Five years on, and the 9/11 books begin to mount up: we’ve had Philip Roth doing it as historical allegory in The Plot Against America; John Updike doing it as a thriller in Terrorist; Jonathan Safran Foer doing whatever it is that Jonathan Safran Foer does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ian McEwan’s Saturday; and now, Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance. You can already hear the sound of university critics drawing up the reading lists for their ‘Post- 9/11 Fiction’ courses: undergraduates, pay attention to what follows.

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