I was rummaging around the secondhand book market here in Cairo and came up with Osama (2012) by Chris Ryan. I don’t usually go for the post-9/11 stuff but conspiratorial things are hinted at on the dust cover in relation to the still mysterious circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s burial at sea.

By Emad Aysha
What can I say about the book? I loved and loathed it at the same time. It’s riveting and written with a lot of military precision, but it’s also sloppy and full of plot holes, with the penultimate chapter made up entirely of copouts and loose ends.

I could also fault the author for the crudeness and crassness of his racial stereotyping, but it's best to be charitable about these things since the man is an actual war hero and has been to hell and back.

The story begins with the SEAL team's attack on Osama bin Laden’s so-called hideout in Pakistan, with a British SAS team providing some extra support. This is where things begin to go wrong from a writing perspective.

You have the hero, Joe, and his best friend, and they’ve commandeered a house and are holding the occupant hostage, and Joe’s comrade almost kills the guy to keep him silent, with Jo reprimanding him.

Then, for some reason, when they’re on the outside and find a young couple up to no good, the comrade hesitates to shoot the girl to stop them from sounding an alarm, and Joe does it instead. That doesn’t make sense, given the pairing just a minute ago, and there’s also a missing character in this.

An informer of sorts, they call the Doctor, who also tries to sound the alarm, for them to kill him, only to discover he’s a lookalike. So where’d the real one go, and why did he not play any role from then on?

The guy looks curiously like bin Laden if you ask me. Other plot problems abound throughout, along with bad writing. You get confused half the time about who is doing what, with references to a generic ‘him’ not knowing which him it is in question.

You have Joe’s ex-sweetheart and police contact Eva, only realising at the end that she has a mobile phone and can call the authorities to warn of the terrorist plot. She never made that call earlier when Joe was with her, and they are desperately trying to save the day. (What about the landline in the house?)

You have poor Eva taking a bullet in the back for Joe as a decoy to a terrorist sniper, and even though she’s wearing body armour, the bad guy takes a potshot at her back. He doesn’t shoot at the one part of her that’s exposed, her neck, and doesn’t shoot her several times to make sure the bullets get through the Kevlar, even when she’s down.

Conveniently, the bullet only wounds her badly, even though the sniper is one of the terrorists’ best. Oh, and for some, the terrorist mastermind has a hooked nose, and his chosen sniper uses a Galil rifle – which is Israeli, I presume?!

There’s a lot of homophobia, too. The CIA guy who is running the terrorist mastermind, using him to bump off Joe (he saw more than he should have with the bin Laden raid), is hinted at being gay. When Joe’s in prison, there’s also an effeminate character he hates. There’s an early indication that racism is wrong, with a jibe against a racist who compares Arabs to blacks, but it doesn’t follow through to the end.

It all setup but no payoff. There’s also the big terror plot at the end and how the Americans are willing for Brits to get killed as long as their own civilians are safe and sound. It was to coerce the British forces into staying in Middle East.

I’m all for the exposure of US foreign policy, but why do we have a scene earlier where an English character talks about the mysteries surrounding the third tower going down on 9/11 (and the now infamous BBC broadcast on it) and insisting that bin Laden must be a double agent?

MISSING IN ACTION: The first Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) in 'The Hunt for Red October'. Nothing like British spy fiction to sober you to your ugly senses.

As I said, a copout. I wanted to love this book, but I just couldn’t. The psychological side is very good, the tormented Joe suffering from war fatigue and being alienated from his wife and little boy – Britain being dragged into America’s wars and doing its dirty work for it.

One other positive angle not pursued to the end is how it is the CIA that weaponises the Quran, with the antagonist using it as a codebook and nothing more.

But the plot errors keep ganging up on Eva. For instance, when she makes her calls, talking to her colleague in Scotland Yard, she has to call several times before he answers. He blocked her initially, which means he’s angry at her, only for him to ask who is calling when he answers.

Also, she locks the door to protect herself at one point, and the bad guy can’t get in, even though he has a gun. And despite all the explosives in his room, the fire he sets doesn’t blow the house up. It’s infuriating!

I don’t have a problem with jingoism and machismo and the gung-ho British spy or military novel – I welcome it – but writers like Dick Francis and Wilber Smith know what they’re doing, with polished prose, complicated bad guys and historical-cultural accuracy.

It seems the editor they hired couldn’t tell the third-person from the first-person himself, or distinguish fanatics from opportunists, with the sniper being longhaired, like a degenerate hippie!

One way or another, the British anti-terror novel is still a welcome break from Tom Clancy’s desk-jockey brand of techno-thrillers and his goody-two-shoes protagonist, Jack Ryan. A little dose of (poorly edited) cynicism never hurt anybody.