Extraordinary rendition entangles personal and state histories in ways novels can trace

Evidence

A Most Wanted Man sees Le Carré exploring the human cost of the practice of targeted abduction of Muslim individuals known as “extraordinary rendition.” … The book is, thus, in part about the sins of fathers and how they can return to haunt the present, the personal colliding with the political to produce what the novel describes as “untidy history.” At the start, Hamburg is a city still trying to expiate its own guilt at playing host to the 9/11 plotters, the so-called Hamburg Cell. As the story progresses, the different responses to the resulting political pressures are played out in the complex internal politics of the German intelligence and security communities— a running feud “between those determined to defend civil rights at all costs, and those determined to curtail them in the name of national security” (103). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 326

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: Directly parallels The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s entanglement of personal biography with US state violence — both hinge on how an individual’s story gets absorbed into security machinery.

Related

• Fiction personifies rendition’s victims to expose its human cost (similarity 0.84)