The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern Age by Iain Overton

On 24^thOctober 1990, members of the Provisional IRA forced their way into the home of Patrick Gillespie, a Catholic who worked as a cook at the Fort George British Army Base. The IRA had warned him to stop working at the base, considering his work to make him guilty of collaboration. Now he had ignored their warnings, they forced him into a van laden with explosives, chained him to the driver’s seat and with his family held at gunpoint in his home, ordered him to drive the van to an army checkpoint on the border with the Republic. When he arrived at the checkpoint, Gillespie tried to free himself from the van and warn the soldiers, but the explosives had been wired to explode should the door be opened, and he and five soldiers died in the ensuing explosion. This was one of three “proxy” bombs - forced suicide bombings in effect - that the IRA carried out during the Troubles. More were planned but the outrage was such that the IRA abandoned the tactic.

The IRA’s experiment with forced suicide bombing is just a footnote in the history of suicide bombing more broadly, and when compared with the wave of suicide bombings to wreak havoc throughout the Middle East down the years, for example, it hardly bears mentioning. A lesser writer, a more insubstantial treatment of the phenomena that is suicide bombing, would have ignored it entirely. But the author is nothing if not thorough and his latest book The Price of Paradise is nothing if not detailed and comprehensive and so it appears within its pages. As does a wealth of other fascinating, albeit sometimes grisly, and oftentimes deeply depressing, information.

The Price of Paradise traces suicide bombing from its earliest roots in Tsarist Russia, when the People’s Will group decided to assassinate Tsar Alexander 11, one of its members opting to ensure success by blowing himself up in close proximity to his target. While there had been suicidal and sacrificial acts in war before, this was the first time someone had explicitly opted to die in such a manner, laying down their own life to ensure that they take the enemy with them. The phenomenon was only to spread from there, leapfrogging to the Far East where both Japanese and Chinese forces used such tactics against each other. And then came the Kamikaze, the tactic of the Imperial Japanese Army against the superior American naval power. The chapter the author dedicates to the Kamikaze is eye-opening in itself, the author arguing convincingly that the tactic and its psychological impact goes someway to explaining why President Truman felt it necessary to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a recurring theme that runs throughout the narrative: that suicide bombing inevitable leads to overreaction and punitive response and while sometimes, as in Japan in the Second World War, this might end the conflict (albeit with massive and horrific loss of life), all too often it creates further resentment and thus sparks further violence and attacks. 

The Price of Paradise traces the tactic onwards from here to its embrace by a perhaps surprising range of often diametrically opposed forces. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, a Tamil nationalist group; Shia Iran in its war with Sunni Islam; Shia Hezbollah, Marxist militia and Christian Phalangists in the Lebanon; now Sunni extremist groups throughout the Middle East. All these factions, implacably opposed to each other, have each embraced the tactic. For example, in the 1980’s when Shia Iran began using it, waves of Iranian fighters throwing themselves against the better armed Iraqi forces, one might have been forgiven for assuming suicide bombing to be peculiar to that branch of Islam. And certainly, when the Ayatollah Khomeini was the West’s bogeyman, that was indeed the lazy assumption. But while Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah still utilise the tactic, it is now groups from the Sunni tradition, al Qaeda and ISIS, who are perhaps the worst culprits.    

As explicitly made clear in the book’s sub-heading, the author’s thesis is that suicide bombing and states’ reactions to it have shaped the world and it is difficult to argue with this thesis. The biggest suicide bombing the world has ever seen was 9/11 and no one could honestly argue that this single incident changed the course of human history, leading as it did to the invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting never-ending war that that country remains, and the Bush Administration’s calamitous decision to invade Iraq. But this was no exception and the history of the effects of suicide bombing - the bombings themselves and the reactions to them - have been in microcosm what occurred after 9/11, real impacts have been felt. Laws have been changed, freedoms have been lost, and Islamophobia in particular has spread. 

As with the author’s previous work, a study of the impact of small arms titled Gun Baby Gun, underpinning The Price of Paradise is a wealth of facts, statistics and fascinating anecdotes. Many non-fiction titles have endnotes, all too often they add nothing to the book, but with The Price of Paradise they’re essential, adding intricate detail to what is found in the main body of the text. If I have one criticism of this book it is that it has no index, an oversight that I find inexplicable, for there’s simply so much here that the reader might want to refer back to that really an index feels to me that it should be essential.

That said, this is a minor quibble as I can’t see anyone writing a better history of the phenomena that is suicide bombing in a long while. Essential reading, this is definitely a book worthy of 5 stars.