Human face of terrorism

Four years ago, with America's attention focused on the unfolding Monica Lewinsky scandal, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were hit by al Qaeda terrorists. It was, of course, the start of something far bigger.

As US Under-Secretary of State Thomas Pickering said, with some prescience, shortly afterwards, "In life, there is no perfect security. There may well be more such strikes."

Novelist Giles Foden was in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam at the time of the bombings, and has chosen to make the attacks, and their background, the subject for his new book. It is a rich, complex and immensely satisfying story: the glamorous Miranda Powers, newly graduated from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and now on the staff of the US embassy in Dar; Nick Karolides, a marine biologist working on coral-reef protection off the Zanzibar coast; the al Qaeda recruits; the "Sheikh" himself, Osama bin Laden and a host of smaller, but no less convincing, characters. Certainly it owes more than a passing debt to Ian Fleming, but is - notwithstanding the Bond-style powerboat chase - a considered and subtle book, full of humour, wisdom and beauty.

The novel is ambitious, and operates on many levels. Woven into the thriller plot is a love story, and some wonderful travel writing - Foden is sparing with description, but knows when to deliver the perfect detail: sand "as soft as talc"; applause which sounds like "frightened pigeons"; a crab "the size and colour of a baseball glove". In the aftermath of the bombing, a man's face is "clown-like with dust". In Foden's hands, the African landscape is vibrant, alive: dusk skies, an approaching cyclone, languorous sunsets.

Occasionally, his descriptions are also startlingly comic. A homeless woman, he writes, "smelled of bonfires and urine and looked weirdly like Madeleine Albright".

Like his previous two books - The Last King of Scotland, which drew a portrait of the reign of Idi Amin through the eyes of his personal physician, and Ladysmith, which dramatised the 118-day siege of the small South African town by Boer forces at the end of the 19th century - Zanzibar, which places fictional characters in the midst of real events, is meticulously researched.

At points, however, the weight of his knowledge threatens to swamp the narrative: there are pages devoted to the media coverage of the bombings, with verbatim quotes from the TV correspondents. "'Back to you, Peter.' 'Thanks, Wendy. Now over to William Cohen at the Pentagon,' cued the anchorman." As he began Zanzibar, with 9/11 still some way off, Foden can have had no idea how compelling his material would prove. Now, though, the lines from the Koran that pepper the al Qaeda sections of the narrative, his meditations on the nature of religious belief and descriptions of the inner workings of the US security machine all have new potency and fascination. Foden's fiction is so convincing that it is hard not to feel that you are reading the "real" inside story. In his hands, terrorists are no longer caricatures of fundamentalist evil, but men whose actions seem understandable, who exist in three dimensions.