Emily Dickinson wrote “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Matt Ruff tells the truth inverted. In The Mirage we get to see 9/11 from the rabbit hole. It becomes 11/9 and the target was the Twin Towers in Baghdad in the United Arab States. The United States is, in version, a fractured collection of countries ruled by various religious ideologues. I have to say, I’ve been despairing of good satire for a long time. Matt Ruff’s book makes up for a lot. This book was so good that I read it in an entire afternoon.
After a short prologue, we are introduced to our trio of protagonists, all agents of Homeland Security. They’re chasing down American suicide bombers in Baghdad when they get the news of planes crashing into their Twin Towers. If Ruff had stopped here, I might still have been satisfied with the story anyway. But he goes further. Various main and supporting characters start getting flashes, in dreams or during spells of vertigo, of another reality, where the plane attacks took place in New York, where Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iraq, where David Koresh died in Waco, where Osama bin Ladin was the head of al Qaeda. Our central lead, Mustafa al Baghdadi, starts to suspect that there’s something wrong with his reality.
This book is packed with historical and cultural references. Ruff even brings in an alternate version of LOLcats. (And thereby brings in a Swiftian touch of humor to his cultural critique.) In between the chapters, we get bits of history from an alternate Wikipedia, which helps to fill in the blanks. I had to keep running to the real Wikipedia to brush up on the real history.
The thing about good satire is that it tells you a truth. It might make you laugh along the way (a great satire will, anyway). But it gets you to look at a situation in a different way. It strips away baggage and blinkers alike and helps you to see what the real problem is. In this case, it’s that you can’t just bomb people back to the stone age, set up a government, and walk away–especially not when it comes to the Middle East. It’s just playing into a long tradition of an eye for an eye until everyone is blind. It also shows just how incompatible fanatical, fundamentalist religion is with peace.
As the story unfolds, Mustafa follows the clues of this other reality (our reality) to the Balkanized America and back. I hate to give away the solution to the mystery, but I will say that everything wraps up in a gloriously satisfying conclusion. I highly recommend this book. It blew my mind.