girl, does more than gesture in that direction. All of the other novels are
structured so as to foreground the wounds of terrorism: to identify and
construct the innocence of the innocent and the wounds of the wounded.
If the innocent and the wounded are also somehow complicit with the ter-
rorists, or responsible for the terrorists’ grievances, or even responsible for
the development of the terrorists’ political ideals—and if the narrative thus
engages readers in identifying with complicity, complicity is not guilt; it is
only a “guilt with,” guilt by metonymy; the innocent are still what they are.
However politically forward-looking or adventurous, these novels are all
constructed around an injurious incident from the side of the injured, and
all are thus designed to narrate, however directly or obliquely, the story of
an injury inflicted on the innocent.
Conclusions
Clearly, more research is needed. Can we, for example, calibrate the dif-
ferences among terrorism novels from the 1970s to the 1990s? Can we
identify the trends, and if so, can we explain them? Is it possible that so
many exceptions could be found to the above typological analysis that it
would have to be rejected or accepted only as one possible typology among
many? And can we provide our categories of analysis with more precision
and theoretical bite? Would doing so be really helpful? All of this remains
to be seen.
Meanwhile, by way of conclusion, we should like to propose two rather
disparate ideas. One is that, if you’re interested in understanding terror-
ism, you have much to learn from the novels discussed, even if the form of
the modern novel and its ideology of representation present a number of
obvious problems. Of course, it is not the meaning of terrorism for the ter-
rorists that these novels elucidate for us. And many novels can be faulted
for either caricaturing terrorists or fudging what we know about the reali-
ties of terrorism. Thus Patrick Magee (2001), himself a former member
of the IRA and a convicted killer, in fact the Brighton Bomber who con-
spired to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet, can convincingly
complain about the falsification of the character of IRA members, tactics,
and ideology in the vast majority of novels that treat the subject, making
them into perverts and thugs when in fact (according to Magee) they were
often quite sober, upstanding, and moralistic defenders of tradition. And
conversely, it can be observed of many recent novels that they confuse sec-
tarian and nationalist activists with the mythic figure of the philosophical
nihilist and anarchist: they prefer to dramatize, portentously, the threat
of philosophical and psychological derangement rather than account for
the real sources of terrorist violence in the world. If Lessing’s The Good
Terrorist dramatizes the events that lead a group of naive youngsters, revo-
lutionists without a cause, to engage in a deadly bombing incident at a
department store in London, she based the incident on a real bombing
that was perpetrated not by hippies but by soldiers (perhaps soldiers like
Magee) of the IRA (again, see Scanlan 2001: chap. 3). So it is not terrorism
per se that many novels enlighten us about but the moral fact of living in
a world where terrorism may be perpetrated against the innocent. What
does it look like, feel like, to live in this world? What are the implications
for moral consciousness of living in this world? Neither law enforcement
agents, terrorism experts, nor terrorists (or freedom fighters), these novels
suggest to us, most of us occupy the position of the wrong man or the wrong
woman, inadvertently complicit in the threats of violence to which we are
vulnerable and even (as so often in the case of thrillers) capable of being
accused, hounded, and injured because of our inadvertent complicity in
them. The novels recruit us to identify with the position of a Jason Bourne,
a Swede Levov, or a Pussy Braden. Many of us in our deepest fantasies
might rather be a victim-avenger, a James Bond, or even, for that matter,
a terrorist, taking possession of the world by destroying it. But, instead,
the novels entreat us, think of yourself as one of the Pussy Bradens of the
world.
But it is in conjunction with this last notion of the subject position of the
protagonist and his or her readers that we should like to venture a second,
final, and more disturbing idea. This is that the cultural work of the terror-
ism novel from 1970 to 2001 has been by and large to legitimate the posi-
tion of innocence occupied by terrorism’s victims and the political society
to which they belong.10 If novels frequently encourage identification with
a form of complicity, they seldom if ever challenge the legitimacy of the
moral, legal, and political order against which a complicity with the other
is proposed. These novels tell us that terrorism is the violence of an Other;
it is illegitimate violence perpetrated from an illegitimate position. Legiti-
macy is for us—even if the best we can do is to live in the world as Jason
Bournes and Swede Levovs and Pussy Bradens, traumatized by a world
we cannot understand or undertake to change and doomed to collaborate,
however unwittingly, with the very forces attempting to destroy us. What
contemporary fiction does with terrorism is mainly to articulate the subject
position of the nonterrorist, who is not quite at fault, but not quite unin-
volved, either.
10. The response to terrorism incidents by way of rituals of legitimation—in which novels,
we may now see, apparently play a part—is discussed at length in Wagner-Pacifici 1986; see
also Sciascia 2002.
Appendix Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001: A Typology of Twenty-Five Texts
Date/Author/Title/ Protagonist(s)/ Terrorist

B genre; B register Focalizer(s) Climactic Action Incident(s)
1971/Forsythe/Day of the Jackal/ Terrorist and Prevented Assassination
Thriller; paranoid suspense counterterrorist assassination
1972/Ambler/The Levanter/ Victim-avenger Prevention of Bombing,

Thriller; comic suspense bombing assassination,
kidnapping
1973/Greene/Honorary Consul/ Collaborator Shooting of protago- Kidnapping

Literary thriller; tragedy nist and terrorists
1975/Harris/Black Sunday/ Terrorists and Bombing (but pre- Mass-murder

Thriller; paranoid suspense counterterrorists vented from striking bombing
main target)
1976/Theroux/Family Arsenal/ Collaborators Bombing, shooting Bombings

Literary thriller; comic suspense of terrorists
1977/DeLillo/Players/Postmod- Collaborator None (suicide of a Intended bomb-

ernist literary fiction, noirist minor character) ing of private
satire property, with
execution
1979/McCarthy/Cannibals and Victims Suicide bombing, Hijacking,

Missionaries/ Literary fiction; destroying artworks hostage taking,
comedy of manners extortion
1980/Abish/How German Is It/ Collaborator- Shoot-out, murder of Bombings of

Postmodernist literary fiction; victim innocents government
satire, black comedy property
1980/Ludlum/Bourne Identity/ Counterterrorist Shoot-out, escape of Assassinations,

Thriller; melodramatic suspense protagonist extortion
1983/Le Carré/Little Drummer Counterterrorist Murder of terrorist Assassination

Girl/Thriller; melodramatic bombings
suspense
1985/Lessing/Good Terrorist/ Terrorists Bombing Bombing of pri-

Literary fiction (bildungsroman); vate property
realist satire
1991/Trevor/My House in Victims Moral crisis among Execution

Umbria/Literary fiction; victims bombing
B tragedy
1991/DeLillo/Mao II/Postmod- Collaborator- Death by natural Kidnapping,

ernist literary fiction; noirist victim causes of would-be extortion,
satire collaborator bombing
1992/Brady/Kaddish in Dublin/ Observer (police Capture of assassin Assassination

Police procedural; noir detective)
Identity of Identity of Motives/Methods/

Terrorist(s) Target(s) Objectives of Terrorist(s) Location
OAS President Charles Money, political conviction, resent- France
de Gaulle ment/Shootings/Coup d’état
Palestinian rene- Israeli citizens Political ambition, conviction/ Syria, Israel

gade terrorist Bombing/Liberation of Palestine
group
Paraguayan American Revolutionary conviction/ Argentina

communists ambassador Kidnapping/Prisoner release
Vietnam veteran Americans at Super Anger/Bombings/Revenge, libera- United

and Palestinians Bowl tion of Palestine States
IRA, fellow travel- Public property Political anger, conviction/ England

ing anarchists Bombings/Free Ireland
Anarchists Floor of New York Anarchist instincts, boredom/ United

Stock Exchange Bombings/Revolution or nihilist States
destruction
Dutch and Ger- Western liberals Political conviction, will to power/ Netherlands
man anarchists, Hijacking/Prisoner release, removal
Palestinians of Netherlands from NATO
Baadher-Meinhof– German citizens Anarchist instincts, revenge/Bomb- Germany

type anarchists and infrastructure ings, shootings/Revolution (?)
“Carlos” and his Hero, miscellaneous Money/Shootings, bombings/ Europe,

network government officials None (Above refers to Carlos and United
conspirators, not state terrorists) States
Palestinian Israeli citizens Political conviction and resentment/ European

Marxists Bombings/Liberation of Palestine continent
British anarchists Property, with Anger, England

citizens neediness/Resistance/Revolution
Unknown Private citizens (?) Unknown Italy
Palestinian- Private citizens, Mass-movement United

Lebanese Maoists celebrities instinct/Kidnapping/Unknown States,
Lebanon
Opus Dei Irish Private citizens Rejection of liberalization of Ireland

nationalists Ireland/Assassination, vandalism,
sabotage/Manipulate elections
Date/Author/Title/ Protagonist(s)/ Terrorist

B genre; B register Focalizer(s) Climactic Action Incident(s)
1993/Aldiss/Remembrance Day/ Victims Bombing Execution,
Literary fiction; domestic tragedy bombing
1994/McNamee/Resurrection Terrorist and Beatings, murder Execution, mur-

Man/Thriller; noir observer der of terrorist
1996/Palahniuk/Fight Club/ Terrorist Suicide Vandalism,

Literary fantasy fiction; noirist extortion, muti-
tragedy lation, bombing
1996/O’Rourke/Notts/Literary Bystander-victim Execution by shoot- None

fiction; academia satire, tragedy ing of bystanders by
counterterrorists
1996/Gardner/Cold/Thriller; Counterterrorist Prevention of mass Sabotage, mur-

romantic adventure ( James Bond) bombing der, extortion,
bombing
1996/Wilson/Eureka Street Bystander None Bombings, van-

dalism, murder
1997/Roth/American Pastoral/ Collaborator None Bombings of

Literary fiction; B domestic government
tragedy property
1998/McCabe/Breakfast on Pluto/ Bystander-victim- Execution, bombing Execution,

Postmodernist fiction; black collaborator bombing
comedy
1998/Stone/Damascus Gate/ Bystander- Faked bombing, Bombing

Literary thriller; melodramatic observer prevented
suspense
1999/Ellis/Glamorama/Postmod- Collaborator None Bombings,

ernist fiction; black comedy extortion
1999/Porter/Remembrance Day/ Victim-avenger Prevented bombing Bombings

Thriller; melodramatic suspense
2001/Patchett/Bel Canto/Literary Victims Execution by shoot- Kidnapping,

fiction; comic romance ing of kidnappers hostage taking,
extortion
Identity of Identity of Motives/Methods/

Terrorist(s) Target(s) Objectives of Terrorist(s) Location
IRA Private (English) Anger/Bombings/Irish liberation England
citizens
Northern Irish Northern Ireland Bigotry, Oedipal anger, political Northern

Ultras Catholic citizens confusion/Murder/Permanent Ireland
intimidation of Irish Catholics
“Project Mayhem,” Private citizens, Nihilism, Oedipal conflicts/Vandal- North

anarchist vandals private property ism, extortion/Protest against con- America
sumer culture, inequality of status,
“history”
Suspected IRA None None England
Right-wing para- Citizens, property, Bigotry, greed/Assassinations, extor- Italy, United

military assisted by agents tion, bombings States
Florentine Mafia
IRA, Ultras Citizens, property, Unknown/Bombing/Northern Irish Northern

opposing religious animosities during the Troubles Ireland
groups
Weathermen-type Government prop- Anger, politics, Oedipal conflict/ United

anarchist erty, with citizens Bombings/End of war in Vietnam States
IRA Private property, Unknown/Bombing/Irish liberation Ireland,

British citizens United
Kingdom
Religious fanatics Holy site Neurotic millenarianism/Bombing/ Israel

(Messianic Jews Rebuilding of Temple
and Christian
fundamentalists)
Fashion model Government prop- Thrill-seeking/Bombing, Europe

anarchists erty, citizens assassination/Unknown
Disaffected IRA personnel, Anger, money/Bombing/Revenge United

paramilitary Whitehall Kingdom
South American Citizens, industry Political conviction, despair/Armed Fictionalized

communists (fic- and government resistance/Prisoner release Peru
tionalized Tupac officials from
Amaru) around the world
References
1. Novels
Abish, Walter
1980 How German Is It (New York: New Directions).
Aldiss, Brian
1993 Remembrance Day (London: HarperCollins).
Ambler, Eric
1972 The Levanter (Boston: G. K. Hall).
Ashe, Alex
1998 An Acceptable Level of Violence (London: Citron).
Auster, Paul
1992 Leviathan (New York: Viking).
Banks, Russell
1998 Cloudsplitter: A Novel (New York: HarperFlamingo).
Brady, John
1992 Kaddish in Dublin (New York: St. Martin’s).
Camus, Albert
1949 Les justes: Piece en cinq actes (Paris: Gallimard).
Chesterton, G. K.
1908 The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Simpkin).
Clancy, Tom
1993 Patriot Games (London: HarperCollins).
Coetzee, J. M.
1994 The Master of Petersburg (London: Minerva).
Conrad, Joseph
1907 The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Methuen).
DeLillo, Don
1977 Players (New York: Knopf ).
1988 Libra (New York: Viking).
1991 Mao II (New York: Viking).
Di Filippo, Paul
1996 Ribofunk (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows).
Ellis, Bret Easton
1991 American Pyscho (New York: Vintage).
1999 Glamorama: A Novel (New York: Knopf ).
Fleming, Ian
1961 Thunderball (New York: Viking).
Forsyth, Frederick
1971 The Day of the Jackal (London: Hutchinson).
2006 The Afghan (London: Bantam).
Gardner, John
1996 Cold (London: Coronet).
Greene, Graham
1955 The Quiet American (London: Heinemann).
1973 The Honorary Consul (London: Bodley Head).
Harris, Thomas
1975 Black Sunday (New York: Putnam).
Houellebecq, Michel
2002 Platform, translated by Frank Wynne (London: Heinemann).
Johnston, Paul
2003 The Last Red Death (London: Hodder and Stoughton).
Jonas, George
1984 Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (New York: Simon and
Schuster).
Khalifah, Sahar
1984 Wild Thorns (London: Al Saqi).
Le Carré, John
1983 The Little Drummer Girl (New York: Knopf ).
2003 Absolute Friends (Boston: Little, Brown).
Lessing, Doris
1985 The Good Terrorist (New York: Knopf ).
Lowry, Malcolm
1947 Under the Volcano (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock).
Ludlum, Robert
1980 The Bourne Identity (New York: R. Marek).
McCabe, Patrick
1998 Breakfast on Pluto (New York: HarperFlamingo).
McCarthy, Mary
1979 Cannibals and Missionaries (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
McEwan, Ian
2005 Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape).
McNamee, Eoin
1994 Resurrection Man (London: Picador).
Messud, Claire
2006 The Emperor’s Children (London: Picador).
Naipaul, V. S.
1975 Guerrillas. London: Deutsch.
Ondaatje, Michael
2000 Anil’s Ghost (London: Bloomsbury).
O’Rourke, William
1996 Notts: A Striking Novel (New York: Marlowe).
Palahniuk, Chuck
1996 Fight Club (New York: Norton).
Patchett, Ann
2001 Bel Canto (New York: HarperCollins).
Porter, Henry
1999 Remembrance Day (London: Orion).
Roth, Philip
1997 American Pastoral (London: Jonathan Cape).
Stone, Robert
1998 Damascus Gate (Thorndike, ME: Thorndike).
Theroux, Paul
1976 The Family Arsenal (London: Hamilton).
Trevor, William
2003 [1991] My House in Umbria (New York: Penguin).
Updike, John
2006 Terrorist (London: Hamish Hamilton).
Uris, Leon
1958 Exodus (Garden City, NY: Doubleday).
Wallace, David Foster
1996 Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown).
West, Paul
2001 A Fifth of November (New York: New Directions).
Wilson, A. N.
1977 The Sweets of Pimlico (London: Secker and Warburg).
Wilson, Robert McLiam
1996 Eureka Street (London: Secker and Warburg).
2. Critical Works
Alter, Robert
1998 “Stone Bombs in Jerusalem,” Salon, review of Damascus Gate, www.salon.com/books/
feature/1998/04/cov_16feature.html.
Aristotle
1995 Poetics, edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press).
Baker, Peter
1994 “The Terrorist as Interpreter: Mao II in Postmodern Context,” Postmodern Culture: An
Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 4 (2).
Baudrillard, Jean
2003 The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays (New York: Verso).
Crenshaw, Martha, and John Pimlott, eds.
1997 Encyclopedia of World Terrorism, 3 vols. (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference).
Denning, Michael
1987 Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge and
K. Paul).
Derrida, Jacques
2003 “Interview,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida, interviewed by Giovanna Borradori, 85–137 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press).
Douglass, William A., and Joseba Zulaika
1996 Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge).
Foertsch, Jacqueline, ed.
2004a “Terrorism and the Postmodern Novel.” Special issue, Studies in the Novel 36 (3):
285–463.
2004b “Introduction: The Terror! The Terror!” in Foertsch 2004a: 285–93.
Frow, John
2003 “The Uses of Terror and the Limits of Cultural Studies,” Symploke 11: 69–76.
Frye, Northrop
1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Hoffman, Bruce
1998 Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press).
Houen, Alex
2002 Terrorism and Modern Literature from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Jackson, Richard
2005 Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester:
Manchester University Press).
Juergensmeyer, Mark
2000 Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of
California Press).
Kelley, Aaron
2005 The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (Aldershot, U.K.:
Ashgate).
Kristeva, Julia
1982 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press).
Kubiak, Anthony
2004 “Spelling It Out: Narrative Typologies of Terror,” in Foertsch 2004a: 294–301.
Lacqueur, Walter
1983 “Le Carré’s Fantasies,” Commentary 75 (6): 62–67.
1999 The New Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press).
Magee, Patrick
2001 Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish Republicans in “Troubles Fiction” (Belfast:
Beyond the Pale).
Melchiori, Barbara Arnett
1985 Terrorism and the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm).
Michaels, Walter Benn
2003 “Empires of the Senseless: (The Response to) Terror and (the End of ) History,” Radi-
cal History Review 85: 105–14.
Osteen, Mark
1999 “Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship and DeLillo’s Mao II,” Modern
Fiction Studies 45: 643–74.
Parrish, Thomas
2005 “The End of Identity: Philip Roth’s Jewish American Pastoral,” in Turning up the Flame:
Philip Roth’s Later Novels, edited by Jay Halio and Ben Siegel, 131–50 (Newark: Univer-
sity of Delaware Press).
Patchett, Ann
n.d. “Interview: A Conversation with Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto,” in BookBrowse,
www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number=645.
Peyser, Thomas
1999 “How Global Is It: Walter Abish and the Fiction of Globalization,” Contemporary
Literature 40 (2): 240–62.
Rowe, John Carlos
2004 “Mao II and the War on Terrorism,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 103: 21–43.
Scanlan, Margaret
2001 Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia).
Sciascia, Leonardo
2002 The Moro Affair, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Granta).
Simmons, Ryan
1999 “What Is a Terrorist? Contemporary Authorship, the Unabomber, and Mao II,”
Modern Fiction Studies 45: 675–95.
Steel, Jayne
1998 “Vampira: Representations of the Irish Female Terrorist,” Irish Studies Review 16 (3):
273–84.
Sternberg, Meir
1983 “Knight Meets Dragon in the James Bond Saga: Realism and Reality Model,” Style
17 (2): 142–80.
Velcic, Vlatka
2004 “Reshaping Ideologies: Leftists as Terrorists/Terrorists as Leftists in DeLillo’s
Novels,” in Foertsch 2004a: 405–18.
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica
1986 The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press).
Walker, Joseph S.
2004 “A Kink in the System: Terrorism and the Comic Mystery Novel,” in Foertsch 2004a:
336–51.
Žižek, Slavoj
2002 Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verso).

Terrorism and The Novel 2008

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Terrorism and The Novel 2008

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001

Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel

The Representation of Terrorism in Fiction

Our question would seem to be straightforward: how, in the world of the

undocumented and uninterrogated. What novels have in fact been writ-

Definitions, Further Questions, and Limitations

A number of difficulties arise when asking those questions, regarding both

person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter; and though failed

sites, dis-identification and abjection (the simultaneous degrading and

Figure 1 Number of novels published originally in English about terrorism,

not a common one. But beginning in 1970 terrorism became a common

In compiling a bibliography, we included not only novels about terror-

otherwise unknown physical laws. We also, though with some hesitation,

Narrating Terrorism: An Overview

ingenious, and unlikely conspiracies, and causing all sorts of implausible

But paranoia is not the only register of the mythography of terrorism

Glamorama (1999) is similarly disengaged, though for different reasons. Cold

Palestinians rather than Algerians, toward anarchists in Germany rather

most commonly white, male, middle-class Americans and Britons, though

To explore the patterns discernible among the different texts, we devised

through the eyes of Jason Bourne, counterterrorist, suffering from amnesia

ine in her mission—because they are themselves the protagonists whose

same—an aircraft dive-bombing into a stadium, a hidden bomb explod-

The Typology of Terrorism

Theroux’s Family Arsenal, where a grudge leads a collaborator to blow up

revenge, to intimidate a population, to “bring the war home,” or to send

of the society to which terrorism’s victims belong, the novels recruit us

Appendix Terrorism and the Novel, 1970–2001: A Typology of Twenty-Five Texts

Date/Author/Title/ Protagonist(s)/ Terrorist

1972/Ambler/The Levanter/ Victim-avenger Prevention of Bombing,

1973/Greene/Honorary Consul/ Collaborator Shooting of protago- Kidnapping

1975/Harris/Black Sunday/ Terrorists and Bombing (but pre- Mass-murder

1976/Theroux/Family Arsenal/ Collaborators Bombing, shooting Bombings

1977/DeLillo/Players/Postmod- Collaborator None (suicide of a Intended bomb-

1979/McCarthy/Cannibals and Victims Suicide bombing, Hijacking,

1980/Abish/How German Is It/ Collaborator- Shoot-out, murder of Bombings of

1980/Ludlum/Bourne Identity/ Counterterrorist Shoot-out, escape of Assassinations,

1983/Le Carré/Little Drummer Counterterrorist Murder of terrorist Assassination

1985/Lessing/Good Terrorist/ Terrorists Bombing Bombing of pri-

1991/Trevor/My House in Victims Moral crisis among Execution

1991/DeLillo/Mao II/Postmod- Collaborator- Death by natural Kidnapping,

1992/Brady/Kaddish in Dublin/ Observer (police Capture of assassin Assassination

Identity of Identity of Motives/Methods/

Palestinian rene- Israeli citizens Political ambition, conviction/ Syria, Israel

Paraguayan American Revolutionary conviction/ Argentina

Vietnam veteran Americans at Super Anger/Bombings/Revenge, libera- United

IRA, fellow travel- Public property Political anger, conviction/ England

Anarchists Floor of New York Anarchist instincts, boredom/ United

Baadher-Meinhof– German citizens Anarchist instincts, revenge/Bomb- Germany

“Carlos” and his Hero, miscellaneous Money/Shootings, bombings/ Europe,

Palestinian Israeli citizens Political conviction and resentment/ European

British anarchists Property, with Anger, England

Unknown Private citizens (?) Unknown Italy

Palestinian- Private citizens, Mass-movement United

Opus Dei Irish Private citizens Rejection of liberalization of Ireland

Date/Author/Title/ Protagonist(s)/ Terrorist

1994/McNamee/Resurrection Terrorist and Beatings, murder Execution, mur-

1996/Palahniuk/Fight Club/ Terrorist Suicide Vandalism,

1996/O’Rourke/Notts/Literary Bystander-victim Execution by shoot- None

1996/Gardner/Cold/Thriller; Counterterrorist Prevention of mass Sabotage, mur-

1996/Wilson/Eureka Street Bystander None Bombings, van-

1997/Roth/American Pastoral/ Collaborator None Bombings of