3.5/5

The thing about terrorism is that it implicates us all. Your fear is the terrorist's weapon. It is an intrinsically memetic act; the terrorism of the 2010s doesn't require the organised bank robberies of the 1970s or even the underground networks of the 1990s and early 2000s - I read this as Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and ascribed it to an ISIS he'd never been a member of, like a young punk learning three chords, starting a band in his basement and somehow feeling a part of a movement, like Breivik before him, like Thomas Mair after him. You don't need organisation any more; you just need to throw the idea out there and let the right people make it theirs.

I digress right away. Osama isn't a great novel, Tidhar's overcooked prose bothers me more than it should and once he telegraphs the reveal you've still got a lot of ground to cover before you get there, but the idea at its core is both creepy, well done, and shot through with grief and anger. In a world where things went differently after WWII (exactly how different we don't know), a mysterious author starts publishing stories of the "vigilante" Osama bin Laden, a literary supervillain or superhero sold by a porn publisher and drawing legions of fans speculating on how things work in the Osamaverse, writing fanfiction called "Love in the desert", etc. A private investigator who's just a little too perfectly noir gets a visit from a mysterious woman asking him to track this writer down, while a mysterious government agency hunts him, terrified of what he might know. And another (maybe) mysterious woman shows up, disappears, mumbles about Nangilima (gold star for that reference, and for not explaining it).

Not sure what to make of the ending. It's either a copout or a gutpunch. Are there some things we don't want to know, some ideas we would rather simply forget? If so, who would blame us?