How to take on the jihadists without risking a fatwa

 
Playing it safe: Timothy Mo keeps well clear of criticising Islam
Nirpal Dhaliwal12 April 2012

Pure
by Timothy Mo
(Turnaround Books, £16.99)

When western hand-wringers blame Islamic terrorism on Anglo-American imperialism, they conveniently forget all the other conflicts raging around the world in which Islam is a central component. Russia, China and India haven’t a single soldier in the Middle East, yet have fought Muslim insurgencies of their own. And jihad is spreading across South-East Asia, with conflagrations in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. The last is the setting for Pure, the first novel by the thrice Booker-shortlisted Timothy Mo since his 2000 work, Renegade or Halo2, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

As with Chris Morris’s film, Four Lions, the author’s perfectly reasonable terror of a fatwa-decreed death sentence keeps him well clear of any direct criticism of the religion itself. Instead, Islamic fundamentalism becomes a mere foil for silliness and lazy humour rather than a subject of genuine scrutiny. While Morris limited himself to bumbling slapstick clownery, Mo has created an excruciatingly tedious lady-boy, called Snooky, who, after a life of relentless drug-taking and casual buggery, is implausibly recruited by the police to spy on a jihadi cell. All the while, he keeps up an incessant torrent of camp asides that makes an entire season of The Graham Norton Show seem like an episode of Top Gear. Yes, it’s that bad.

This trite humour and Mo’s refusal to excavate the real issues make this a very boring read. Rather than insight, his characters offer only glib and often stupid readings of history. For instance: “the FO had dreadful relations with the Indians and good ones with the Pakistanis. The former had a chip on its shoulder about the Empire which the other lacked”. The substance of the novel consists of either such condescending off-hand comments or much windier, though equally useless, pronouncements. One expert is quoted saying: “The Muslim world has been in one of the states of suspended animation for centuries. Now it’s showing the first signs of stirring from its torpor. They’ll turn our world upside down, wait and see. Then it’ll all go back to sleep again for half a millennium.” That is about as good as the historical analysis gets.

A truly great writer, such as Naipaul, would forensically examine the agonising tension between traditional societies and the obliterating force of modernity that annihilates millennia of culture, loyalties and mores in a single generation — a truly horrifying prospect for many in the non-western world. But Mo, through his characters, offers only well-worn platitudes or woefully ill-considered tosh. It is unbelievable that a character in a serious novel can make the following assertion and go unchallenged: “Have you noticed that democracies throw up mediocre leaders as the rule rather than than the exception? Yet dictators are never mediocre people; they can’t be, or they wouldn’t have got where they are.” Finally, wretches like Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein can rest, knowing that someone has at last recognised their genius.

Guiding us through all this codswallop is the limp-wristed Snooky and her constant riffing, like a Tarantino character, on whatever takes her fancy — films, sex, make-up and popular culture — while the real story of why jihadism has now girdled the earth, from London to Mumbai to New York, goes entirely untold. The mere presence of Islam in the novel will encourage some to regard the work as brave, when it’s nothing of the sort. Having chosen such an important topic, Mo has flagrantly chickened out in his effort to explore it.

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