In dynamite fishermen, set in Beirut, Lebanon, in the early 1980s, Preston Fleming depicts irresponsible violence as a way of life, seen from the perspective of an American intelligence officer and his local contacts. The few months of the story fall during something of a lull in the long Lebanese civil war; a period plagued by almost daily car bombings, civilian shootings, artillery attacks and other mayhem shortly before open warfare. Some of the bloody civil war is in the past, but much of the turmoil across the Arab world, though foreshadowed, is yet to come.
For a work of fiction, the story is a lot like a history book. The complexities of the endless Arab-Israeli and inter-Arab conflicts are manifesting themselves in small clashes across Beirut. Muslims, Christians and secular Lebanese coexist in a strange dance of sometimes tolerance and sometimes violence with each other. The masses of displaced Palestinians in Lebanon are determined enemies of Israel, while acting in a phase that tends to seek solutions, but the seeds of renewed violence begin to flourish. The war between Iran and Iraq is in its beginning. Syria exerts constant pressure against Lebanon, and Israel is in conflict with the whole world. All of them are active in Lebanon, making it a microcosm of the entire Middle East.
Conrad Prosser is the central observer of this drama. As an American intelligence agent, conversant in the Arabic language and culture, his routine in the face of chaos is to meet with his local contacts and gather any news that helps analyze the dynamics of overlapping conflicts. Clues to the future are in his reports, but the actual future cannot be reliably predicted. Prosser meets with various sources of information on him, and each meeting exposes the random violence of moving around Beirut. Except for the traditional exuberant gunshots, violence usually means something to someone, and it’s Prosser’s job to sort out the factions and their targets. His constant exposure to violence has left him with a fatalistic attitude of relying on statistics to survive, because there’s really nothing anyone can do in Beirut to truly be safe.
Prosser’s relations with his sources are necessarily impersonal, despite the brotherly cultural facade. Any of her sources are likely to be targeted for retaliation, if the information provided leads to some kind of intervention or countermeasure. Her relations with women are no better. Ultimately, she has no real purpose except to survive and do her job, and the women in her life are invariably involved in her job in some way.
It is difficult to identify the plot in dynamite fishermen. In the end, the answer seems to be that there are many threads that need to be woven into the reader’s mind. Prosser survives assassination attempts, gathers volumes of information, witnesses the downfall of many of his sources, as well as the breakup of some of the opposing factions; but the violence continued as if none of that mattered. The reader, aware of the upcoming conflicts in the Middle East, can see the evidence in Prosser’s reports, but the real future is hidden from the participants in the book. In the end, Prosser likens his efforts to the methods of local fishermen, who blow up dynamite underwater to kill large numbers of fish, but are only able to collect a few to sell on the market. The results of Prosser’s work seem equally meager to him in comparison with the human costs. The book paints a picture of politics and private agendas that will be interesting to readers following the intricate conflicts in the Middle East.
As much of the detail of this conflict reverberates in today’s issues, the novelty of characters juxtaposed within factual events provides a memorable story for the fictional people who have shaped history and provided direction for peace. global, or lack thereof. Cleverly written with details unfamiliar to many, the place and time that has created the story are set as a backdrop for the lives of the characters, culminating in a gripping page turner and memorable story.