Michael Scharf

Writing Guantánamo
June 19, 2007

When open political discourse is suppressed or oversaturated, it finds its outlet in literature.

I haven't yet seen an account of the remarkable recent spate of near-future thrillers -- books that imagine the political climate of, say, 2012, and spin out worst-case scenarios therein. The spate arguably began in 2005, with Richard A. Clarke's The Scorpion's Gate, and continues through William Gibson's Spook Country, due in August.

In the meantime, two forthcoming novels imagine present-day U.S. practices.

The first, by veteran German critic and novelist Dorothea Dieckmann, is titled Guantanamo, and is due from Soft Skull in August. It imagines the travails of Rashid Bakhrani, a fictional 20-year-old German of Indian Muslim descent who is arrested in Pakistan, and flown to the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he is held in a cage, and subject to torture.

PW's review of the novel runs on Monday.  It compares the book to Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The second novel is Charles Holdefer's The Contractor, due in November from Permanent Press.  The book, according to the press material, follows fictional first Gulf War vet George Young as he works post-9/11 as an interrogator at an overseas holding facility called Omega, and where a suspect dies in his care.

Three makes a trend, but the appearance of these two novels so close together doesn't seem accidental, and seems particularly timely given the current skepticism about torture's efficacy in interrogation. The Permanent Press's Martin Shepard confirms that the press bought The Contractor just three months ago and had planned to do it in 2008, but that they are crashing it.  Shepard calls it "the most important book we've done in our 30 years of publishing."

Posted by Michael Scharf on June 19, 2007 | Comments (0)