4 ideas
Joe, a private detective in Vientiane, Laos, is hired by a mysterious woman to find Mike Longshott, author of cheap pulp novels titled 'Osama bin Laden: Vigilante.' In Joe's world the bombings of our War on Terror exist only as lurid paperback fiction. His search through Paris, London and New York leads him to suspect that his own world is not the real one.
Joe's world is haunted by insubstantial, ghostlike figures who drift through its streets. They turn out to be traces of people from the world where the attacks actually happened. The victims of real violence appear as refugees who cannot fully exist in a world that has been imagined without them.
By casting bin Laden as the 'vigilante' hero of a pulp series, the book shows that genre conventions decide who reads as a hero. The narrative role is filled first, and the morality follows. The same acts of violence become thrilling entertainment once they sit inside a vigilante-adventure frame and are consumed at a safe distance.
The novel suggests that a world without terror can exist only as a refuge dreamed by those damaged by terror. Its opium haze and noir detachment work as a way of not remembering. In that reading, alternate history works less as speculation than as a form of grief: it imagines atrocity away while being unable to keep the atrocity from seeping back in.