Book Review The Mirage by Matt Ruff

 

 

 

The Mirage by Matt Ruff

Hardcover, 432 pages

Published February 2012 by Harper 

 

This is an interesting book and despite it being older than Lovecraft Country, I think most readers of this book found it after the amazing success of Ruff's novel that will be an HBO TV series launching this month. While Lovecraft Country might be a better novel, I think I enjoyed the experience of reading The Mirage even more. This book is an alternate history farce of the War on Terror and the awful foreign policy of the GW Bush years. I think some readers took the alternate history aspects a little too serious and were nitpicking aspects of the false history in a way that I think misses the point.
 
There are laugh-out-loud moments in the book but this is not a goofy satire. I like the balance that Ruff strikes in this book. It works in three modes. Bizarro satire/political commentary/uncomfortable reflection. I enjoyed all three modes as Ruff's experiment is simple. Flip the War on Terror.  Using the tools of science fiction and alternate history Ruff sets his book in the UAS, the United Arab States that was formed after World War 2 out of the ashes of colonialism.
 
This democracy in the UAS is made up of states who are similar to the middle east nations we know.  This country has governors like Baathist gangster Saddam Hussein and Senator Osama Bin Laden the son of the oil tycoon. Yeah, it is corrupt but when this timeline has a tattered plutocracy with Donald Trump can we really talk shit? The story takes place a decade after fundamentalist Christian highjackers send planes crashing into Baghdad's Tigris & Euphrates towers on November 9th,2001.

The main point of view character is Mustafa A Baghdadi a homeland security agent. While many of the well-known characters are sorta cartoonish satire versions of themselves I thought Mustafa was a good anchor for the story. Some of my favorite moments of the book were scenes when Mustafa's investigation brought him face to face with Saddam. I loved all these scenes that sees the Iraqi president as a brutal gangster and every bit as scary as he is in our world.

The narrative is a third-person broken up with fake wiki-pedia like entries from this world's equivalent to the online library of Alexandria. This is a helpful way for Ruff to do world-building without having the characters stop to explain the world. They are nicely laid out like the entry about Osama Bin Laden that comes pages after he is introduced. It gives us a few pages ponder his role on our own before filling in the blanks.
 
 It is not until the second half that Mustafa travels to the fractured North American countries that we find out that the elderly LBJ has been an autocratic dictator since the killing of Kennedy. That he signed a civil rights act that was pretty much not worth the paper it was signed on. That the U.S. is mostly the eastern states and the country has broken apart, Texas for example is an evangelical nation. There several short military conflicts in North America but not much is said about Mexico and Canada. Some of the obvious characters from those years Dick Chainey and Donald Rumsfeld plays roles in the story but there are a few cool surprises I don't see coming when I get to spoilers I will explain.
 
Comparisons to Man in The High Castle are both obvious and at the same missing the point of both books. In High Castle PKD was making a point that the narrative of history is not always to be trusted. there is no binary On the High Castle world Vs our own. The world  where the allies won in the novel inside of the novel of High Castle is not OUR world. The Mirage does set up this binary reality. There is a condition where people believe in our world, Mustafa finds a copy of the New York Times from September 12th that appears to be from our world.
 
The Mirage is not about the narrative of history it is about the War on Terror. The point is to show Americans how this "war" would look with the roles reversed. So the binary take on it is fine and makes sense. I personally would have preferred if this world just existed and there were no illusions to this other world.  

So far so good, I am not sure I agree at all times with Ruff's idea about how this world would shake out but it is his mirror on our society and he can highlight what he chooses. Even if I don't agree I think it is a valuable one to look at. The Mirage is more of a thought experiment than novel, it is clear that Ruff got the episodic nature of Lovecraft Country in mind here but this is more one story.

There are some moments in spoilers I was not a huge fan of that took the book down a bit for me including a problematic core to the final act but it is a big spoiler. I suggest if the topic interests you to read and come back but if you don't plan to after the spoiler warning I will talk about a twist I liked and one I didn't. In the meantime overall I think This book should be read.



SPOILERS:

OK , there is a major twist in the third act when a CIA contacts Mustafa during his mission in the D.C. green zone. This agent is Timothy McVeigh working for the Christian Intelligence Agency on behalf of the republic of texas under the direction of a profit David Koresh who is working with a man called the Quail Hunter -clearly Dick Chainey. I didn't see this coming but it makes sense if you are flipping the War on Terror. I liked this twist.
 
The Twist I didn't like and thought was a problem is that despite flipping the stories the big twist at the end is that the Truthers in this world who think Bin Laden engineered the 11/9 attacks were proven correct. Yep, the end has an evil Muslims behind the whole thing twist. I was bothered that he couldn't commit in the story to the idea of Christian terrorists. I really didn't like this ending but still liked the book overall.