He has published six novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997) and Satan Wants Me (1999). He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He is the commissioning editor for The Times Literary Suupplement for The Middle East and writes for a number of newspapers and journals in the UK and the USA. He also lectured on Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford. He read Modern History at Oxford and taught Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001.But the book's daredevil plot-twists and eerie character-study cast a dramatic spell. At times Irwin stretches credibility with Roussel's superhuman talent for eluding his pursuers and recovering from violent injury. Propelled by a mad, Marxist sense of historical inevitability, Roussel indiscriminately kills anybody who does not share his sense of a divine political mission. In a violent odyssey through the casbahs and dark, twisting backstreets of Algiers, where he contacts the FLN underground, Roussel's adventures are peopled with a terrifying crew of thugs posing as revolutionaries, who vie with the colonial occupiers, themselves specialists in torture and casual violence. A veteran of the Indo-China war, Roussel was brainwashed in a Vietnamese detention center and sent back to the colonial fold to wreak havoc clandestinely in support of national liberation movements. The book's protagonist, Phillippe Roussel, an intelligence officer attached to the Foreign Legion in Algiers, is a spy and human time-bomb in the midst of the French colonists. Set during the French-Algerian War, the novel describes a revolutionary struggle that becomes an ideological bloodbath. It is an apt curtain raiser for this fast-paced and absorbing political thriller.
Irwin's ( The Arabian Nightmare ) latest opens with one of the characters musing over a Camus essay on the nature of violence and political change.
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