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Loading... The Infernal: A Novelby Mark Doten
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"In the early years of the Iraq war, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the US government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama Bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: this is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be" -- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Doten's funhouse mirror reimagining of post-Iraq-War-era personalities big and small (L. Paul Bremer, Condoleeza Rice, Jeff Gannon, et al.) is both bemusing and amusing, and I have the impression there's more than meets the eye to the recurring motifs (sycamore trees, the murder or suicide of young boys, birds) within their individually narrated chapters that might become clearer upon rereading.
I think this is probably the key that would turn The Infernal from a good read into a great one for me; however, I failed to catch just enough of these elements on the first go-through that I'm not motivated to dive right back in for another.