Mao II

Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Sentex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's. An extraordinary novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II explores a world in which the novelist's power to influence the inner life of a culture now belongs to bomb-makes and gunmen.