One consequence of our turbulent times is that art and literature are being keenly scrutinized in the light of politics, and these complex, often convulsive, politics are throwing up strange bedfellows, complicating the act of interpretation. Take the Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal, and the American President, Donald Trump, for instance, and the warnings both men have issued about Islamic fundamentalism. In Sansal’s dystopian novel 2084: The end of the world (unabashedly based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) the narrator wonders how he can reach back in time to warn people about the catastrophe of totalitarianism that is about to befall them. Set in a future when the clocks have stopped, and following a Great Holy War, an authoritarian theocracy (resembling Isis, though never named as such) has taken control of the planet. Abistan is now the only country in existence, Abilang the only language spoken. Religious pilgrimages traverse…
