Rav Grewal-Kök’s intriguing novel seems intent on unsettling us from its opening pages, with coolly precise prose that sneaks nimbly around the periphery of its characters’ darkest thoughts and actions. In that sense, you might say that this accomplished debut, “The Snares,” has adopted the techniques of the world it depicts — a realm of shadowy intelligence dominions where even the deadliest actions are carried out with calm detachment.
We view this world largely through the eyes of Neel Chima, who, as the son of Punjabi Sikh immigrants, has never felt fully accepted by America even after graduating from an Ivy, serving as a naval officer, marrying a patrician young woman from the Beltway suburbs, and becoming a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice.
As a federal prosecutor, he catches the attention of two mysterious schemers deep within the C.I.A., who see in Neel a bright young man with yearnings and vulnerabilities that might be leveraged to make him do their bidding, even when their plans go beyond the usual moral and legal boundaries of clandestine service.
They engineer his hiring as a deputy director of the Freedom Center, which, with its newness, vague powers and bunkerlike headquarters in Northern Virginia, feels like a fictional version of the National Counterterrorism Center, an agency created in 2004.
The book is set about seven years after 9/11, in the final months of the George W. Bush administration and the first term of President Barack Obama, who, in attempting to establish his toughness against foreign adversaries, liberally employed some of the deadliest tools at his disposal, especially drones.
At the Freedom Center, Neel is expected to assess and identify worthy targets for those strikes. His sponsors’ stated goal for Neel — to build the Freedom Center’s influence with the White House by orchestrating high-value killings — comes with its own emotional costs, which weigh heavily on him from the beginning. But it is their enlistment of Neel in even more sensitive plans — involving targets on U.S. soil — that alerts him to the depths of the morass he has entered, especially after they entrap him with a compromising event designed to keep him more firmly under their thumb.
In chronicling Neel’s descent, Grewal-Kök offers us vivid glimpses into one room after another of push-button remote warriors, not just the trailers in the Nevada desert where crews pilot drones thousands of miles away, but also the cavernous operations chambers of the Freedom Center, where Neel’s commands play out on video screens with horrifying results. Richer still is the author’s depiction of rival agencies as they compete for influence, at war with one another as bitterly as with their enemies abroad.
Grewal-Kök’s icily clean prose is one of the novel’s greatest strengths, yet also its most off-putting feature. While delivering the necessary chill with such precision, at times he holds us at arm’s length from his characters. Neel often does the same with everyone in his orbit, including his wife and children, and only heightens this distancing effect. Some of the book’s most oddly intimate scenes occur when Neel encounters other dark-skinned players within his world of secrets. In those moments, a code seems to arise organically between them, allowing them to finally speak freely of the hurdles and barriers they have faced since birth.
The ending, arising with a jarring suddenness, feels like a bit of a puzzle — either a hapless stab at redemption or a surrender posing as resistance. But the chill, at least, is finally gone.
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