A Cause Untrue by David Blacker is a fast-paced action read. It is a gripping account of an Air Canada plane hijack by the Liberation Tamil Tiger Eelam (LTTE), assassination of a Canadian Minister, and hostages in the Canadian embassy in Sri Lanka, beside other sub-plots. The issues are multiple, from the status of Tamils in Canada and the LTTE being linked to 9/11 attacks with which the book opens. With bold strokes and fine details Blacker makes real the global enterprise of terror, like Robert Ludlum and Forsythe.
 
The book is evenly paced and highlights the drama: one group wants the minister removed another wants him as negotiator. Like in all good action story writing, the terror plots and acts of terror are nicely spaced out with background information and sex. You do not miss much even if you forget a name of a character or a story line in the 600 page book. The writer had done the homework for you, he knows it all and will feed you stuff when you need it. Though each of the 28 chapters advances the plot, Chapter 10 and 27 are gripping for their depiction of events. The real action takes place in Chapters 19 and 20. The ending is violent, as is the thesis of the book.
 
What I liked most was that we have brown skinned snipers who eat chapattis with their hands. They are named Dayan and Mahesh and Devini Sundaralingam. Move over Jason Bourne and James Bond. The writer veers towards insinuating that India has been destabilising the sub-continent, but he does not impose his ideology on the reader though he calls the counter operations Ram and Sita, a cliché. Since I am a lay reader with no political interests in the war, I want Devini to be able to avenge the twin horrors of her life: her mother’s death by the Sinhalese, her own rape by the Tiger leaders. I want Dayan to succeed in killing Kumaradeven who has hurt Sandra. I want Daniel’s plane to survive the hijack, though I want Balachandran’s hijack to succeed. Blacker had me in his grip.
 
The weakness of the book is the amount of background information it has to convey for us to make sense of the whole enterprise. Blacker is locating his book in unknown and unwritten territory; we know so little about the war in our backyard that he feels the need to give us the information. I hope the overload will thin down once we have more books like this one.
 
This book was written while the war was still on. The book helps us participate in the events of one of the biggest organised struggles, perhaps the biggest war of the 21st century until now. Borrow A Cause Untrue if you are taking a long flight from India to the US or Europe and want to reconstruct a world of conspiracies in your mind.
 
Amandeep Sandhu is the author of Sepia Leaves (Rupa)