With all our newspaper’s valiant efforts to predict and expose what’s going on in Syria, I thought it prudent to take a page out of the literary canon to make sense of it. Ahmad Al-Sharaa, after all, is a guy who changes employees like other people change shoes, circa Bin Laden to Zarqawi to Baghdadi and beyond. I may have chanced on the answer in a rather disappointing conspiracy thriller, The Tetramachus Collection (1976) by Philippe Van Rjndt.

By Emad Aysha
The story is about a priest trying to expose the Vatican’s WWII secrets, only for the files never to see the light of day thanks to a series of plot conveniences. The only thing that drew me to the novel was the namesake of the ultra-secret semi-private intelligence agency hired to track down the archives and the pastor – ISIS!

SPIES AT HEART: The original Bourne Identity (1988) was a TV miniseries from author Robert Ludlum [right]. While a creature of its time it nonetheless holds lessons for the world of today.

The author ‘claims’ this is a real agency, and that he got the name from ancient Egyptian mythology. The goddess Isis, seeing her as both a giver of life and a destructor. (I don’t know what Egyptian mythology he’s been reading.)

But look at the choice of name in light of the wacky world we’re living in now, with the Islamic State getting the acronym ISIS. (Remember simulation theory and Snake Eyes?)

It just goes to show how intellectually as well as morally bankrupt the true conspirators who run the world are, since they can’t think up a better term than that to describe something they most likely created!

These names Al-Qaeda (the base or 'foundation') and ISIS aka Daesh simply make no sense in Arabic. They’re not the kind of acronyms we’d dream up. We’re a sloganistic people and like melodrama and poetry in our name games, and we certainly wouldn’t use the name of a ‘pagan’ deity.

A journalist in the Guardian half-figured this out himself, noting that Al-Qaeda may have been derived by Bin Laden from Asimov’s Foundation novels. (That’s a sci-fi connection even I couldn’t dream up.)

Even left-wing, secular intellectuals in the Arab world don’t buy these names and have said all along, and rightly, that these forces are merely proxies. (Syria speaks for itself). This novel hammers home that point, without even knowing it.

There are interesting details about money laundering, you could say, but it feels like a sideshow to the central plot and doesn’t really go anywhere.

The mafia is also strangely absent from the story, which is set primarily in Italy. You also have rogue Fascists killing the left-wing publisher who was given the stolen archives. But the novel makes it sound like these people have nothing to do with the CIA and its secret anti-Communist networks.

There’s no mention of Operation Paperclip, with Nazi war criminals being given safe refuge in the USA, thanks to the agency. Only lip service is paid to any right-wing links with the CIA when it comes to Greece, and that’s about it.

I also didn’t find the ISIS agency to be terribly impressive. The Vatican banker dude does a much better job in trying to track down the stolen files through his own personal and business contacts.

Professional criminals are hired who do a much better job at burglary, surveillance and death than the so-called professionals. They don’t need orders to know what to do in the field and can think up solutions better than the actual spies.

Even the Fascists are better trained, faster and more capable of keeping a low profile than ISIS. The good guys are always incompetent.

BASE INSTINCTS: I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series as a kid. It drove me to social science and math simulations. But what about Bin Laden?

The poor publisher, Sabatini, makes only one photocopy of the archive. And he hands the original to a professor to check its authenticity, only realising his mistake when it's conveniently too late.

I was really expecting something on the level of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980), with rip-roaring action, intelligence intrigue and double-crosses galore.

That novel has its own cheesy moments, mind you, but it’s a thrill-ride, especially given how voluminous it is. It gives you a convincing peephole into how the CIA actually does things and the nefarious people it’s willing to work with. And how this comes to haunt it in the end.

Stylistically, Van Rjndt’s novel is good, with warm introspective moments and dramatic surprises. Just look at the poor Czech mistress of the French minister killing herself after slitting the minister’s throat.

But the drama is wasted because the so-called hero, Alexander Players, doesn’t do anything particularly big at the end. He does save the pastor’s life, but that was already a foregone conclusion given who comes out on top in the Vatican.

Characters are both overdeveloped, wasting our time with needless slices of history, and underdeveloped. Not so with Ludlum, and he was a Canadian too, like this author, with wartime experience. He was even rumoured to have been an actual CIA guy at one point in his early days.

Ludlum also anticipated the war on terror, in his own way. The antagonist in the novel is none other than Carlos, a rogue element in his own right.

Likewise, Ludlum anticipated how going after a demon can turn you into the very thing you’re fighting against. Mr Players (what an annoying and ‘wasted’ name) has his eye on a happy retirement from the first time that you meet him, and he’s not nearly as cool as he thinks he is.

By contrast, Jason Bourne has his identity erased to go after Carlos, becoming his chief rival. And the protagonist had become tainted, like his country, during the Vietnam War, thanks to the deadly CIA assassination network ‘Medusa’.

That’s a proper usage of mythology, if you ask me: a monster created by the gods to do war with the Titans – only to become a threat herself to the very same Olympian gods.

Evil is too personified in individuals in the Rjndt novel. People who get away with things because they’re smart, not because the system itself is corrupt.

Ludlum was much more institutional in his understanding and portrayal of evil. Someone with his instincts could have anticipated 9/11, if you ask me.

MEDUSA TOUCH: Sam Worthington in the 'Clash of the Titans' (2010) remake, turning the magic on the magicians as we Arabs say. Alas, I don't think the post-modern audience got the point.

Tragically, Robert Ludlum died in March 2001 under somewhat suspicious circumstances. If he’d lived, he would have seen a repeat of Medusa.

In the form of al-Qaeda and ISIS, that is. Compromises that always blow up in your face!