A maze of revenge in Somalia

Although most Americans couldn't find Somalia on a map, they all share one clear mental image of the African country: the mutilated body of an Army Ranger being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The United States had arrived in late 1992 on a humanitarian mission called Restore Hope. Sixteen months later, after bitter humiliation and a new lesson on the complications of intervention, it retreated.

Mark Bowden placed the infamous helicopter battle in Mogadishu at the center of his bestselling book, "Black Hawk Down," a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999. A popular Hollywood version followed two years later.

Now comes a very different treatment of that conflict from Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah. Whereas Bowden's journalistic approach tried to untangle the complexities of Mogadishu, Farah's new novel, "Links," aims to convey a sense of the city's impenetrable ambiguity. And while the movie, with its Oscar-winning soundtrack, brought viewers smack into the grit of battle, Farah raises us into a haze of muffled alliances and conflicted values. That approach involves considerable risks, particularly for Americans, who may want their books, like their military interventions, well defined with clear exit strategies, but Farah plays to an international audience.

"Links" concerns a Somali named Jeebleh who's come back after 20 years of exile in the United States. Mogadishu holds few pleasant memories for him; he spent his last years there in prison. He watched the American intervention on TV from the comfort of his home in New York City, and later he received word of his mother's death through the mail. He might not have ever gone back, but when a Somali taxi driver in New York almost ran him over, the irony of that close call inspired him to visit his war-torn country, "a land where demons never took a break."

He arrives full of apprehension, "certain that at a conscious level he was not sufficiently prepared for the shocks in store for him." On cue, while he's collecting his bags, a group of armed youths drive by, place bets, and shoot into the new arrivals, killing a 10-year-old boy.

But what interests Farah in this novel is not so much the horror of these random acts of violence, which form the background radiation of life in Mogadishu, but the psychological effects of living in chaos. "Distrust was the order of the day," Farah writes, "and everyone was suspicious of everybody else." For people trapped in such a place, the result is a permanently unsettled sense of apprehension, worse even, Farah suggests, than the rule of a cruel dictator.

Jeebleh seeks out his old friend, Dr. Bile, a pacifist who runs The Refuge, a haven in a city torn between warring clans. Bile's niece, a young woman with a mystic aura of peace and "a face as ancient as the roots of a baobab," has recently disappeared, and Bile suspects his evil stepbrother may have kidnapped her. Jeebleh decides to find the girl himself, but he quickly discovers that, like everything in this country, her disappearance is not what it seems.

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