Radicalisation

More than 80 years after it ended, we are still living through the aftermath of the second world war. When people use the word ‘postwar’ they invariably mean this war and the changes it wrought upon international relations, trade, economics, domestic politics, social values and much more besides. Yet it remains all too easy, certainly in the English-speaking world, to cleave to a rather parochial view of that conflict as something that ended up spreading to lots of exotic places while still ultimately concerning the great battle between good and evil that was the Allies vs the Nazis. Can there be any corner of Hitler’s psyche, any charming detail of the home front in Britain, which remains unprobed in books, TV programmes and museum exhibits?

Twins are literary dynamite. For writers, they’re perfect for thrashing out notions of free will, the pinballing of cause and effect and fate’s arbitrariness. One twin reflects the other, darkly: living proof of the road not taken, the life not lived. In Maryse Condé’s The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana this point is rather laboured — literally, as we first meet the titular pair when they are dragged from the ‘warm and tranquil abode’ of their mother’s womb. They emerge bawling into contemporary Guadeloupe, where their mother Simone ‘works herself to the bone in the sugarcane fields’. Things don’t improve much when they seek their fortunes abroad, first in Mali, then in France.

Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes, travelled to Syria to join Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist militia and one of the main jihadist groups fighting the Syrian army. A dozen more young people from Brighton were also eager to go. Radicalisation had swept through the group like a ‘contagion’, catching parents and police unawares and baffling counter-extremism experts. In his disturbing No Return, Mark Townsend traces the various hidden causes of the Deghayes case, events that he claims ‘transformed the entire approach of the government’s counter-extremism programme, both in policy and ideology’.