Book Review: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Osama by Lavie Tidhar
PS Books, pp 276
ISBN 978 1 84863 192 2

Mike Longshott writes the popular Osama bin Laden: Vigilante series – cheap pulp fiction with testosterone-charged titles like Assignment: Africa and The Sinai Bombings. The books do very well, and he is a very famous man. Well, he would be a famous man, if anyone actually knew who he was…

Enter Joe. Probably the only English-speaking private eye in Laos, his income – unsurprisingly – is minimal. His neighbors – a curmudgeonly bookseller and his partner, of indeterminate gender – aside, companionship is non-existent. So when a mysterious woman wafts into his office and asks him to track down the elusive Mike Longshott, Joe jumps at the commission. It always helps to have a client willing to cover all expenses, after all…

But there’s more to Mike Longshott than meets the eye. His books display a startling depth of detail concerning Mr bin Laden’s modus operandi, for one thing. And when Joe finds himself being shot at and knocked about by heavies keen to interpose themselves between Joe and his task, it might just be worth having second thoughts. But as he travels from Laos to Paris, London to New York in pursuit of his quarry, Joe is sucked into an increasingly inexplicable and bewildering vortex of confusing detail, with the only certainty the enigmatic Longshott and his Osama, Vigilante books.  And suddenly, Joe can’t be sure whether he is the pursuer or the prey, or what exactly his mission is all about…

Osama, the latest from the pen of prolific fantasy novelist Lavie Tidhar, is an interestingly subversive take on the most significant events of the last decade. Tidhar, apparently, was in Dar-es-Salaam during the 1998 embassy bombings, and had stayed at the same hotel as the al-Qaeda operatives in the concurrent Nairobi attack; he later “narrowly avoided” the 2004 Sinai attacks, and 2005 London bombings. It is fair to suppose that this unfortunate pedigree gives him some insight into the impact of mass terror attacks. But, as it happens, it isn’t this proximity that gives Osama its appeal; rather it’s the stylistic sensibilities that catch the eye.

Joe, our private eye, chain smokes, favors his whiskey with a single ice cube, and keeps getting hit over the head and waking up in strange surroundings. As you might guess, Osama borrows liberally from the noir sub-genre of detective fiction. At first, the cliches seem sprinkled a little over-liberally; but after a while, it becomes impossible to escape the amusing concept of reading a book written in pulp fiction style, about a pulp fiction hero searching for the author of pulp fiction novels. Got that? It is a bit of a mouthful.

Strange inconsistencies keep popping up. Why, for instance, does Joe travel from France to England by ferry, when presumably there is the Eurostar train which is far quicker and much more convenient? How is it that he has such detailed knowledge about opium use – and abuse? Who are the heavies who keep stomping on him, and why do they seem so retro? Who is Mike Longshott? Come to think of it, who is Joe, anyway? And where does Osama bin Laden fit in this, other than as a character in a series of books that may – or may not – be prescient fiction?

Tidhar keeps his cards close to his chest, pulling the reader along without giving much away until absolutely necessary. The post-modern conceit, amusing at first, wears a little thin after a while, but never becomes threadbare. To be fair, the denouement, when it arrives, is both unexpected and unpredicted. Osama is an entertaining romp about speculative possibilities; it never pretends to say anything too profound, and this is no bad thing.