Osama Review . . . Donnie Darko meets L.A. Confidential

Osama, by Lavie Tidhar, is the story of Joe, a surname-less detective hired by a mysterious woman to track down Mike Longshott, author of Osama: Vigilante.  Written in a kind of post-noir Chandler-esque chic, it quickly becomes apparent that Joe inhabits a world markedly different from our own, where certain notable events either never happened, or went off on an oblique.  Tidhar's sense of place is impeccable, from the rain-swept streets of Vientiane to the wilds of London (on both sides of the surreal), to Kabul, where Tidhar evokes ten or more years of bombings compressed into a single instant--the absurdity of this moment,  and others, drawn out by snippets throughout the book.

Absurdity seems to be what this book is about; the absurdly disproportionate response by a superpower against terrorists a world away, the absurdity of a war against terror, the absurdity of men destroying themselves as a last gasp at communicating their own creed.  Mike Longshott is the absurd moniker taken by an Afghan man who glimpses the world beyond the veil, our own world, and attempts to comprehend it absurdity by capturing it in fiction.

On the surface, this is the story of one man's search for Mike Longshott, but classifying this subtle and haunting book as alternative history or science fiction is to miss the point.  Tidhar manages to blur the real and the unreal in such a way that truth and fiction combine in such a way that we're unable to distinguish one from the other.  And maybe that's the point.  Because by the end we're left with a man who's seen beyond the veil of the real into a world of gross surveillance, paranoia, and killing for the sake of terror.  Ultimately, Osama is a haunting soliloquy about this strange new world none of us could have foreseen and hardly any of us understands.

I would recommend this book to a friend.