At hom
TERRORISM
Christina Lamb
The Bin Laden Papers
How the Abbottabad Raid
Revealed the Truth about
Al-Qaeda, Its Leader and His
Family by Nelly Lahoud
Yale UP £18.99 pp362As each day brings ever more
bloodcurdling images of the
trail of death left by Vladimir
Putin’s forces across Ukraine,
it is hard to remember that not
so very long ago our greatest
threat was Osama bin Laden
and al-Qaeda.
It’s fair to say that when we
think of the world’s most
feared terrorist leader, we
don’t picture him being told
by his 19-year-old daughter to
re-record one of his statements
as his voice sounded tired. Or
being lectured by her that “it
is possible some among the
new generation will believe
that political change could
occur without jihad”.
The influence of his wives
and daughters on Bin Laden
is one of the most surprising
revelations in this fascinating
book — the first real inside
look into an organisation that
changed how we live.
These revelations could not
be better sourced — many are
in Bin Laden’s own words or
those of family members,
and come from information
gathered by US navy Seals
during their raid on the
compound in the Pakistani
town of Abbottabad where
he, two of his wives and nine
children and grandchildren
had been holed up for years.
“For God and country,
Geronimo!” came the Seals’
coded message to their
commander in the early hours
of May 2, 2011, after they
launched their attack on
the compound, plus the
abbreviation EKIA — enemy
killed in action. Then came
another message: “Sir, they
say they found a whole
shit-ton of computers and
electronic gear on the second
floor.” They had instructions
to wrap up the operationwithin 30 minutes, but this
was potential gold. They were
given 18 more minutes to
hoover up Bin Laden’s hard
drives and papers.
Six years later much of it
was declassified, allowing
Nelly Lahoud, a leading
scholar on al-Qaeda, to
comb through 96,000 files,
including 6,000 pages in
Arabic of private
communications and a
handwritten notebook of
family conversations in Bin
Laden’s final two months.
The picture that emerges
could not be further from the
international image. We see
an ageing man trapped in
the Abbottabad compound,
unsure who to trust and
operationally impotent —
most of his key lieutenants
detained, others picked off
by drones, often because ofKeeping Barnes
on his toes
Formidable friend Anita Brookner is at the
heart of Julian Barnes’s vivid new novel
FICTION
Peter Kemp
Elizabeth Finch
by Julian Barnes
Cape £16.99 pp192
Julian Barnes’s Booker-
winning novel The Sense of
an Ending (2011) opened in a
sixth-form classroom. Moving
up the educational scale,
his new book opens in a
university lecture room.
Poised at the lectern, its
heroine, Elizabeth Finch,
briskly informs the adult
students enrolled on her
evening course, Culture and
Civilisation, what lies ahead.
In the case of Neil, who
narrates the novel, it is not
just an inspirational
intellectual experience but an
emotional and psychological
one as well. The first and third
parts of the book recount the
impact on his curiosity and
imagination of a teacher who
is decidedly singular.
Unmarried, dedicated to
her profession, attracting
fascinated followers, she
could seem a degree-level
Jean Brodie but, in
educational approach,
she is the opposite of
Muriel Spark’s spinster
schoolmistress in
her flamboyantly
domineering prime.
“The best form of
education, as the Greeks
knew, is collaborative,”
she declares. “She was
corrective but not
diminishing, as she
directed us elegantly
away from the obvious,”
Neil reflects.
Barnes himself, of course,
has been elegantly directing
readers away from the
obvious throughout a literary
career of more than 40 years.
And this isn’t the only way
in which there is personal
investment in his portrait
of “EF”, as Neil calls her.
Sections of a 2016 obituary
tribute Barnes paid to his
friend, the “witty, glitteringly
intelligent, reserved”
art historian and novelist
Anita Brookner, reappear,
sometimes word for word,
in Neil’s recollections of his
relationship with EF.
Like Barnes and Brookner,
the two have met at wide
intervals for lunch (never
lasting more than 75 minutes),
during which EF, whose
invariable greeting was, like
Brookner’s, “So, what have
you got for me?”, similarly
kept her fellow diner on his
intellectual toes.
“Vocabulary and grammar
were self-scrutinised in the
microsecond before they
emerged from my mouth;
I even found myself
punctuating my own
conversation — putting in
semicolons,” Barnes reported
of his table talk with
Brookner. Neil marvels at EF’s
impeccable locution: “Her
diction was formal. Her
sentence structure entirely
grammatical... you could
almost hear the commas,
semicolons and full stops.”As with Flaubert’s Parrot
(1984), Barnes’s novel about
the nature of biography, the
narrative fitted around the
central ideas in this book, a
fictional focus on philosophy,
is minimal. Neil’s background
— two failed marriages, three
barely referred-to children,
a career that has sputtered
along between minor acting
roles, restaurant work
and forays into growing
mushrooms — gets cursory
mention. There are hints,
never followed through, of
possible past dramas in EF’s
private life. But, as a person,
she remains mysterious.
As a teacher, though, she
blazes with vividness. “Her
presence and example had
made my brain change gear,
had provoked a quantum leap
in my understanding of the
world,” Neil enthuses. When
bequeathed her papers, he
commemorates her by putting
together a 50-page essay
based on them.
The book’s central and
most enthralling section,
this deals with a figure EF
esteemed as a kindred spirit:
Julian the Apostate, the last
pagan Roman emperor,
whose battlefield death in
the Persian desert in AD363
signalled the triumph of
Christianity, “the moment
when history went wrong”,
as she saw it, allowing
monotheism to thrive and
stifle healthy doubt and
questioning.
A bravura exercise in
nimbly handled erudition,
this essay about Julian’s
shifting reputation over
the centuries, which “had
interpreted and reinterpreted
him, like a man walking
across a stage pursued by
different coloured spotlights”,
brilliantly charts his life and
the afterlife bestowed on him
by a remarkable medley of
commentaries, novels,
poetry, plays — one 480 pages
long — two operas and an
unexpected eulogy from
Adolf Hitler.
It also celebrates the cast
of mind Barnes most prizes.
A connoisseur and master
of irony himself, he fills this
book with instances of its
exhilarating power — from
EF’s “fine, ironic wit” to the
invigorating scepticism of
her 4th-century hero. With
Julian the Apostate and his
latter-day admirer, Julian
the Ironist finds himself in
congenial company. cGlitteringly intelligent
The author Anita BrooknerBOOKS
DENZIL MCNEELANCE/TIMES NEWSPAPERSLost, bossed by his
teenage daughter— the al-Qaeda
leader’s domesticlife is revealed
AP22 10 April 2022