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THE IMAM OF TAWI-TAWI
by Ian Hamilton
Spiderline/House of Anansi Press, January 2018
400 pages
$$15.95US/19.95 CAD
ISBN: 1487002742


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

With THE IMAM OF TAWI-TAWI, Ian Hamilton has found his footing again after his last novel, THE COUTURIER OF MILAN, which had his detective-heroine, Ava Lee, virtually immobile. Here, she is again on the move, amidst rivetting geo-politics that pit anti-Muslims and quietest Muslims (in this case, the Muslim Brotherhood) in the Philippines, in which a Christian majority is looking for a reason to descend, in force, on a Muslim minority in the provincial island of Tawi-Tawi. Ava's opportunity for action is provided by the request, on the part of Tommy Ordonez and Chang Wang—both of whom are old friends of her now-dead mentor and partner, Uncle (Chow Tung, a former Triad leader in Hong Kong)—for her to investigate potential terrorist training activity at Zakat College, an insular, Muslim college in Tawi-Tawi. Civil unrest brought on by unwelcome miliary and special-forces interventions on the part of the Philippine leadership, as they point out, will certainly compromise their business interests in the province's pineapple plantations, interests they share with their silent partner, Miguel Ramirez, a senator with an agricultural portfolio.

Ava is indeed mobile—she flies across the Philippines on numerous occasions; to Sydney, Australia; to Hong Kong, then back to Manila, in the space of countable hours—but all that travel can't make up for the fact that, because she has chosen to bring in the help of CIA agent, Alasdair Dulles, she has very limited personal latitude. She drinks a lot of black coffee; packs and unpacks her bags; eats interesting meals at restaurants; gets good massages; and she even gets to use her signature phoenix-eye fist at one point, though not when the stakes are particularly high. Yet she is also constrained by what the CIA, Philippine politicos, and Muslim Brotherhood choose to tell her and which investigative venues they pursue.

Understandably, Ava is frustrated and infuriated by being kept in the dark about everything from motives to facts, from background investigations to cover-ups. She can make suggestions, but can't ensure that others will take them seriously; she can do interrogations, but can't be certain that the knowledge she gleans will be communicated to the powers who can act on it; she can uncover bank accounts or money trails, but can't access the necessary means to trace them. As if acknowledging that he has constructed a plot in which Ava is hamstrung at almost every turn—and in some ways, it is no surprise that he reveals in his acknowledgements that the novel was, in at least two of its four iterations, conceived as a non-Ava Lee book—Hamilton compensates by having a host of other characters load on the praise for Ava's past successes. Chang Wang tells her repeatedly how wonderfully she performed before for him and Ordonez (in THE DISCIPLE OF LAS VEGAS). Ryan Poirier, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service operative who puts her in touch with Dulles, tells her how much he respected her for her professionalism in Indonesia (in THE SCOTTISH BANKER OF SURABAYA). Perhaps most irksome, is Dulles's CIA boss, Brad Harrison, who tells her that Uncle would have been proud of her for her ultimate decisions, as if that particular paternalistic pat-on-the-head should be especially meaningful and pleasing to her. Sadly, it is.

And yet, for all Ava is systematically made to feel like a fifth wheel, THE IMAM OF TAWI-TAWI is an engrossing novel. First of all, it tackles the alarmism about the threat of international terrorist activity, suggesting that an extremist overreaction to even a whiff of Muslim militant organization is at least as bad, if not worse, than the actual threat itself. Offering a detective fiction complement to Matt Ruff's alternative history SF novel, Mirage, and a surprising departure from Graeme Wood's set of disturbing articles on ISIS for The Atlantic, Hamilton's novel envisions duelling forms of self-justifying hatred, action, and pro-action that are chilling and all too believeable in the current international arena. It is hardly a surprise, then, that Ava Lee has trouble intervening directly in that murky political mess. What she does do, however, is reconsider her own position and ethical responsibilities. And even if that reconsideration doesn't quite counterbalance the relatively low impact of her decisions as a private citizen, Hamilton has added a welcome new dimension to her character.

§ Nicola Nixon is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal

Reviewed by Nicola Nixon, December 2017

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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