Why Terroists Do It: Neil Bissoondath's Unyielding Clamour of the Night

Nobody so far has claimed responsibility for the bloody bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday, but the supposition that it was done by a terrorist of one sort or another seems inescapeable.   Whoever did it appears to have gotten away without injury--certainly none of the dead was a suicide bomber--but events like this always raise the question of how and why someone reaches a point where he or she would kill  innocents for a cause.

Novels can offer insights here, as they can in so many other places.  One in particular, The Unyielding Clamour of the Night by Neil Bissoondath, seems to me to make a kind of sense. (The French translation by the dynamic duo of Laurie St-Martin and Paul Gagné is La Clameur des ténèbres.)

The story concerns a young man from a "good" family who goes off to teach school in a village in the south of his civil war-torn country. As an evocation of a tropical landscape and an exploration of the complicated circumstances that lead to horrendous inter-ethnic conflict, it has no parallel. The hero, Arun, is an extremely understandable and attractive young man, and his slow involvement in local causes is convincing—and frightening. While Bissoondath takes pains to say that his story takes place in an imagined place, the similarities with Sri Lanka are striking.

This is not a book by someone whose own country has suffered civil war.  For that read Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje,  who tells us a story set during Sri Lanka's 25 year war between Tamils and Sinhalese in intimate, poetic detail. 

Bissoondath, from Trinidad and transplanted successfully to Quebec, says he didn't do any research on that conflict, because he didn't want to be influenced by what "really" had happened in Sri Lanka.  Indeed, he has told interviewers that the  spark for the book  was ignited half a world away at a dinner when someone in his French-Canadian wife's family told a story of an old wood prothesis that had the man had in his garage that had belong to his great grandmother.   

From there Bissoondath says he began thinking about a  young man with a withered leg., a handicap that made him an outsider. The character  developed slowly, as did Bissoondath's take on the physical and political setting.   And when he started writing, it wasn't in a warm climate but in the middle of winter in Quebec City.  He felt compelled to go down to one of the parks along the St. Lawerence, clear the snow from a picnic table, and transport himself and Arum to a tropical place.  The first 100 pages of the book were written there. which, he says, include the novel's essence.

Yet I came away with what seemed to me to be a much better idea of why bombers do what they do than I had from reading thousands and thousands of words of news reports. 

For more novels about terrorism, here's a link to a New York Times roundup by Benjamin Kunckel.  I'd add  The Yacoubian Building by Alaa  al Aswany.  It has a character who becomes an Islamic extremists after becoming disillusioned by the disconnect in the 1970s between Egyptian rhetoric of democracy and opportunity and the harsh reality of a society where there was little of either.  And then there's Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. 

But maybe the Boston explosions are the work of someone entirely different, as some obsevers have speculated. If the event turns out to be the work of someone like the UnaBomber, a very different fictional current must be explored...