Lionel Shriver reckons it's time to reclaim our sense of humour about terrorism. "Isn't comedy a nefariously devastating weapon?" says the novelist and writer. "The one thing a jihadist, for example, can't stand is to be laughed at. I've long thought the 'Underpants Bomber' got his just desserts, if only by being tagged with that humiliating and intrinsically comic handle."
Shriver's eleventh novel, The New Republic, takes a comic look at the public and media obsession with terrorism and the way journalists and terrorists feed off each other. She wrote it in 1998, but at the time her "poisonous" sales record, combined with the fact that Americans "largely dismissed terrorism as Foreigners' Boring Problem'" meant she could not find a publisher. That changed with the events of 9/11 and the runaway success of We Need to Talk About Kevin in 2003, but terrorism then became such a sensitive subject that the book was kept "on ice" until this year.
It's the story of wannabe foreign correspondent Edgar Kellogg, who is assigned to the small and desolate Portuguese province of Barba, home to a separatist terrorist movement known as the SOB, to replace a journalist who is mysteriously missing. But the terrorist acts claimed by the SOB suddenly dry up and Edgar is left scrounging for stories among a bunch of jaded and self-important foreign correspondents.
Q: The book examines how the SOB works as a terrorist organisation. How did you develop your ideas around this?
A: The novel began with the premise: postulating how one might systematically take public responsibility for unclaimed terrorist incidents (especially in the 80s and 90s, orphaned atrocities were perplexingly commonplace) in the name of a fictional organization, and thereby amass real political clout. And I fancied the Pygmalion arc whereby a made-up guerilla group might eventually manifest the real thing. The purpose of telling the story of this seemingly harmless prank that goes wrong was to illustrate what I learned in Northern Ireland and is too rarely observed about terrorism: it works. It works fiendishly well. The people who were bombing the bejesus out of Northern Ireland for 30 years are now running the place. And these days Islamic terrorism is equally effective-especially at making the culprits, their motives, their grievances, their ostensible political purposes, the centre of attention, which is in my view not the secondary but the primary objective of virtually all terrorism-including school shootings and the likes of that lunatic Breivik in Norway.
