How soon the newsflash turns into the thriller. Wham, bang: the story of guns and bombs is one that has us increasingly enthralled, even as we suspect that the real narrative is altogether quieter; that actual power lies elsewhere. One of the things that has become clear in the past months is that Osama bin Laden understood CNN and Hollywood - the fictions the US tells the world - in a way that CNN and Hollywood do not understand bin Laden. Maybe that is the reason he smiled all the time.
Zanzibar, Giles Foden's third novel, deals with the real events of 1998 when bin Laden's followers bombed the US embassy in Dar-es- Salaam. The newsflash from that time is skilfully fleshed as we follow the fate of Miranda Powers, a young embassy official caught up in the blast. This rip in the fabric of her life is the central event of the novel; around it are woven the fictional tales of the other characters: the CIA man Jack Queller, the bomber Khaled al-Khidr, and Nick Karolides, a US aid worker who has come to the neighbouring island of Zanzibar to save its coral reefs. Zanzibar is really Nick's story: his romantic dalliance with Miranda takes place on the same small island the bombers use to prepare the explosives. When the book turns altogether thriller, he escapes capture there and, with Miranda and Queller, he chases the bombers down.
So far, so neatly plotted; but the interesting bits of Zanzibar are the places where it sprawls a little. The lush descriptions of Nick's solitude on the island and his engagement with the natural world speak to us of another kind of book, one in which there is room for Queller's meditative doubts and grief - one in which there are fewer plot points and more radical uncertainties.
The characters all have a spiritual life, often passed on to them from a dead parent: nearly everyone in this novel is bereaved. In the case of the bomber, Khaled al-Khidr, the bodies of his mother and father, killed by "American agents" are always in his mind's eye. But Foden is careful not to pit Eastern religious fanaticism against a secular West; the American characters, too, have their religious inclinations and residues. Miranda takes her spiritual advice from the dead Irish cop that is her father, speaking in her head. Queller, the CIA man, grieves, not just for his dead wife, but also for the loss of his arm, amputated after an incident in the mountains of Afghanistan, and he spends his days in retirement reading Arabic poetry and the Koran.
In the face of this spiritual variety, the US special forces seem bizarrely shallow. We are familiar with these crew-cut goons, too rational, too "intelligent" to be right about what is going on. It is Queller, the man who wants to understand, not conquer, who guesses who the bombers really are. Foden's implication - that we must read the Koran before we can quell Islamic militancy - seems reasonable - though, when it comes to bin Laden, I suspect you might do better to read Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Besides, religion is sometimes only the word that people put on things - no one ever read the Penny Catechism in order to get a handle on the IRA, for example, let alone the New Testament.
Foden is anxious to open up the debate, but it sometimes seems as though he has chosen the wrong form. Both the thriller and the newsflash are Western cartoons. We know, even as we watch CNN, that we are learning less about the world, not more: it is our increasing ignorance that keeps us glued, desperate for the understanding that never comes.
Foden's first novel, The Last King of Scotland, unsettled some of the media clichés with the story of a Scots doctor who become the personal physician of Idi Amin. Zanzibar, too, works at an intersection of cultures, but by using the clichéd, and very American, form of the thriller, the writer works against the book's wider interests and inclinations.
Perhaps it is not from the cultural monolith of the US that insight into other cultures comes; for that we need translators, people who are willing to live between - the Carib-Indian sensibility of Naipaul, or the amused east European eye of Ryszard Kapuscinski. Foden is an intelligent writer, and one who understands better than most the forces at play in his story, but this is a book that feels as if it were written with an eye on Hollywood, and one of the problems with Hollywood is that it cannot understand.
Zanzibar. By Giles Foden. Faber and Faber. 390 pp, £14.99 sterling
Anne Enright's novel, The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch, will be published by Cape later this month