Nilanjana S Roy: 9/11 fiction, five years later

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Five years after the September 11 attacks on the US, we can ask whether there is such a thing as the definitive 9/11 novel.

The first reactions to the attack came in the form of torrents of poetry, some hopelessly maudlin, a few accomplished, but all written with sincerity. For writers, 9/11 presented the classic dilemma""how could you write about it, how could you not write about it? From the moment those first, unbelievable images appeared on our television screens it was clear that this tragedy would demand a response.

Other human tragedies had been raging during the same period, but many writers accepted without question that 9/11 was different. Few authors would tell you that they agonised over the ethics and means of writing the quintessential Darfur novel, the tsunami short story, the cyclone trilogy. September 11 has been set apart in the imagination, especially the Western literary imagination, as a tragedy that cannot be ignored.

Two early attempts to address the fallout of September 11, 2001 came from science fiction stalwarts. Iain Banks used the attacks as the backdrop to Dead Air, which starred an abrasive radio "shock-jock" who's having an affair with a ganglord's wife. Banks is a coldly intelligent satirist, but 9/11 effectively muffled him; it might be possible in the next decade to write about the fall of the Twin Towers as black farce, but it wasn't in 2002 or even 2004.

William Gibson's 2003 Pattern Recognition is set in a post 9/11 New York. It plays with the idea that humans need to make sense of randomness, to build meaningful connections out of apparently disconnected events""all the more so in the aftermath of a tragedy. And Gibson understood how surreal watching the destruction of the Towers is: "It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture.".

Wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer made an ambitious attempt to write the literary 9/11 novel in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where blank pages, pages with scribbles and scrawls, pages with blurred photographs and a whole slew of similar devices attempted to recreate the chaos that we all inhabited post-9/11. Foer's novel has its fans, but for many, it felt too cerebral, too distanced and often, in its experimentation, annoyingly self-conscious.

Ian McEwan's Saturday, Philip Roth's Everyman and most recently, Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children approached 9/11 obliquely. Saturday was set in Britain with the politics of the post 9/11 world infiltrating the pleasant upper-middle-class world of its protagonists. Roth's Everyman is set in the pre-9/11 world, with the bombings emerging only in the final paragraph""but it is a stunning paragraph, and it makes you see how abruptly normal human lives can change.

Perhaps the most successful is Messud's The Emperor's Children, where the events of that September day infiltrated her book as she was writing it. The actual attacks only occur roughly three-fourths into the novel, a clever bit of structuring that makes the impact of September 11 on the lives of her New Yorkers far more powerful.

The fictional view of September 11 is skewed, with the perspective being predominantly Western. A rare exception is Baghdad Burning, the book version of the blog written by Iraqi blogger Riverbend. She writes: "We have 9/11s on a monthly basis. Each and every Iraqi person who dies with a bullet, a missile, a grenade, under torture, accidentally""they all have families and friends and people who care. The number of Iraqis dead since March 2003 is by now at least eight times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center. They had their last words, and their last thoughts as their worlds came down around them, too."

Perhaps some of these novels will last into the next century, or perhaps it will be the poems that have the last word, after all. Like this one by Jeet Thayil, who was living in New York at the time. It's called "September 10, 2001".

How much harder it is to speak when I have spent the whole day silent.
I would like to stop someone, leave my room in the evening and stop someone, a man without hope,
or a woman bent double, as if she were
searching the sidewalk for gems caught in the cracks, and I would tell her
that each of us walks with the same impossible burden, knowing that only the stars will last""
she will listen to me, hear what I say and go on her way, bent over as before,
never looking up at the approaching sky.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com