Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, Bills dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scotts lover - and Bills.
An extraordinary novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Мао II explores a world in which the novelists power to influence the inner life of a culture now belongs to bomb-makers and gunmen.