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Osama

Lavie Tidhar

Start date: November 12, 2012

Finish date: December 4, 2012

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May 14, 2014 Benjamin added it · review of another edition

Shelves: bedside-reading

Every review of Tidhar's Osama is required to mention how Tidhar has a global (i.e., non-American) background--Israeli-born, lived in South Africa and Southeast Asia, lives in England; or how this novel grew out of Tidhar's close calls with terrorism. So there, I've fulfilled the requirement. (Why does no one mention that Lavie used to maintain the World SF Blog and edited the Apex Books of World SF?)

We could also start with Tidhar's apparent enjoyment of genre play: taking some clear genre and Every review of Tidhar's Osama is required to mention how Tidhar has a global (i.e., non-American) background--Israeli-born, lived in South Africa and Southeast Asia, lives in England; or how this novel grew out of Tidhar's close calls with terrorism. So there, I've fulfilled the requirement. (Why does no one mention that Lavie used to maintain the World SF Blog and edited the Apex Books of World SF?)

We could also start with Tidhar's apparent enjoyment of genre play: taking some clear genre and playing with the elements. This is a man, after all, who wrote a story where Jekyll/Hyde boards the Titanic (ah, that literary/historical mashup), turns out to have been Jack the Ripper (ah, the Ripper conspiracy), and ends with the ship running into trouble... when Godzilla rises from the seas. (The story is "Titanic!" and though I've spoiled the very short story's plot for you, it's still such a hilarious remix--with a point!--that it's worth checking out.)

Tidhar's Osama could be seen as the collision of these two spheres: it's an alternate history mixed with a noir story mixed with a sort of metaphysical fantasy (genre play, whee!) that covers a noir detective's global search for a writer in a world without global terrorism (global-perspective, terrorism, whee!). That writer writes pulp novels about the adventures of Osama Bin Laden. (Oh, I forgot: Tidhar's blog and Twitter also occasionally note his fondness for old pulp novel novels/covers, including the Nazisploitation "stalag fiction" that was popular in Israel in the 1950s. So Osama is at the center of that Venn diagram.)

The story is sort of the zero-degree of noir stories: mysterious woman with a quest, shadowy opponents who try to scare him off, a steady stream of clues given or found by following morally ambiguous characters. (Including, for all intents and purposes, Rick from Casablanca.) The detective Joe is a cypher, with no particular background or life (or dreams), almost approaching parody of the noir detective; while the other characters are also mostly thin, on purpose. Really, the only characters who seemed rounded to me were the slightly foolish married couple at the Osama Bin Laden convention. Perhaps Tidhar and I have met those same people at various sf cons...

And depending on your interests, that thinness of character is an example of what might be the sticking point of this novel: for all that there's an alternate history background (de Saint-Exupery was the president of France instead of De Gaulle) and a noiry plot (one man trying to track down another man for a woman), Tidhar's interest doesn't seem to be to fulfill the traditional pleasures of these genres. I wouldn't even say that Tidhar's novel fulfills the Dickian promise of a man lost between dimensions. (For one thing, Tidhar's book is a lot slower and more tone-oriented than Dick's books.) It's slow, and melancholy, and while there's some hard-hitting real-world moments about terrorism (what they do to us) and war (what we do legally to them), most of the book seems to focus on that unfolding melancholy of what's lost no matter which turn history takes. Not exactly a fun book, but an interesting one. ...more

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Oct 03, 2012 Kaila rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: missed-the-mark, science-fiction, io9-book-club, alternate-history, award-winner, 2013, christianity-wins-again, book-lovers-never-go-to-bed-alone

The back of this book sounds SO COOL. It's rather misleading. Even the title is misleading. This book isn't really about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of about terrorism, but only peripherally. Mostly it's about describing what the narrator is seeing ad nauseum. For example, this is from the first chapter:

Joe put down the book on the low bamboo table and sighed. The small china cup before him contained strong Lao mountain coffee, sweet with the two sugars he likes to use, which was overdoing it, he

...more

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