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bookish_arcadia 's review for:
American War
by Omar El Akkad
American War is a timely book as the divisions in US society seem to grow day by day with battle-lines often drawn in the same old places. There's an appetite for visions of how our apparent descent into conflict and intolerance might end and they are far from cheerful. American War envisions a USA once more torn apart, North against South with the South breaking away from the Union creating a new generation of sectarianism and bloodshed. With Nazi flags marching openly in the streets who's to say this is not the future, less a dystopia than a terrifying possibility. Unfortunately it is the details that are less convincing. The failure to address race or religion in any meaningful way is difficult to understand. Considering how central these themes continue to be in contemporary US events this is a glaring omission that doesn't sit well, it seems vastly unlikely that a second civil war would be ignited by environmental issues (and the idea of the US being a world-leader in finally abandoning fossil fuels is frankly laughable) without the churning morass of these issues being incorporated into the narrative. Considering that el Akkad makes the choice to frame his main character as part-Latino and part-African-American and highlights the poverty and uncertainty of their position it leaves a yawning hole that suggests that it was too difficult to address but is also impossible to ignore.
That being said while the cause of the new conflict may be on shaky ground and it may turn a blind eye to the glaringly obvious the rapid, almost-inevitable progression and escalation of the Second Civil War el Akkad describes is chillingly plausible. The clear-eyed, sensitive dissection of how how pain, loss and hated can forge anyone into a devastating weapon is both insightful and pertinent and it would have been even more powerful if it had been attached to a character one could connect with. Unfortunately, after the first few pages Sarat becomes elusive and difficult to reach. The barriers she builds are understandable within the story but they shouldn't exist between the character and the reader, at least not permanently.
For the most part the complex structure is more of a stumbling block than an asset. The jumps in time confuse the story and often excise developments that it would have been better to experience at first-hand. The conceit of incorporating other excerpts of other sources to add context and detail is a popular one. Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace) and Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) both used real and fictional sources in their historical fiction with enormous effect and success in their historical fiction. When it works it lends great texture and depth to a story, its reality is more tangible but it works better when there is reality at the base already. Sadly, in this case, it just tangles and slows the plot, creating an illusion of complexity when really one of the main problems is that the premise of American War is not complex enough, or at least it doesn't evidence the complexity of its world effectively. For example, the political makeup of this late twenty-first-century world is quite different to our own but rather than an Orwellian world such as 1984 in which the composition of the nations and their relations was (and is) all too credible I found myself wondering several times just how these new nations and world-powers emerged. These muddy waters were frustrating hinting at such vast changes that are actually so integral to the plot without any convincing explanation severely weakens the structure of the story.
There is some lovely writing and the ideas are both compelling and worrying but ultimately the internal inconsistencies of the story and the world-building turn something that could have been groundbreaking into something quite frustrating.
That being said while the cause of the new conflict may be on shaky ground and it may turn a blind eye to the glaringly obvious the rapid, almost-inevitable progression and escalation of the Second Civil War el Akkad describes is chillingly plausible. The clear-eyed, sensitive dissection of how how pain, loss and hated can forge anyone into a devastating weapon is both insightful and pertinent and it would have been even more powerful if it had been attached to a character one could connect with. Unfortunately, after the first few pages Sarat becomes elusive and difficult to reach. The barriers she builds are understandable within the story but they shouldn't exist between the character and the reader, at least not permanently.
For the most part the complex structure is more of a stumbling block than an asset. The jumps in time confuse the story and often excise developments that it would have been better to experience at first-hand. The conceit of incorporating other excerpts of other sources to add context and detail is a popular one. Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace) and Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) both used real and fictional sources in their historical fiction with enormous effect and success in their historical fiction. When it works it lends great texture and depth to a story, its reality is more tangible but it works better when there is reality at the base already. Sadly, in this case, it just tangles and slows the plot, creating an illusion of complexity when really one of the main problems is that the premise of American War is not complex enough, or at least it doesn't evidence the complexity of its world effectively. For example, the political makeup of this late twenty-first-century world is quite different to our own but rather than an Orwellian world such as 1984 in which the composition of the nations and their relations was (and is) all too credible I found myself wondering several times just how these new nations and world-powers emerged. These muddy waters were frustrating hinting at such vast changes that are actually so integral to the plot without any convincing explanation severely weakens the structure of the story.
There is some lovely writing and the ideas are both compelling and worrying but ultimately the internal inconsistencies of the story and the world-building turn something that could have been groundbreaking into something quite frustrating.