SOURCE: "Dogs," in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 3, February 11, 1993, p. 19.

In the following review of Inshallah, Bennett assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Fallaci's portrayal of war-torn Beirut.

Set in Beirut in the early Eighties, Oriana Fallaci's novel [Inshallah] opens at the moment when, on the morning of 23 October 1983, an Islamic Jihad militant drove a truck laden with explosives into the headquarters of the US contingent of the Multinational Force (MNF). A second suicide bomber attacked the French military base at the same time. Altogether more than three hundred servicemen were killed.

The Americans and French had returned to the city the previous year, along with a body of Italian troops, after the catastrophic Israeli invasion of the Lebanon. The MNF's presence was highly controversial and subject to conflicting interpretations. Its self-proclaimed goal was vague and, with hindsight, absurdly optimistic: to protect the innocent from slaughter and...