A vision of Al Qaeda as victor

IN skillful hands, so-called imaginative and science fiction can be more than entertaining. It can be a kind of cultural tripwire, alerting readers to the impulses, apprehensions and preoccupations stirring beyond the boundaries of “serious” or “responsible” writing.

During the McCarthy era and in the depths of the Cold War, for example, stories of biologically enforced conformity, telepathic mind control and post-nuclear war desolation were staples of the genre. Now that we’re out of the shadow of mutually assured destruction and living through the international Sunni Muslim insurgency’s global terrorist campaign, it probably was only a matter of time until somebody conducted a literary thought experiment on what might happen if Al Qaeda wins.

At the center of Robert Ferrigno’s version of that exercise, “Prayers for the Assassin,” is a clever little conceit. In his vision of the future, Osama bin Laden and his buddies haven’t so much won as the United States -- demoralized and intimidated -- has surrendered.

The setting is 35 years in the future: Millions of Americans already have converted to Islam when the simultaneous explosions of nuclear suitcase bombs destroy New York and Washington, and a dirty bomb renders Mecca a radioactive ruin. When the terrorists responsible are apprehended, they turn out to be from a renegade Mossad unit. Israel is destroyed, and the survivors are given refuge in Russia. A bloody civil war breaks out in the United States -- the North and West become an Islamic Republic, while fundamentalist Christians establish their own nation in the old Confederacy. (Nevada is a “free state” devoted to vice and commerce, so no change there.)

As the narrative picks up, things are hardly paradisiacal among the American Muslims, who remain locked in a low-level conflict with their Christian antagonists. (They rather unimaginatively refer to each other as “towel heads” and “peckerwoods.”) Meanwhile, the highly militarized Islamic Republic is itself increasingly divided between fundamentalists -- whose “black robe” enforcers are modeled on contemporary Saudi religious police -- and “moderns,” devout Muslims who favor openness, increased freedom and denim (along with tolerance for the country’s Catholic minority and Jews).

The fundamentalists seem to be winning, and the country is sinking into a kind of backward, Third World torpor. The Super Bowl between the Warlords and Bedouins is played in Khomeini Stadium, and LAX has become Bin Laden International. San Francisco is one of the fundamentalist strongholds, where homosexuals are executed daily and their heads placed along the bridges. You get the picture.

Into this, Ferrigno injects his two protagonists -- they are, of course, also lovers -- a beautiful and fearless young cultural historian, Sarah Dougan, and Rakkim Epps, a retired Islamic soldier who runs a bar and smuggles persecuted Jews and homosexuals. Rakkim isn’t just some guy hanging around the VFW hall; he’s a “Fedayeen shadow warrior,” able to kill roomfuls of armed men. (It’ll make a great movie scene.) Sarah has come into possession of evidence that the Islamic Republic’s origins may not be what they seem to be.

As she and the ubermensch Rakkim struggle to solve the mystery and put their findings before the world, they are pursued by the book’s best-drawn character, a state assassin, and his boss, a malevolent Muslim mastermind apparently modeled on Hassan i Sabbah, the so-called Old Man of the Mountain, whose heretical Ismaili sect gave the West the word “assassin.” (William S. Burroughs once wrote that Sabbah was “the only spiritual leader who [had] anything significant to say in the space age.”) Both Sarah and the invincible Rakkim, by the way, just happen to be the wards of the Islamic Republic’s chief of state security, which places them at the very center of power.

Here we enter the realm of the garden-variety thriller in which authors are fearless of coincidence and impervious to burdensome literary conventions like character development. Unlike some of his better-selling brethren, however, Ferrigno does manage to keep his pronouns’ antecedents fairly clear. Aside from the characters’ occasional lapses into monologues meant to display the author’s research, the dialogue has the snappy gloss of cinematic patter.

It’s probably unfair to freight a thriller with the weight of more significance than the generic armature will bear. Still, some of our better writers have attached memorable writing and thinking to this particular narrative framework. Though Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” wasn’t up to his best work of the previous decade, its villains -- Sen. Buzz Windrip (modeled on Huey Long) and his co-conspirator, Bishop Peter Paul Prang (a gloss on the notorious radio priest and Jew baiter, Charles Coughlin) -- remain chillingly recognizable American types. The book was a bestseller in its day, and, though the Hays office blocked production of a film version, a successful stage adaptation played across the country under the auspices of the New Deal’s Federal Theater Project.

Margaret Atwood captured the dreary essence of fundamentalism in her 1986 book, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and, more recently, Philip Roth had a well-deserved success with “The Plot Against America.”

Ferrigno has a serious subtext in mind, as he explained in an online author’s statement for Amazon.com’s British site. There he wrote that “I make it clear that the USA was never defeated militarily, but bled white by a conflict without end, weakened internally by dissent, economic malaise and a consumer culture hostile to people’s thirst for meaning.... The nations of the West are innovative and sectarian, valuing personal freedom and creativity, but those attributes also leave us shortsighted and vulnerable.... In a generation-long war, technology will not matter as much as the absolute belief in the rightness of one’s cause and the willingness to die for those beliefs.... I sometimes think that people who can’t imagine Americans’ converting to Islam are deaf to the serenity and comfort of a deep religious faith.”

There’s a lot of this stuff at the edges of our culture these days. At the low end, it’s obviously going to express itself in thrillers of this sort. At the high end, it tends to focus on the West’s purported loss of confidence in its Judeo-Christian identity and the political values to which it gave rise. What tends to be overlooked in all this Spenglerian apprehension is that the one thing truly free societies never can be free of is doubt.

In 1930, when he traveled to Stockholm to accept the first Nobel Prize for literature awarded to an American, Lewis told the Swedish Academy: “It is my fate ... to swing constantly from optimism to pessimism and back, but so is it the fate of anyone who writes or speaks of anything in America -- the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring of any land in the world today.”

And so it remains, confounding lesser minds and talents.