In an essay lambasting the war-on-terror thriller's role in normalizing state-sanctioned terror, David Holloway has argued that the shift in political ethics that led to torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as well as to practices such as extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, and so on has been legitimized in popular-culture forms that often make these practices part of a desperate race to save innocent lives … For Holloway, readers of thrillers occupy a "thoroughly abject, feminized [sic] position … in relation to what they read." We enjoy such novels because we know "that our abjection as readers is merely the prelude to enlightenment and 'mastery' over the fictive world," which will come with conventional closure and disclosure. In other words, we are passive counters in a "pleasurable process of interpellation." … Yet even setting aside the curious gendered language Holloway uses to indicate the thriller reader's supposed passivity, his direct translation of coercive imperialism into the structure of genre literature, resulting in a willing abasement of the reader to imperial ideology, is surely too totalizing. Quite apart from the general fact that narrative pleasures are more variegated and ambiguous than Holloway allows, there is no obvious reason why questions of form should simply reflect wider political preoccupations so directly. As we have already seen in this book, at best they refract them. … However, in the generalizing conclusions Holloway reaches there is no place for what one might think of as those more liberal thrillers—texts such as John Le Carré's A Most Wanted Man (2008)—that expose the human cost of practices such as torture and the targeted abduction and extradition of stateless Muslims as well as the machinations, careerism, and duplicity of Western security services.

XREF: Connects to ongoing debates about the political valence of genre fiction and reader reception theory.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 321