The Last Night of a Damned Soul : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: intriguing, enlightening content marred by stylistic flaws
Review: The Last Night of a Damned Soul is the story of Raouf, a young Arab-American whose grief/confusion over his father's death leads him down the path of martyrdom, guided by his Palestinian friend and Kuwaiti boss. Over the course of the novel, Raouf removes himself more and more from the trappings of his American life (dog, apartment, girlfriend, mother, etc.) to enter further into the world of Islam and terrorism as he repents, is reborn, and is trained for a terrorist act. These acts of gradual removal are often preceded by long stretches of quoted sermons/speeches or long passages of introspection.
The book, due to its subject matter and its close focus on an individual, has a certain chill to it, and a sense of suspense as to whether Raouf will actually go through with the terrorist act (no telling here). And the passages where he is guided or preyed upon depending on one's viewpoint have a macabre sort of fascination. The sermons also are of interest, giving a window into a set of beliefs, a worldview, that many Western readers probably do not have.
In the end, however, the book's effectiveness is marred by its many flaws. One is that the characters in the book rarely seem to act like fully-fleshed, real people. Raouf's girlfriend, for instance, seems to be there simply so she can be discarded. Her reactions to the changes he displays are either non-existent or unbelievable and his changing reaction to her is all too easily glossed over in a few paragraphs of inner monologue. Before he is lured/co-opted into the terrorist world, it is all too obvious that his friend and his boss have leaning or connections that way and yet there is no recognition of this on his part, no internal turmoil, again, highly unbelievable. His mother too seems to be a role character whose major purpose is to sum up an opposing viewpoint in a lengthy letter clumsily introduced toward the end. And Raouf's own movement from young Arab-American software engineer to fundamentalist Islamic terrorist seems more acted out than acted from within, more staged than developed.
Stylistically, many of the characters do not speak like real people. The dialogue is often stilted and given to speechifying rather than conversing. While the characters are debating politics and religion, they do so less as people involved in a discussion than as people reading from prepared notes. The use of so many sermons quoted at such length also was a problem, slowing the book's narrative pace down, taking us away from the more intense and more compelling first-person narrative by Raouf.
Even the first-person form, however, has its problems as it too often allows the author to pile on the exposition or characterization by telling rather than showing. There were times the internal monologue told us things we had already figured out by more subtle preceding actions or descriptions or told us things that would have been better shown. His relationship with his father and his father's subsequent death, for instance, we're told over and over again, had a deep impact on the character, but we are never given any reason to believe this beyond being told it--we're given almost no scenes to convey it through flashback or memory or third-character viewpoint.
The end of the book is the most effective part, where Raouf must confront the actual decision to take part or not in the attack, where his mother writes an impassioned and eloquent "sermon" in opposition to the many preceding that led him down the path of terrorism. For all it effectiveness, however, the ending also highlights what the book could have been, and thus highlights its flaws.
As a novel, I can't really recommend the book based on its weak characterization and flawed style and structure. On the other hand, if one wishes to set those aside and read not so much for reading pleasure but for insight into a world many of us seldom glimpse let alone imagine, it does awaken an awareness in the reader, a bud of understanding, if not a full flower. If it were a longer work, I wouldn't recommend it even then, but since it's such a quick read, it is possible to tolerate the writing flaws for the payoff of subject matter. Therefore, a very mixed recommendation.