Fiction personifies rendition’s victims to expose its human cost

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.” Focalized alternatively by the main protagonists—Annabel Richter, idealistic and determined young human rights lawyer; Tommy Brue, jaded British scion of Brue Frères Bank in Hamburg; and Gunther Bachmann, maverick German intelligence agent—it tells of the fate of a stateless Chechen Muslim, Issa Karpov. At the start, Issa has made his way to Hamburg, having escaped from detention and torture in Russia, where he has been falsely implicated in radical Islamist activity. But Issa is also the illegitimate son of a now deceased Soviet army general who has lodged in an illicit account at Brue Frères Bank the ill-gotten gains made by looting, raping, and murdering his way through Chechnya during the 1980s. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 326

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to how Hamid’s and Naqvi’s narratives focalize Muslim characters to contest state practices.
• SEED: The multiple-focalization structure — victim, humanitarian lawyer, jaded banker, maverick agent — as a template for dramatizing rendition resembles the multi-voiced strategy of literature against Islamophobia.