War Cycles

I had mixed feelings Martin Amis's imaginative recreation of the mindset that Muhammad Atta took with him and American 11 into the North tower at 8.46.40 five years ago.

If you find yourself discontented with the world as it is, I guess you can ignore it, change it, save it...or kill it. Amis suggests that Atta's core reason for doing what he did was the most obviously destructive of these options, a suicide that aspired to make a significant contribution to Death.

I wonder whether Atta's nihilism was really that irreligious and icily dispassionate. Was it just the "cloudless entitlement" of westerners that pricked him into serving their doom?

For my taste Amis's style is over-heavy for its actual content load, but I enjoyed the way he makes the terrorist reflect whether his actions would bequeathe a legacy of more dead time to the world: "It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom."