Rules of Engagement and Strategies of Withdrawal: The War on Terror in 'The Bench of Desolation'

'The Bench of Desolation' takes faltering romance from a lovers' tiff to a new scale of conflict. James knew war, both civil, colonial and international, and this tale is intimate with its dangers. A rhetoric of extremism, the distortion of history and geography, and economic hegemony betray transgressions from private to public. The constructed cause, shifts of perspective and justification, the suspicion of intended destruction, the tactics of surveillance and evasion, the deployment of fiscal measures, the sense of an absence at the heart of the tale of wrong-doing: these are the signs of the war on terror.