Osama

Joe runs a private detective agency in Vientiane, drinks, smokes, and reads pulp novels about a terrorist called Osama bin Laden: Vigilante, Assignment Africa, Sinai Bombings, cheaply printed adventures by an author named Mike Longshott. Then a woman comes into his office and hires him to find Longshott, and pays in cash he has no way of tracing. The search takes Joe to Paris, London and New York, through a world that is almost ours and is not: no attacks, no wars of the kind we had, and everywhere a population of the faded and the semi-transparent, refugees who slip between the two versions and are gathered up by men who do not want them talking. The pulp passages, reproduced in the text, describe real atrocities in flat commercial prose. Tidhar was in Dar es Salaam near the embassy bombing and in Nairobi shortly after, and lived near enough to other attacks that the book's provocation is earned rather than clever. It uses noir as an instrument for grief, asking what fiction does to mass death and whether the shape a thriller imposes is a form of consolation or a lie.