Fiction This article is more than 5 years oldReviewThe Runaways by Fatima Bhutto review – pathways to Islamist extremism
This article is more than 5 years oldThe lives of three disparate young people converge at a jihadi training camp in Mosul in this searching and timely novel
Anita Rose lives in Karachi: her home is a small cement room where she sleeps on the floor alongside her mother and brother. Monty is from Karachi too, although his well-heeled Pakistani parents prefer Chelsea, ordering Addison Lee cabs rather than risk the over-familiarities of Uber drivers when travelling from Heathrow to their Sloane Square flat. Meanwhile in Portsmouth, lonely Sunny listens to Frank Ocean albums. He is perplexed both by the desi girls determined to seduce him and by his immigrant father’s insistence that he assimilate. Together, they form the title characters of Fatima Bhutto’s searching and ambitious new novel, The Runaways.
That title might suggest a romantic waywardness –and it’s true that the prose leans towards the distractingly lyrical at times – but Bhutto’s concerns are serious and unsentimental. She tracks how the experiences of poverty, disaffection and alienation become the pathways to Islamist extremism. “How far would you run to escape your life?” is the provocative question posed across the back cover of the book. “As far as the inhospitable desert of Iraq,” is the answer her characters give. Bhutto writes them an expansive story stretching across the globe as they forge their different routes from various cities to finally converge at a jihadi training camp on the edges of Mosul.
Niece of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul into a political dynasty. Growing up in Syria, and studying in the US and the UK, she is better equipped than most to navigate the transnationality of Islamist extremism. Yet this is a novel not just about radicalisation and acts of terror, but about young people, their experiences of dislocation and the anxieties of belonging that bring them to crisis. How do they come to leave behind their ordinary lives and what vulnerability draws them to trust in the redemption of religious violence? As real-life British-born “jihadi brides” flee Islamic State and plead their right to return home, these questions seem more pertinent than ever. Bhutto asks them unobtrusively, allowing us into the imagined consciousness of each of her runaways. Her observations are often sorrowful rather than sympathetic, careful to avoid easy rationalisations.
As real-life British-born 'jihadi brides' plead their right to return home, this novel seems more pertinent than everFor Anita Rose, it’s the indignity of servitude and the constraints of poverty that compel her to seek an alternative life. Her mother works for a moneyed family in an affluent neighbourhood. Anita watches them from the margins, coveting their video games and pink flip phones. When a kindly neighbour introduces her to poetry and political radicalism, her envy turns to anger. “Rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number,” he makes her recite, encouraging her righteous outrage at inequality without suspecting how anticapitalist sentiment might lead to radical Islamism. Bhutto draws this out with tremendous skill and intelligence over the course of the novel.
For Sunny, it is the desperation to belong that sways him when his swaggering cousin Oz returns from Syria, drenched in oud scent and denouncing the west. “Fuck Ukip,” Oz writes on Instagram beside a picture of Nigel Farage. Bhutto has an ear for the comedy of this, but she has the eye of the outsider, too. It’s this that makes her so mercilessly alert to the unlovely aspects of English culture. She has Sunny observe how the streets of Portsmouth after a football match are “littered with greasy tissues dropped from burger trucks, and cans of 1664 lager” spilling from bins. He registers with unease how an Arab mother struggling on to a bus sits next to a large, white-haired woman whose “face curled in distaste at the family speaking in a foreign tongue”. Not that “the Maryams, the Aishas and the Kareenas” who stalk Sunny at clubs and cinemas offer him any better sense of belonging. Sexuality is a puzzle and it’s his reluctance to come to terms with it that leaves him vulnerable to the predations of a charismatic religious leader.
And this, perhaps, is where Bhutto excels. She has something complex and profound to say about the place of desire in jihad. At his exclusive Karachi private school, Monty falls in love with a mysterious girl called Layla. She reads Marxist Pakistani poetry and calls out the hypocrisy of her teachers. He follows her into the Iraqi desert, calling her name in his troubled sleep every night. Bhutto knows that radical Islamism is a seduction, and she makes the shadowy Layla, “the princess of jihad”, the symbol of its beguilement. It’s Layla who’ll bring the story to its spectacular climax. But over and above the dramatics, this is a bold and probing novel, from a writer strikingly alert to something small and true: the disquietude of youth, the vulnerability and the foolishness – and how catastrophically it can be exploited.
The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto is published by Viking (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
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