Thrillers can mobilize border crossings to challenge rather than reinforce Islamophobic truisms

Evidence

I also argue that John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan are interested in testing and transgressing discursive constructs of essential difference and—directly or indirectly, successfully or otherwise—challenging the Islamophobic truisms that emerge from the mentalities these constructs foster. The novels I focus on—A Most Wanted Man (2008) by John Le Carré, The Warlord’s Son (2004) by Dan Fesperman, and The Unknown Terrorist (2006) by Richard Flanagan3—are full of border crossings, displacements, and uncanny returns, seeking ways to symbolize experiences of exclusion that have come to the fore as the increasingly paranoid modern nation attempts to secure itself in ever more extreme and inequitable ways. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 315

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the chapter’s counter-intuitive contention: that a genre conventionally read as inherently conservative can, in certain hands, contest the very binaries it traffics in.