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Terrorist

Doing the Devil’s work

John Updike
Penguin, 310pp, £17.99,

Ian Sansom

Wednesday, 16th August 2006

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the amazingly curious and apparently perpetual work of John Updike will of course be familiar with his profound observations about what is arguably mankind’s greatest obsession and also its most terrible blight: sex. Oh, yes, and religion. In this regard, his new novel Terrorist is much the same as all the others, except this time the religion happens to be Islam.

Updike’s protagonist is 18-year-old Ahmad Mulloy, son of an Egyptian father and an Irish mother. Ahmad is a devout Muslim, but also a hot-blooded young male who can’t help but notice his schoolmate Joryleen’s breasts, which ‘push up like great blisters in the scoop neck of the indecent top that at its other hem exposes the fat of her belly’. Instead of going on to college, and under the guidance of his imam, Shaikh Rashid, Ahmad decides to become a truck-driver, and is looking forward to driving hazardous substances; he has a particular interest in toxic gases, poisons and anything infectious and radioactive. You can perhaps see the way this is heading, and anyway the book’s title rather gives the game away.

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