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A graduate student named Helen interviews Chaim, a Jewish extremist who’s convinced he’s descended from Albert Einstein and is seeking powerful weapons because he hopes to bring about an apocalypse. Emma, niece to the Archbishop of Canterbury, flirts and feuds with a volatile atheist named Jack who delivers pompous lectures on the absurdities of religion. People throughout the world are puzzled by the sudden appearance of an intelligent child who speaks in many languages and warns, “Death or peace. Peace or death. We must choose.”
When a helicopter carrying the Child is blown apart by a handheld missile in the skies over Jerusalem, the news of his death prompts the Archbishop to announce a “Grand Religious Summit” where the leaders of various faiths will make a nonbinding statement concerning the need for peace on earth. Meanwhile, a perky but naïve Christian missionary named Betsey is kidnapped by the Taliban, who are keen to acquire a nuclear device. A conspiracy is brewing to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque in the hopes of igniting a global war.
Many writers imagine that they’re funny; Hanna truly is. This is not a conventional genre novel with one-dimensional heroes battling terrorists in the Middle East, where the stakes are the end of life on earth. Nothing in the book goes as expected. It reads at times more like a spoof of airport thrillers—a wicked work of satire in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller. The subplot involving the Child and his inglorious demise is wonderfully demented and darkly comical. Much of the humor is character-based, as in a scene where a criminal breaks into the Archbishop’s house through a window, then awkwardly leaves. This is a remarkably well-crafted novel, quirky and strange, bold in its vision and assured in its narrative voice.