Frederick Forsyth is, above all, a great storyteller. In The Afghan, the bulk of the story is told in real time, which is exhilerating. We jump frequently from scene to scene, where characters are acting on information just as other things are happening elsewhere. And there are a lot of characters, but their profiles are well established enough so that the reader knows who he's following around at any given time, and usually, what his motive is.

When I saw the title I was struck by how contemporary it looked. And it is indeed contemporary. Unlike historical novels that are set in the past, background has to be established, and the reader only knows the world in the novel from what he is told. The Afghan is quite different. Forsyth takes a stab at fitting a story in the world of today, the world we know from tv and the news, and with historical persons in central roles. He takes on the Middle East conflict, treating us to a guided tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also to a less severe look at the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Peshawar, Quetta, Kandahar and Jalalabad are some of the venues.

We follow in the footsteps of a young Afghan, Izmat Khan, a boy from a village in the mountains. As a boy he bears witness to the Soviet invasion, deemed too young to participate. His family is evacuated to a refugee camp in Pakistan, where he enters a madrasah, the one flavor of education offered to the refugees, funded by the Saudis who are intent on spreading wahhabism. By the time he grows up, the Soviets are still in Afghanistan, and he joins in with the Mujahideen. Soon, 1989 rolls around and the struggle is over, but the country is by no means at peace. Warlords fight among themselves for dominance, to which the Taliban rises up in opposition, eventually taking control of most of the country.

With the Soviet Union in ruins, the West eventually wakes up to the threat of religious radicalism. Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden continues to enjoy the hospitality at the hands of Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Under Bill Clinton there are air raids on his training camps. A cruise missile launched from a US ship in the Gulf misses its target and strikes the mountain above Khan's valley. He happens to be visiting a neighboring village that day, but he returns to witness his entire village buried under rock. His whole family wiped out. That is the day he pledges to join in the jihad against America. First in the Taliban, he fights the Northern Alliance, US sponsored. Then, he is to become a part of the single biggest terrorist attack to date.

This is all background for the events to take place, established so that the story told in the current can be told effectively. The key is a plot that has been uncovered from an Al Qaeda high official who escapes capture, but his laptop is taken. The plot has a name, but nothing points to what it consists of. Noone knows what it means, because noone knows about it, save a small circle at the very top of the organization. Their communications are under constant scrutiny, but the intelligence services of the West are powerless to tap into them. Messages are often delivered by messenger, recited from memory. And unlike the impatient West, Al Qaeda is in no hurry, things take time and that is way. Their operatives have spotless records, highly educated in the West and above suspicion.

The novel is an intriguing mix of contemporary reality and literary license for plausible additions.

Ludlum's Bourne trilogy was well received when it was published (the first book in 1980). Ludlum was not one for sequels, so the epic of Jason Bourne is an exception to the rule, and it wasn't until six years later that "Supremacy" hit the shelves.

The Bourne story has seen a big revival since. The first movie starring Matt Damon came out in 2002, and Ludlum was willing to work on the movie and turn his creation into a motion picture. Unfortunately, he died in 2001, before the movie was premiered, and probably never got to see the end product. But for what it's worth, I think the movie and the ones to follow were done very well. There is too much complexity and substance in the story to put on screen, so they decided not to try to follow the story in the book, just make a good movie instead. Which I think they did.

Consequently, Damon's Bourne is very alike Ludlum's Bourne, but not quite the same. And the movie epic has the same starting point, but swiftly departs from the story in the book, while grabbing many key details that make a Bourne story what it is. If you're a Bourne fan, then, you'll find three parts of a story that are completely new and captivating.

Interestingly, the Bourne story is not like a tv series, where you find the same characters a week apart in their lives, with the same concerns and outlook on life. Ludlum puts 5-10 years in between each story, and Bourne's life (and he himself) will have changed a lot from one to the next.

Identity

It all begins with a small fishing village somewhere near Marseille. The drunk of a doctor receives the man who's been found floating in the water, multiple gunshot wounds in his body, a severe one in the head. At once a gentle introduction to the man without a name (who shall be known as Jason Bourne) and a crucial peg in the story - the six months he spends recuperating, off radar; noone knows what happened to him.

The story is played out first in Zurich, then Paris. A thrilling account where little by little, bits and pieces of Jason's life are recovered, and yet the struggle to find himself never stops. In Zurich he takes a hostage in a moment's reflex to blend into the crowd. Her name is Marie, she's an economist from Canada. Everything in Jason's life is unexpected and uncontrolled circumstance. Including Marie, who is to become first his ally and at last his wife.

His identity comes into view slowly, through a haze of disinformation he must fight off. Nothing seems to make sense. Until he learns at the very end that noone knows who he really is precisely because that is how his identity was crafted. As a cover. A fake assassin dispatched to lure the real assassin. Carlos. So well concealed that no intelligence unit can get to him, even locate him.

Carlos becomes his mission, because that is all he knows, all he can remember. But not his real objective, which is to find himself, find the people who cast him in this role. The people who haven't heard from him in six months and think he's turned on them.

The story is so thrilling precisely because he has this terrible disadvantage. Everyone is after him, but he doesn't know their various motives and interests. And yet he has the intuitive skills to hide from them. But there is a symmetry in the situation. Since he doesn't know what he's doing, neither can they predict his actions. He is as incomprehensible to them as they are to him. Except Carlos. Carlos knows him. Not personally, but he understands the thought process, the method of an assassin. And in the end, Bourne lures Carlos to him, but fails to defeat him, nearly losing his life.

Supremacy

Many years have passed since Paris. David and Marie Webb reside in a small town, courtesy of a government protection program. David's memory has not been fully restored, but his mind is whole again, he can live a normal life. Flashes of his life under the name of Jason Bourne still haunt him. And flashes of his even more distant past as the clandestine operative Delta in the Vietnam war do too. But they do not dominate him anymore. Under the supervision of psychiatrist Morris Panov he has recuperated mentally, and his horrible recollections are now a matter of exception.

The happy existence is brutally disturbed. In Hong Kong there is an assassin on the loose, a pretender calling himself Jason Bourne. A kidnapping is staged. Marie disappears. David is forced to chase after her to Hong Kong. He enlists the help of Alex Conklin, an ally from the distant past, and an influential officer in the CIA. But not even Conklin is sufficiently well placed to uncover the plot. A plot hatched by the government to take down this fake Bourne and pump him for information.

David is forced to set aside his quiet life and become Jason again. The chase in Hong Kong, Macau and China is thrilling. At the center of it is one of the most powerful men in China's economy, and government. A Taiwanese who wants to see China's downfall, and the man he has enlisted to propel Hong Kong into chaos, thereby giving China the necessary pretext to make a play for annexation, is the new Jason Bourne. A play that will inevitably put China at conflict with the Western world. In the chaos he perceives a coup, a victory for Taiwan.

The title "supremacy" is descriptive. Bourne is at his best, his body and mind at full throttle. He not only speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese well enough, he navigates the underworld of South East Asia with fluency. And yet he is so utterly alone, not even Marie to guide him with her analytical mind.

Ultimatum

David has aged, he's 50. With a wife and two children now. It is odd that Ludlum has let Carlos rest for a decade since the events in Paris. Now, suddenly he's back, and gunning for Bourne. David's loss of physical athleticism is balanced out a bit, at least he has support from the agency this time. But Carlos out-thinks and out-schemes them all, Bourne is constantly on the defensive.

What was once a political objective to bring down Carlos is now a desperate struggle to protect his family. Bourne isn't as sharp anymore, or as quick. Ludlum has brought him back more desperate, more careless. More people get caught in his crossfire. In the distance there is a group of powerful men conspiring to take control of big business and government. They are the survivors of the once notorious Medusa in Vietnam, the Medusa the man known as Delta was part of. Decades later, they are highly placed officials and businessmen; their operation becomes an imperative for the agency. But their link to Carlos, as Bourne perceived it, is vague.

For Bourne there is only Carlos. They squre off in Montserrat, then in Paris, finally Bourne lures Carlos out of his safe Paris haven and into the Soviet Union. The Soviets want Carlos as badly as everyone else, they still suffer the stain of having trained him as an operative before it became clear to them that he's a psychopath. In Moscow, Bourne enjoys some unprecedented and strictly off the record co-operation with the KGB, courtesy of Conklin's contacts.

Marie is desperate. Not about the threat of Carlos, but about David's mind. He must not let the past take hold of him. And yet she can see how much more it drains him now, the stress and the pursuit. The terror of a strike on his family. But the ultimatum has been thrown down, he doesn't have a choice. Go after Carlos or Carlos will destroy what's most dear to him.

Daniel Dennett is a professor of philosophy. In this tome his primary call to action, as others have also suggested, is that of denouncing the protectonism religion enjoys in our culture. And not in some sort of general sense, but he states concrete suggestions. In the first place to "break the spell" that discourages anyone from discussing or studying religion seriously. In the second place, perhaps, to break away from religion altogether, pending the results of the first step.

The subtitle is "Religion as a natural phenomenon", and that is really what this book is all about. Unlike other authors who examine and critique religion, Dennett wants to explain what religion is and where it came from. He goes at it by seeing religions and religious ideas and practices as memes. This has the immediate consequence of divorcing the matter of a particular religion from its followers; the religion can be studied on its own. By seeing religions as memes we can also understand how most of the world's religions are long since extinct, the memes failed to survive. And what we have left are the most robust and resilient memes, those shaped best by cultural evolution to seduce and entrance us. (Incidentally, there is nothing in the theory of evolution that says transmission must be biological, it may just as well be cultural, I am told.)

Defining religion memetically has another benefit, namely to ask: how is it that religion survives; is it at our benefit (a symbiotic relationship), at our expense (parasitic) or just co-existing neutrally? Dennett does not answer the question (he says philosophers prefer to ask questions rather than answer them), but just by framing it thus he dispels the intuition that surely it must be beneficial to us. Central to this question is his compulsion to ask: who benefits from this meme? A meme is just an idea, a unit of information. A word is a meme. What is it made of? Where does it live? In our minds, or in a book, or in a recording. But it exists strictly separate from us. We can pronounce it, transmit it to others, but who ultimately benefits from that? Is it ourselves, because we need the word to describe something? Ah, but what if we destroy whatever it is (let's say it's an object) the word describes? Well, the word lives on, it may not mean anything, but we can still pronounce it, write it, pass it on. The word exists separately from the thing it describes.

What about a viral video (eg. rickrolling). Those can spread in weeks, or days, on our beloved interwebs. Who benefits from that? Every person who passes it on gets a laugh out of it? Isn't it also true that we are sending it around "because everyone else is doing it"? What does that say about our motive? If we enjoy the video and pass it on, what does it say about the video itself? As a meme, it is one of gazillions of memes, amongst which we have found one in particular that appeals to us. Why did we pick this one to like and not that one? Why did we come up with the elements of Christianity rather than some other bag of memes?

The birth of religion

Dennett suggests that the roots of religion are found in superstition. And the roots of superstition, in turn, are found in our ability to reason about intentions. Our actions, as humans, are motivated by motives, and every human understands this. As such, we tend to mistakenly attribute potentially all actions as intentional, backed by motive. Even when they aren't. If I do something, then it is never without a reason. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why does it rain today? What caused it to rain today? Who caused it to rain? It is just in our nature to be suspicious of intentions, to search for them. Evolutionarily speaking, it must have been a benefit to us to perceive the intentions of humans and animals (even if animals are not driven by motive but merely instinct).

And here is another important idea: the free floating rationale. They are somewhat like laws of physics. We may discover them. But no person invented a law of physics and then set out to put it into practice. That is not in our power, the best we can do is to discover laws that exist. Thus also with natural causes. Why do certain animals exhibit purposefully misleading behavior (eg. the fish that lies flat on the sea bed, waiting to be mistaken for terrain, only to pounce on its prey)? It is not because they reason such, their instincts were just shaped this way in the endless arms race of natural selection. It is a "free floating" explanation, ie. that it "makes sense" (in terms of survival and reproduction) for the fish to disguise itself on the seabed.

And so our instinct to detect intention is a free floating rationale, Dennett says. Even if it causes us to detect intention where there is none (after all, evolution is an extremely imperfect process). And so we concoct this idea that it rains, because someone, somewhere, is doing it. We have other quirks too. We form bonds with people around us. We become accustomed to their presence. But just as it takes time to bond, it also takes time to "disbond". In various circumstances of breaking the bond, we still feel sometimes as if the person is still around. There are times when we think of something to say that the other person would like. Or that we remember their presence and the effect it had on us back then. No wonder that so many superstitions arose centered around the idea of talking to our ancestors. If someone died, and I still feel their presence sometimes, it's as if they were still around, kind of. So perhaps they are? If someone is making it rain and it's noone that I can find, perhaps it's an ancestor?

This is how Dennett sees the beginning of religion, as superstitions arising from life in our surroundings, gradually forming a folklore of beliefs we transmit to one another and our progeny. But then, as these primitive religions evolve, we become increasingly reflective about our beliefs, and what starts out as folklore religion transitions into organized religion.

Gods

Then there is that other thing about religions that is so mystifying: god(s). When people say today that they believe in god, we really have no idea what that really is. The early concept of a god was basically a person with intentions, or not strictly a person, as they did not exist (or had ceased to, if they were our ancestors), but certainly a being in human form. It is crucial that god be a defined in human form, because it is of great interest of us to communicate with this being. A god who is abstract or lifeless cannot be communicated with, and therefore not a particularly captivating god at all (ie. the meme that went extinct).

But the problem is this. Early gods people belived in were in some sense human beings. The Greek gods, the Roman gods, Nordic mythology, that kind of thing. But today there are lots of people who find such a god simplistic and false. (What was wrong with Zeus exactly?) Instead, our idea of "god" has evolved a lot over the centuries. God is not exactly a person, he is some kind of "thing" that we can't understand. Why? Because such a "thing" is much more resistent to refutation. Some "thing" that is mysterious, inexplicable, that doesn't literally live on Mount Olympus, is a more tantalizing and captivating kind of god (meme). Its survival hinges on being inscrutable. Yet other people believe "in god" not as a being at all, but just as a word to describe the inexplicable. So it boils down to this. If you ask people if they "believe in god", a lot of people will say they do, because they feel a certain moral duty to their upbringing and traditions "to believe", but the actual "gods" people supposedly believe in vary wildly.

Do people believe in the god of the Old Testament, the arrogant, selfish, cruel god who craves constant recognition? The capricious and small minded god who punked Moses into killing his own son? The loving god who murdered the entire planet except whoever made it onto the Ark? No, that's a backward and primitive notion of god, god is actually a lot more sophisticated than that. Or is he? Rememeber, god has to remain human in some sense, so that we can speak to him. But our sensibilities are offended by this backward notion of a god, in our civilized society with human rights and gender equality. So who believes in what kind of god we have no idea, but because everyone calls it god, we can maintain this illusion that everyone believes in the same thing. The only thing we know for sure is that it's called "god", whatever it is:

So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.
-- William James

Further, there are memes in certain religions that serve to obscure the idea of god even more, by forbidding depictions of god.

And so, beside those who do believe in god there are many more who believe that "perhaps there is such a thing as god", or those who believe that it's good for people to believe in god, and "wouldn't it be nice if I believed in god". But for cultural and political reasons, all these people are inclined to say they believe in god, even if what they really believe is merely the idea that "belief in god exists".

It is classic Hitchens to examine the unexamined. He says of his endeavor to investigate the life of Mother Teresa that he would rather judge her reputation by her words and actions than to judge the words and actions by her reputation.

It would seem culturally counter intuitive to so much as suggest that Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for starters, isn't entirely equal to the admiration she received in her lifetime and continues to receive posthumously. Hitchens has an explanation for this. He argues wealthy people living comfortable lives in rich countries want to believe that somewhere out there there is someone who is doing something for the poor.

Mother Teresa was self proclaimed for this role, of course. Hitchens paints a picture of a person so consumed by the conviction that for the poor there is glory in suffering that her whole organization is dedicated to enforcing it. Her clinic in Calcutta is void of appropriate medical equipment, despite the fact that through the numerous donations to her cause she would have amassed the funds to upgrade it.

Essentially, Hitchens says that Mother Teresa is using the poor and the suffering to power her operation, a sort of "poverty in practice". Her aim is not to empower the poor to propel them out of poverty, or even to end their suffering, but rather for them to endure their poverty and suffering, for such is the will of god. All the while preaching the strictest of Catholic doctrine. We know that Jesus devoted his end to suffering, although whether he was a real person or merely a philosophical character is not established. Mother Teresa, then, was dedicated to a reenactment of sorts through the poor in her clinic, who had no power to refuse.

It is a rather different view on the world renowned character, for which Christopher Hitchens unsurprisingly received much criticism. Is it because he is twisting the facts or because we in this world are so unwilling to blemish the image of someone who was supposed to be through and through noble?

Cory Doctorow published this book in 2008, both online freely and in dead tree format. It's a (mildly) futuristic story in a time when a lot of privacy battles have already been lost. Security cameras in school tracking people, cameras on the streets, tracking people through rfids in their cars and their mass transit tickets. Then a terrorist attack occurs. National security is elevated immensely.

Doctorow is doing two things. He is setting the stage for a thorough tutorial on how to use anonymizing technologies and he keeps elevating the plot to keep introducing new methods and ideas. As a technologist connoseur he isn't forced to make up things that aren't realistic and embarrass himself. In fact, he doesn't seem tempted to invent anything, which is a bit odd for a futuristic story, he's basing the account on technologies we already know today. (Although tunneling a video stream over DNS is a bit far fetched on our current bandwidth.)

Secondly, he's trying to educate about the threats that we see today and the already existing encroachment on civil liberties. Not in a preachy way, but it's part of the message. He will digress occasionally to tell a story from history. He does well to integrate this into a captivating story.

Although it seems similar at first, it isn't Fleming and it isn't Ludlum, in a high school story. Little Brother is about normal people who face predictable consequences, no miracles included. Doctorow isn't trying to craft characters who seem impossible, he likes it down to earth. I have a hunch that sections of it are auto biographical as well.

In closing, I tip my hat to Jürgen Geuter, who turned me onto Doctorow's other 2008 book Content a few weeks ago, a collection of essays about security, privacy, and freedom.