A Day And A Night And A Day
Glen Duncan
ECCO (HarperCollins), Jan 6 2009, $24.95
ISBN: 0061239992

They are both Americans linked forever in their respective minds by the Global War on Terrorism. They perform a dance ritual several times a day, but in a part of America not within the fifty states. Instead operative Harper tortures alleged terrorist Rose in a dark cell in the pits of Guantanamo expecting to extract information like a dentist taking out a tooth without Novocain.

The African-Italian Rose expects to die here because the CIA and White House can hide the fact they have tortured an American citizen at Gitmo. Up until his snatch he was a Manhattan restaurant owner with a past. Rose thinks back to the 1950s growing up in Harlem where he was condemned for his Italian paternal roots leading a decade later to Merkete easily recruiting him as a soldier in her "vigilante democracy" movement, which the Americans called terrorism. He remembers 1968 when he was twenty-one and in love with Selina; thirty years later she died in a Barcelona bombing. Finally he is old and alone expecting death once again while on some bleak British island; but even there he is pulled back into the violence of humanity when he meets a girl.

This is a fascinating character study that condemns the legacy of torture accepted by Americans as a standard operating procedure regardless of the information obtained or the victim's worth. Although Rose is the prime star, he shines when he is compared with Harper as Glen Duncan digs deep into each of their souls to uncover what motivates a terrorist and an inquisitioner to act the way they do: Intriguingly each claims the moral high ground of their end objective condoning the means they use. The Selina and the post-Gitmo subplots are also well written; but it is comparing the inspirations of the two antagonistic Americans that turns this into a terrific intelligent look at a world that has become anesthetized to genocide, terrorism, and torture.

Harriet Klausner