Review: American War

American War by Omar El Akkad
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 2074, the Second American Civil War breaks out. Many coastal areas of the USA, and around the world, have been claimed by rising sea levels, a group of southern states secede from the Union over the outlawing of fossil fuels and war is declared. Sarat Chesnutt is six years old when the war starts and the book is her story, as told, many years later, by her nephew.

Written by Egyptian-born Canadian journalist, Omar el Akkad, the novel can be read as an allegory on the war on terror. Sarat, born in Louisiana of mixed race parents, is displaced by the war and spends her childhood and early teens in a refugee camp where she is gradually radicalised by a charismatic leader of the ‘Red’ southern states and used in the fight against the ‘Blue’ union majority.

By depicting climate change as the pivotal, and perhaps only, factor leading to the war, the author can possibly be accused of over-simplification - it would appear that racism, for instance, has been eliminated; there is certainly no overtly racist language or characters in the novel and religious differences too have little impact on the plot - but many of his scenes are harrowing and thought provoking.

“At first he’d asked her if she preferred to make herself a weapon, to become what the Northerners called homicide bombers.”

It is shocking when the ‘heroine’ of the novel, who has at least some Katniss Everdeen-like characteristics, is offered this choice. This is near-future America, and Americans are suicide bombers… The point is reinforced by the reverence in which the south holds Julia Templestowe, a southern martyr who wore a ‘farmer’s suit’ and blew herself up assassinating the American president. The narrator also tells us at the start of the story that, following the end of formal hostilities, on Reunification Day, “one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death” - the plague kills almost ten times the eleven million who died in the war.

Nor does the south hold a monopoly on atrocities. At the beginning of the book we are told that Carolina has essentially become a wasteland due to a chemical or germ attack by the Blue states and is “a walled hospice” - the reference to the wall is not coincidental. The North has at some point lost control of their ‘warring Birds’, drones which then randomly rain down death. The North still practices waterboarding on detainees in a Guantanamo-like interrogation centre. There is an attack on a camp in which innocents are targeted in the most brutal way in a search for ‘insurgents’.

El Akkad may have ‘simplified’ but doing so allows him to focus on key issues that should be shocking. I am not an American but it seems to me that, given the turn that western society, and US society in particular, has taken recently, perhaps the events of the novel are not as shocking as they should be; this future is not as far off as it should be. The book has flaws but the story and the issues it raises will stay with me for some time.

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