"A Day and a Night and a Day" by Glen Duncan

Having read one of Glen Duncan's earlier efforts, the charming if uneven "I, Lucifer," I felt justified in taking a chance on his newest book "A Day and a Night and a Day." Let's start with the most important thing- Duncan can flat-out write. His narrative jerks the reader around as he spools out information in much the same fashion as his protagonist, Augustus Rose. It is a wholly remarkable work.

Rose is an American, part of a shadowy network of what are best described as "vigilante terrorists" who has, for personal reasons, spent years infiltrating a group of Muslim extremists in Spain in the wake of a terrorist bombing in Barcelona. But this is not a thriller. Rose's involvement in this organization is merely the device to set up the key relationships in the book: between him and the love of his life, Selina; and between him and a man called Harper. Harper is another American, in the employ of the government, whose job it is to get information from Rose about the organization by whatever means.

This is not a story about Rose's torment, although it is. Nor is it a misplaced cri de coeur against torture. Indeed, Duncan seems to understand that, as Harper puts it, we always choose our atrocities. This is about the peculiar relationship that springs up between a torturer and his victim, about the places the victim goes to escape the pain, and about what is left to a victim who by a fluke survives and must continue with the knowledge of what he has endured.

Fiction works best when it is truer than nonfiction. For the few fantastic elements of this book, it works because it is more real somehow than news coverage of torture. There are amazing insights into the forces that motivate extremists of all stripes. "A Day and a Night and a Day" is as powerful a statement about the consequences of human action , and as strong an indictment of man's cruelty to man, as you are likely to read.