Sami Amir, the protagonist of Salar Abdoh's debut novel, The Poet Game, is hardly your run-of-the-mill spook. The son of an American mother and an unknown Iranian father, raised in a Catholic orphanage outside of Tehran, and fluent in English, he has, until recently, made his living as a translator for an operation known as "the Office." Sami's employer is an ultrasecret organization that monitors the actions of the Iranian military and intelligence services in an effort to undercut the influence of hard-line Islamic extremists in the government. To this end, it has sent Sami into the field--to New York, in fact--to thwart an act of terrorism.
Pretending to be an operative for an organization known as Section 19, our man from Tehran must infiltrate a bizarre world of Islamic militants, mad-bomber wannabes, reluctant middlemen, and one or two guys who might even be the real deal. Between the Libyans, Palestinians, Pakistanis, and odd-ball American black Moslems, it's getting hard to keep track of the players--and their differing agendas--without a scorecard. Then Sami's contact from the Office shows up and confuses matters even more. An American, a woman, a poet and part-time stripper--and possibly a double agent--Ellena is not what he was expecting. As Sami penetrates deeper into the labyrinthine world of Middle Eastern politics, he is also drawn reluctantly into a love affair with her--a relationship he characterizes as "two failed poets trying to get it right in the wrong trade."
Salar Abdoh is aiming high with The Poet Game--a spy story that is more than just a thriller, a noir novel that transcends pulp fiction. If, at times, the plot becomes overly convoluted and suffers from one double-double-cross too many, Abdoh's elegant prose and deft characterization make up for it. Sami might be a failed poet, but he is no romantic when it comes to his profession: "For what was any of this but another means of making a living--no different really than performing open-heart surgery or collecting garbage at night." And in the end, it is this sad, clear-eyed vision of himself and his world that makes Sami Amir's fate worth caring about. --Sheila Bright
Abdoh, born in Iran and now teaching English at the City College of New York, has written what may be the first-ever novel about militant Islamic terrorism in the United States. Unexpectedly, perhaps, this is not a page-turning story of intrigue and drama, but a roman noir full of layers of complication and brooding introspection.
The plot: Sami is dispatched by a super-secret intelligence agency in Iran to New York to infiltrate the terrorist rings in America. His purpose - and here begins the noir part - is not to help them attack U.S. targets but to prevent them from doing so. His agency has determined that if bombs go off in Manhattan, the U.S. forces will be patrolling the Persian Gulf and making life difficult for the Islamic Republic of Iran, so those bombs must be stopped. Sami presents himself as a terrorist and gets caught up in confusing rings of Iranian, Arab, and American agents. Trouble is, his confusion rapidly becomes the reader's too and it quickly becomes overly-burdensome to follow who is who and working for whom in Abdoh's shadowy world, especially as it does not seem all that serious. Guns go off and lives are lost, but it is more surreal than horrifying (Sami's ally was "as unfazed by his goon's dying as if the man had been lying there in his own pool blood for recreation").
There is another problem with Abdoh's story: as he understands it, the motive force for terrorism on U.S. soil comes from countries like Iran and Libya, ignoring the important development that this violence now derives primarily from American-based sources, not foreign ones. So the story is not just hard to follow, but it does not correspond all that well to reality. In all then, though sophisticated and competently written, The Poet Game is neither a page-turner nor an insight into Islamist violence in America.
In the current climate of concern about Terrorism, Abdoh's 2001 book almost seems prophetic. Basically, a Iranian counter-terrorism agent goes to New York to investigate a conspiracy. Double-crosses and triple-crosses soon come, and Sami is in a game where rival Iranian originzations use him to further their own power. The ending was a bit of a let-down, which is why I wouldn't recommend this book.
I will say this book is non stop, and most of all very fun. It can be a little complex, but very non stop where Iwill admit I did not put the book down at all. Good Job
