Irregular Books

A few months after the attacks of September 11, an old friend of mine suggested that I read Lie Down With Lions in order to get a more complete idea of what life in Afghanistan is really like. It’s a piece of potboiler fiction, written in the 1980s when the Soviet Union was still trying to hold on to the country, but the book does contain some information about Afghanistan, and I guess I’m glad that I have that information in my head now.

The problem with Lie Down With Lions is that what information there is gets lost in an unsophisticated story with shallow characters who behave in completely predictable ways. I understand that characters need to act out of their own motivation, and in such a sense should be predictable. What I can’t stand about this book, however, is that the motivation of the characters is so cartoonishly simple. I want characters who develop in significant ways, so that by the end of the book they belie the apparent simplicity of their earlier identities, not John Wayne sorts of good guys and bad guys.

I’m not going to give away the plot of this book, because that’s pretty much all that it is. Unfortunately, there’s not much deeper meaning to it. So there’s a Cold War and some Islamic rebels and a romantic triangle. So what? I need a “so what”, and this book fails to deliver it.

I won’t say that Lie Down With Lions is entirely worthless. At least it communicates the important point that quick fixes like an American invasion are not going to truly solve the problems that have made Afghanistan a haven for desperate people bent on violence.

If you really want to find out about Afghanistan, though, a story like this isn’t the best way to go. I suggest, instead, that you read the book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism by John K. Cooley. Supplement that work with the CIA Factbook entry on Afghanistan and some ethnographic (anthropological) studies of the peoples of Afghanistan.

Of course, if that’s too much hard work for you, you can rely on the likes of Geraldo Rivera on the clownish Fox News network. You can rely on entertaining but shallow stories like Lie Down With Lions. To me, being a citizen in a democracy demands a little bit more of us than that. Issues of life and death are in our hands, and it’s our duty to educate ourselves beyond the depth of the bestsellers list.