By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 13/05/06):
THE GOVERNMENT has deployed a new weapon in the battle with terrorism: the narrative, the tale, the long short story. The promise to deliver “an authoritative account or ‘narrative’ of what happened” on July 7 last year was a ploy to avoid a full inquiry, but it also, perhaps inadvertently, addressed a profound psychological need.
Stories are how we understand the world. To be able to comprehend events as horrendous as the London bombings, we require a cast of characters, some sense of psychological motivation and unfolding drama.
The bombing plot cries out for a narrative plot, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. We think of terrorism as a modern curse, but writers as varied as Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky have all tried to make sense of terrorism by placing it in the context of a story.
The narrator of the Government’s July 7 story is unlikely to win any literary prizes. He begins with that traditional British curtain-raiser, a weather report: “7 July began unsettled, with heavy showers in places.” (You feel he was just itching to write: “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”) This is as close as the civil servant-author gets to a literary flourish.
Yet the 35-page Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London is a gripping read, a page-turner that relates a tale simultaneously extraordinary and frighteningly banal. We follow three of the bombers as they trundle down the M1, and then board the train to London, their knapsacks crammed with home-made explosive. Here are the cricket-playing Shehzad Tanweer, who owned a red Mercedes and worked in his father’s fish and chip shop; Mohammad Sidique Khan, better known as “Sid”, the soft-eyed ringleader; and 18-year-old Hasib Hussain, burly and not too bright.
The narrator can hardly conceal his bewilderment as he relates how Hussain’s mother found him in the family kitchen in his pyjamas, eating a bowl of cereal, 24 hours before he blew himself to pieces on the top of the No 30 bus, killing 13 other people.
The exceptional thing about this narrative is that it is, in so many ways, unexceptional. The writer searches for reasons. Hussain scribbled “Al Qaida No Limits” on his RE schoolbook but, as the narrator dryly observes, there is a long way between “extremist doodling” and suicide bombing. Only in the case of Jermaine Lindsay, the Jamaican-born fourth bomber, does the psychological profile offer any clues: a broken home, a harsh step- father, a mother who moved out. Even so, he was hardly unusual.
Like many of the most compelling stories, this one raises more questions than it answers. The men who carried out this appalling slaughter were, on the outside, averagely angry, averagely religious and averagely integrated. Twelve thousand statements, 6,000 hours of CCTV footage and 26,000 exhibits have produced a picture of four utterly unremarkable people.
We are told that the July 7 bombers represent a new breed of terrorist, almost impossible to stop because they blend into the background. But camouflage has always been the key to terror. In The Secret Agent Conrad described “the Professor” who wanders London with a bomb strapped to his chest, the first fictional suicide bomber and perhaps the most frightening terrorist in literature: “He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable — and terrible in the simplicity of his idea . . . Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”
In searching for the motivation of the bombers, our narrator found only the most blurred simplicities: a quest for martyrdom, resentment at perceived injustices against Muslims, a vague hero-worship of the pin-ups of Islamic extremism, a garnish of anti-Semitism. But nothing that adds up to an ideology or an explanation. The al-Qaeda links remain tenuous.
In his 1886 novel The Princess Casamassima, Henry James described how a would-be radical, angered by poverty, joins a shadowy terrorist group and agrees to assassinate a duke. James’s terrorist has little ideological vision, merely “blind obedience” in return for the promise of a tiny role in “a very large plan, of which he couldn’t measure the scope — something that was to be done simultaneously in a dozen different countries”. That description precisely fits Khan, the senior 7/7 bomber, a man apparently on the margins of organised terror, radicalised just enough by others to make him do something terrible.
It is the sheer amateurism of the suicide bombers that comes through most chillingly in the narrative. Small, shallow men, bleaching their own hair with toxic fumes from bomb-making recipes found on the internet and ingredients bought from the chemist; then clapping one another on the back as they head off to kill.
These are not the sophisticated, techno-terrorists of a Tom Clancy novel, but little men seeking to make a big bang. In this they are far closer to the terrorist revolutionaries depicted with scorn by Dostoevsky in his novel The Possessed, violent failures veneered in ideology but bent on vengeance for private ends, inflamed by their own incendiary rhetoric: “Fire in the minds of men.”
The 7/7 narrator quotes Khan’s video suicide statement: “Our driving motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer . . . we are at war and I am a soldier.” The words are strikingly similar to those of Conrad’s Professor, who mocks his pursuers by pointing out that they “depend on life . . . whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.”
The narrative of 7/7 is not great literature. It offers no penetrating insights. But it does bring the reader closer to what happened that day, who did it, and why, and in a way that carries echoes of earlier, greater writers. Here is the terrorist as he truly is: a small-time, all but invisible amateur, an insignificant man with fire in his mind, who believes he has found superiority by embracing death, terrible in the simplicity of his idea.