Jacqueline Rose

At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes. He is part of a cell, or ‘family’, of drifting boys taken up by an old woman who goes by the name of Walt Whitman – whose poetry they all cite and whose vision they share. ‘Nobody really dies. We go into the grass. We go into the trees.’ ‘Of your real body and any man’s or woman’s real body,’ Whitman wrote in ‘Starting from Paumanok’, ‘Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners, and/pass to fitting spheres.’ No doubt with his mind partly on 9/11, but with striking resonance for London this July, Cunningham brings suicide bombing, via Whitman, who haunts all three stories, into the visionary heart of America.

“On the one hand, suicide bombers are beyond understanding. On the other, the mind of Islam can be uncovered in its most intimate detail. Reuter opens his book by asking: what motivates a suicide bomber? Or rather: what ‘kind of people’ are they? He knows there is no answer. Suicide bombers are not a species. He also knows that the question is loaded. If suicide attacks are political, they call for a political response. If they stem from ‘perversity’, then the perpetrators can be treated as a ‘criminal sect’, to be isolated, arrested, suppressed. Behind the argument that suicide bombers should not, or cannot, be understood lies a subtext of dehumanisation.”

Ever since the fall of Baghdad, when looters went rampaging through the city, a centuries-old assumption about ‘the people’ has lurked, barely spoken, beneath the ghastly aftermath of the war. It is that the people, meaning ‘people en masse’, are incapable of restraining themselves. In the case of Iraq, two further assumptions are in play. First, people freed from the...