By Assaf GavronFourth Estate, £12.99.
Croc-Attack! is the story of two ordinary men born into the powder keg of Israel-Palestine. Eitan Enoch - known as Croc - is a feckless, 33-year-old salesman stuck in an unsatisfying relationship and a redundant-sounding job reclaiming "dead seconds" for businesses. By slicing time off directory enquiries calls, his firm's software can allegedly save companies thousands of dollars per day. This "solution" is presented as a typical product of the febrile Israeli atmosphere, an atmosphere in which Croc escapes, by the narrowest of whiskers, first one, then several terrorist attacks. He is swiftly made a national hero.
Alternating with this narrative is the story of Fahmi, a degraded, angry, idealistic, weary Palestinian, struggling for his life in an Israeli hospital, following his own, failed suicide attack. Though apparently trapped in a coma, Fahmi remains sentient, and his reminiscences are juxtaposed with his reactions to Svetlana, the nurse who tends to him.
Fahmi's internal rage - "you goddamned Jewish whore" - soon gives way to yearning - "Oh, Svet. I need your fingers" - in a darkly comic allegory of what might happen if only we were nicer to each other. Svet, meanwhile, becomes convinced that docile, silent Fahmi may just be "the perfect man".
As Fahmi's story unfolds, it becomes clear that Croc was the intended target, and Croc's own trajectory is plotted into the path of this calamity. Croc's first brush with death leads him on a detective mission to uncover information about another of the terrorist victims, and this strand chivvies the story along nicely. So, too, does the emergence of Croc's shrugging acceptance of daily life while everyone around him dissolves into hysteria.
Shunted on to a right-wing talkshow to glorify his apparent refusal to "give in" to the terrorists, Croc is merely embarrassed: "I didn't know the first thing about politics".
Fahmi would doubtless love the option of such apathy, and Gavron draws a credible, ultimately sympathetic portrait of the bomber's coming-of-age. "All my people are looking for are peace and freedom", he protests, before imagining the disappointment of his saintly father, who would rather suffer mutely than lash out in violence.
But, while Croc's story maintains its momentum, there is something jarring about Fahmi's, and the coma device doesn't convince. Moreover, Croc-Attack! ultimately suffers from its emphasis on circumspection. There is a muted quality to the prose (translated from the Hebrew by Gavron and James Lever).
Still, as a piece of political fiction, Croc-Attack! scores highly, bringing empathy and universality to what is all too often a polemicised, dehumanised, ticking bomb of a topic.
