MR OSAMA BIN LADEN, WE presume?

zanzibar by giles foden (faber and faber, (pounds) 14.99)

CLIMBING between the sheets with historical figures is becoming something of a habit for Giles Foden. In his award-winning debut, The Last King Of Scotland, we were shown Idi Amin through the eyes of his Scots-born physician, and a young Winston Churchill featured in Ladysmith, set amid the 1899 siege of the South African town by Boer forces.

For his third novel, Zanzibar, Foden has turned to the 1998 al- Qaeda terror campaign which resulted in the bombing of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and while his principal players are once again fictional, the character of one Osama bin Laden looms large. Foden refers to him as the Sheikh, and we follow his travels across Taliban-held Afghanistan as he orchestrates the plot that will bring a whole world of trouble down on his old adversary, CIA veteran Jack Queller, and the novel's star-cross'd young lovers - embassy worker Miranda Powers and her well-buffed beau, maritime conservationist Nick Karolides. (Well, perhaps star- cross'd isn't quite the right phrase; theirs is a relationship born of pragmatism and shrouded in doubt. A modern sort of affair, though not one that Foden handles with anything approaching conviction.) In concentrating on the embassy attacks, Zanzibar's serious intent is to examine Islam's position with regard to terrorism and to highlight America's role in arming, training and funding bin Laden in the first place. Queller, it transpires, was bin Laden's CIA contact during the long fight against the Russians, and it was bin Laden who shot off the American's arm. Powers and Karolides are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they serve as foils for an America with no real understanding of Islam or the reasons for its hatred of Uncle Sam.

What ruins the exercise is the clunkiness with which the characters move between such morally ambiguous introspection - Queller musing on his role in creating bin Laden, Zanzibari bomber Khaled asking if terror really is compatible with Islam - and the awful action sequences. William Boyd can take normal people, pitch them into abnormal situations and rack up the tension without losing credibility, but Foden hasn't yet found the knack. There's something of the caricature about all of his American characters, and a boat- chase climax (with shaven-headed baddie Zayn following on a jet-ski) is the absolute nadir.

In his introduction, Foden writes that the bulk of the novel was written before the September 11 terrorist attacks in America. In other words, this is a world where bin Laden is not yet a household name nor al-Qaeda the world's most gossiped-about terrorist organisation, all of which makes our author look enormously prescient. Lucky, almost.

But I'm not convinced Foden will view it quite like that. If September 11 had never happened, Zanzibar would have fitted neatly into his oeuvre: Africa-set, concerned with a half-forgotten moment in that continent's history and guest-starring a man drawn from the periphery of world events.

Instead he was left with a new novel that must already have felt like an anachronism when the sun rose on September 12. Imprisoned by its 1998 setting, even remedial action would have left it unable to engage with the one thing he knew we would be screaming to read about: the terrorist attacks on America.

So all we have here is a prequel to a book which hasn't been written yet. It makes Zanzibar a curiously unsatisfying read.

Copyright 2002
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