I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

Nick Kristof features an amazing woman in his NYT column today:  Hawa Abdi, the 63-year-old Somali doctor and lawyer who has confronted armed hard-line militias running rampant in the near-anarchy of Somalia’s disintegration – and, backed by the outrage of the vast Muslim majority worldwide, forced the extremists to back down.

Dr Abdi and her daughter were the two doctors I wanted so much more of in my recent review of Eliza Griswold’s ‘The Tenth Parallel,’  Here’s part of why, on page 139 of Griswold’s book:

The hill on which we were standing was a mass grave.

‘We buried ten thousand and seventy-eight bodies here,’ Dr Abdi told me as we cut through the press of new arrivals and picked our way down the steep slope to the place she euphemistically called the neo-natal ward:  a cracked veranda where half a dozen babies lay dying of chronic diarrhea, which is treatable.  Abdi stuffed her worn hands into the frayed pockets of her white lab coat.  When I first visited in June 2007, twenty thousand people had fled to her farm for safety;  when I returned in April 2008, that number had quadrupled to eighty thousand.

As the Somalian government collapsed, famine struck, and foreign aid workers fled literally for their lives, the one-room women’s clinic Dr Abdi opened in 1983 became a 400-bed hospital, and her 1,300 acres of farmland on a hill outside Mogadishu became a refuge for those displaced by the famine and violence.

Then this past May, the extremist Hizb al-Islam (Party of Islam), angry at the very idea of a woman running the place, ordered her to hand it over.  She refused.  They attacked, with 750 soldiers, and seized the hospital.

But here’s the turning point:  the world’s Somalis reacted, rightly, with outrage.  And their outrage – and that of Muslims worldwide – shamed the Islamist militia into backing down.  Dr Abdi could run the hospital under their direction, they said.

Again, she refused, demanding that the extremists withdraw completely.  More than that, she demanded an apology from them, in writing, for having wrecked the hospital.

A week later, they did just that.

Here’s how Kristof concludes his column:

What a woman! And what a Muslim! It’s because of people like her that sweeping denunciations of Islam, or the “Muslim hearings” planned in Congress, rile me — and seem profoundly misguided.

The greatest religious battles are often not between faiths, but within faiths. The widest gulfs are often not those that divide one religion from the next, but those between extremists and progressives within a single faith. And in this religious season, there’s something that we can all learn from the courage, compassion and tolerance of Dr. Hawa Abdi.

But here’s where I disagree with Kristof:  This is not between extremists on one side and progressives on the other.  It is, I think, between extremists and the vast majority of Muslims:  the one and a half billion believers, including both mainstream and progressives, whose moderation – exactly as advocated in the Quran itself — never makes the headlines.

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For more on Dr Abdi (Kristof refers to her as Dr Hawa, Griswold as Dr Abdi),  altmuslimah says it has a fuller profile in the works.

Huge subject, small space:  The Seattle Times asked me to review Eliza Griswold’s ‘The Tenth Parallel’ — in only 600 words.   Still, am glad I said yes.   The review ran Sunday, but edited further for space, so here’s the full version:

“Islam versus the West” is part of the over-heated political rhetoric now sweeping the United States.  Over-heated, and wrong.  In the past two decades, the two faiths have clashed most intensely and bloodily in neither the West nor the Middle East, but in Africa and southeast Asia.

Few westerners, if any, know this territory as well as Eliza Griswold.  Tracing what she calls the fault line between the two faiths across the tenth parallel, the line of latitude some 700 miles north of the Equator, she points out that it’s home to more than half of the world‘s Muslims and sixty percent of its Christians.  And then she takes us deep inside the fault line.

At Jakarta airport she waits to meet a jihadi killer fresh out of electroshock and waterboarding in an Indonesian prison, watching as he eases through security with two live rabbits in a cardboard box, a gift for his as-yet unseen newborn son.

She shares a helicopter with the commander of US forces in the Philippines as he talks about “the gee-watt” – military-speak for the Global War on Terror.  Then she calmly looks at how “the gee-watt” has destroyed entire economies (as when the US shut down the main company in Somalia’s trust-based hawala money-transfer system on suspicion of being linked to Al Qaeda, when in fact Al Qaeda financed 9/11 by wire transfers through Florida’s Sun Trust Bank).

She listens as a 71-year-old motorcycle-riding priest in the Philippines documents the Catholic paramilitary gangs killing in the name of Christ while doing the government’s dirty work with US-supplied arms.  “If this is what the war on terror is,” he says, “then it’s about terrorizing the people.”

She meets one of Somalia’s most notorious US-backed warlords, a man “with thick well-oiled curls and double-wide girth” whose thugs fleece his own population into abject poverty.  Goes on night patrol with the Vice and Virtue Squad in Indonesia’s Banda Aceh, site of the disastrous tsunami on Christmas Eve 2004,  as they enforce a strict Islamic morals code.  Even kneels down to pray with Franklin Graham – Billy junior – whose cold-blooded evangelism helps stoke the conflict.

Yet throughout, Griswold emphasizes that religion is not the cause of conflict, but its manipulated rationale.  From Nigeria to the Philippines, she shows how the battle for power and resources has been cynically cast as a battle between faiths, with the faithful used as self-destructive pawns to enrich the powerful:  hopelessly corrupt politicians, ruthlessly violent warlords, flamboyantly wealthy evangelicals and Pentacostalists, hard-core Islamist extremists, and (one almost wants to say ‘of course’) the CIA, one of whose top Cold War operatives planned to ‘win’ Africa in the 1950’s and 60’s by using Islam against Communism.  As his son tells Griswold:  “Manipulating religious conviction was part of what my father liked to call his bag of dirty tricks.  He saw religion as an ideal cold war weapon.”

Griswold writes beautifully, but all this makes ‘The Tenth Parallel’ a hard book to read.  The scope is overwhelming, and yet at the same time it’s not enough.   I wanted to spend more time with nearly every figure who appears in these pages – with the women doctors in a refugee camp, the insurgent commanders, the tortured jihadi now selling herbal remedies, even that well-oiled double-wide rapacious warlord.

In fact I wish Griswold had written not one but two books:  one on Africa, one on Asia.  Using the tenth parallel to “pull the book together,” as editors say, is a bit of a stretch – here and there, you feel her straining to make the fit — and it’s not necessary.  When a reporter is this sharp and insightful, has won as many awards as Griswold, and writes this well, any reader worth his or her salt will follow her wherever she goes.