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Terrorist is among the most vital keywords of our day, and among the most fiercely contested. One culture's murderer is another's martyr; revolutionaries may also be freedom fighters. Experts debate where one should place the dividing line between "legitimate" acts of war, even those that harm noncombatants, and acts of terrorism, which are by definition illegitimate. An often cited definition was proposed by Thomas Perry Thornton in 1964: terrorism entails "a symbolic act designed to influence political behavior by extranormal means, entailing the use or threat of violence."1 The immediate damage wrought by such acts matters less than the effect they have upon the imagination of the people who witness them, especially through the media.
Given this dependence upon imagination and representation, it should come as no surprise that terrorism has served as a ready topic for fiction. The 19th century was a fertile ground for violence intended to effect political change, and dime-novels about Irish secret societies, Russian anarchists, and other prototypical terrorists proliferated as the century waned. In the 150 years since, there have been countless thrillers in which terrorists play the villain. Their secrecy, their remorseless tactics, their irrational desire to unmake our very world—all this conduces to our horrified fascination, and the straightforward use of terrorist-as-ultimate-menace remains quite popular today in the work of such writers as Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum (whose franchise continues to flourish under new management).
Alongside this robust tradition runs a parallel vein of fiction about terrorists in which suspense and violence are subordinated to larger political, philosophical, and aesthetic issues. Some novelists have focused on the social conditions that give rise to terrorists as a group, others have focused on the cultural and political systems that terrorists claim to oppose; some try to get inside an individual terrorist's head, either to explain or criticize, while others focus solely on the experience of being a victim of terrorism. Perpetrators and victims, causes and effects, social conditions and psychological roots: clearly, the variations are endless. But what all these literary treatments have in common is a deeper curiosity about what terrorists might represent, both culturally and artistically. They are made to be more than a mysterious menace lying in wait to terrify us; instead, terrorists are used to tell us something about ourselves, for better or worse.
There have been surprisingly few sympathetic treatments of terrorists over the years. Even two novelists of such opposing philosophical perspectives as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Joseph Conrad were able to share a contempt toward the terrorists of their day, the anarchists. In Demons, Dostoevsky allows the ne'er-do-well Stephan Trofimovich a death-bed conversion and seeming redemption; the anarchists led by Stephan's son, however, all end up dead or in prison. In The Secret Agent, Conrad's protagonist is ordered to destroy the Greenwich Observatory but manages only to get his simple brother-in-law blown to bits. The secret agent's unfortunate wife kills him in anger over her lost brother and then takes her own life; no lasting change is effected by the bombing.
Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist would seem at first blush a counter-example; when it was published in 1985, it was hailed as an utterly convincing depiction of a terrorist cell "from the inside." The protagonist, Alice Mellings, is a young English communist who has dedicated herself to fighting the injustices of modern capitalist society. She and her comrades in the Communist Centre Union are desperate, both individually and collectively, to prove themselves serious and committed to the cause. One of the book's strengths lies in its depiction of small group dynamics; Lessing makes the process leading up to the house's decision to embrace terrorism—as a means of proving themselves to the IRA—seem both natural and unavoidable. But Lessing also uses her psychological acuity to give us insights into the characters that they are incapable of having themselves; she implies that they are deluded, subject to motivations and passions much more psychosexual than political.
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