Book rec: American War by Omar El Akkad

[sabotabby]

JFC, this book. Foolishly, I thought I might read it on the plane. I'm rather glad I didn't. I started reading it last night, had nightmares, and in lieu of doing a few more hours of work today, finished it and will likely have nightmares tonight and for the rest of my life. I haven't been this viscerally unsettled by a novel in awhile.

I did not know what I was getting into with this one, beyond that it was getting some excellent reviews, the blurb on the back sounded up my alley, and I thought an Egyptian-Canadian journalist's take on a futuristic second American Civil War would at least be worth a read. Superficially, it sounded like something that had been done before—a badass teenage girl struggles to survive in a near-future dystopia as the fault lines in the country that never fully healed after the first American Civil War split open again—but in some ways, it's not about America at all, at least not in the way one would think. It's about Syria, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Palestine, and the Arab Spring, and climate change, and how when America has fought its wars in this century and the previous one, it's been on someone else's land, with someone else's blood shed.

Much of the novel's strength lies in its complicated, broken protagonist, Sarat Chestnut, who is born in Louisiana and grows up in a refugee camp after a suicide bomber kills her father. Living in the Free Southern State, she suffers under the constant threats of violence, poverty, and a handful of barely-sci-fi terrors, including hacked out-of-control drones that randomly rain death on civilians and the spectre of new manmade plagues and antibiotic-resistant diseases. There are no heroes in her world, and the narrow point-of-view, interspersed with documents detailing the broader historical context, means that we sympathize with her, recoil at the atrocities both visited upon her and later committed by her, even while we know how much of an unreliable narrator she cannot help but being. 

If I have one critique of the novel, it's that it's almost too obviously about the Middle East to be transposed to an American setting; Sarat and her family are Black and Latinx, but race is almost never mentioned, and religion only happens as window dressing, largely inconsequential to the politics. It's difficult to imagine any conflict in the US that doesn't largely revolve around race and religion, even if the geopolitical and environmental causes are what tip the balance (and the latter, I think is very realistically written). Likewise, El Akkad doesn't always get the cadences of Southern dialect; the dialogue works best when it becomes poetic rather than naturalistic.

But the worldbuilding critiques I have are overshadowed by just how tangible and believable the depictions of war, displacement, and trauma are. The brilliance is not in El Akkad's ability to imagine the future; it's in his ability to transpose what is the present for so many parts of the world into a geography familiar to Western readers. Bringing the chickens home to roost, as it were. 

Anyone else want to help me process?

Comments

[lapinlunaire]

This sounds incredibly depressing but also interesting so I'll probably read this. It sounds like there are no tl;dr descriptions of white women staring at flowers so that's good.

[sabotabby]

I'm trying to think if there are any white women in it. Some of the ethnicities aren't specified so maybe.

There are flowers and also a turtle.

[rdi]

I will once I’ve read it. Which is probably a few weeks off as there are cure two holds per copy at TPL.

[sabotabby]

If it helps, I just returned my "copy." :)

[rdi]

There were 5 holds on each digital copy, so I suspect I'll get the dead tree version first. Though probably worth putting both on hold.

[dewline]

El Akkad is definitely using the genre to process some of the things he's seen in his work as a journalist, to judge from what little I know of the book so far. It ought to be on my list of books to read ASAP, and yet, seeing the possibilities on the Canadian and American horizons that I do, I'm not sure that I can yet bring myself to do so.

I do believe that Can-Con, a local literary SF convention here in Ottawa, ought to be inviting El Akkad to attend. It won't be happening this year, I believe, but hope remains for the future.

[sabotabby]

It's definitely a book for reading when you're not in an awful frame of mind!

The book is only barely sci-fi (I found an interview with him where he said the near-future setting was to allow time for the oceans to rise and the fictional Middle Eastern and North African empire to emerge), but dystopia ought to count, even if it's largely based on current and real dystopias.

[minoanmiss]

Holy moly. That sounds wrenching and astonishing.

[sabotabby]

Pretty much yeah. I'm reading a literal rainbow chaser after it.

[kingtycoon]

As an Egyptian-American Malcontent living in the US at this moment in history...

This book made a lot of sense to me. I liked Sarat, she was very relatable. I liked her extended family, the narrator - the narrator especially. I think the contrivance of having the in-text author of the text be the one person who did have a hero who was revealed as a villain - I think that set a tone that I could understand. What happens in the old country is just stories that are told, about uncles and aunts. They're legends that enter the family when you hear about this or that person -kidnapped or massacred, the government stealing their business, Haile Salassie shaking their hands. I could write a book like that, about late 20th century Egypt that would probably fall as short as this guy's book about 21st century america. But that voice, the in-universe author - really held it together for me.

Being from the parts of Ohio that aren't columbus but that are ruled by that fucking place- the bits about it being an enemy were pretty accessible as well.

Anyhow, I feel like a big-cool-smartie when I've read something you've read.

[sabotabby]

I think the narrator was the only innocent character, which made the reveal all the more powerful. So much of what goes wrong in the world—and this isn't just an American thing—is an inability to admit that people we know and like can be capable of atrocities.

I'm glad it spoke to you too.