The most pressing question facing Abdellah Taia's second novel, Infidels, is whether the world is ready �" that is, adult enough �" for it. I don't know that it is. The book, a 2012 work of fiction (this cannot be said too loudly), has just appeared in English, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories Press). It is a quantum artistic leap forward by the out Moroccan novelist, whose Salvation Army of 2006 announced the arrival, not the promise, of a singular new talent.
For such a short book, Infidels lays a long fuse to its climax, or the high point of its episodic plot, anyway. And while the storyline throws sparks all along the way, you don't see the actual jihadist bomb coming until a few pages before it is in the hands, and strapped to the body, of the novel's highly sympathetic protagonist, Jallal. By the time the bomb explodes �" in the occasionally childlike language of this book, it goes BOOOOOM �" in a deserted Casablanca movie theater, you're in the same stomach-in-the-throat fear and ambivalence as Jallal, who has been seduced into this act of terror by the promise, or illusion, of lasting male love.
Less reluctant than Jallal, author Taia is not at all chary of using the words Islamist terrorists to identify the two men who set that bomb off, in the end taking out only themselves. But he has written a novel in which the very names of the principal characters are as overlapping, fluid and ultimately confounding as the forces that influence their lives and drive their perplexing actions.
Despite the simple sentences in which it is told, many of which also are paragraphs, Infidels is the most adult of novels. It is not a thinly veiled suicide bomber video, nor is it an Internet rant about the making of one. Least of all is it an apologia for violent jihad. It will not make sense of Orlando, but it will put human flesh on the bones of the toxic mix of homophobia, Islamophobia and the particularly explosive cocktail of homophobia in the Islamic cultures in which it is also a known practice. Infidels is a story told with the complexity that, finally, only fiction affords.
It depicts, in all its mystifications, the faux consolations militarized Islam �" precisely like Ted Cruz's kill-the-fags Christianity �" offers the aggrieved and afflicted. Throughout the novel, Jallal could not be clearer about what a lax, lapsed, in-name-only Muslim he is. But the promise of an enduring love that lures him one more time �" as he teaches a stranger the 99 names of Allah in Arabic �" is all about warm comfort the real world offers only in a cold substitute. (Later, the men's teeth will actually chatter.)
When we meet Jallal, he is literally spitting rage and scorn, at that moment aimed at his prostitute mother. Later, using words, he will tell her, "Maman, one day you'll be stoned to death by the very same people who creep to the house each night to ask for your forgiveness and a bit of pleasure." However diminutive physically, Slima towers over her son and this book. Her prolonged, increasingly violent rape at the hands of authorities who want her to confess information they already have (and she does not), is almost as harrowing for the reader �" except, crucially, that the reader goes on while Slima literally slouches toward Mecca.
The reader also knows everything essential about the soldier in question, including that he was, while a client of Slima's, a companion of the 10-year-old Jallal. A sexual force, he's also the only tender, caring presence in the life of the vulnerable boy, who also sees to the sexual needs of his mother's other, usually rough, overflow.
Because of the soldier's largesse, Slima and Jallal have a battered color TV, a commodity so precious it is their biggest secret from the community (which knows all about Slima's work). On it they watch faded tapes, in English and also in a French dub, of River of No Return, a Western featuring Marilyn Monroe. In the heady mix of cultural perfumes that suffuses this novel, MM becomes a veritable character, as does the Moroccan Arab singer Samira Said, one of whose torch songs (you can hear it on YouTube) is at the core of the novel's first half. It foreshadows the book's haunting final pages: the "Trouble of the World" as sung by Mahalia Jackson. "I soon will be done/With the trouble of the world/I'm going home to be with God."
Those three iconic women stand in for the defiant ur-feminine that knows the ways of dominating men all-too-well. When the two jihadists "wake," in Heaven, it is to an understanding if impatient God. Wait till you meet Her.