The September 11 attacks enter the novel through Richards’s memory, where they mark the end of an older model of war and the beginning of conflict dispersed across ordinary places and populations. The recollection gives a historical frame to the book’s wider concern with how violence changes not only institutions but also the ways people interpret danger, responsibility, and one another.

Richards’s memory and the turning point

Richards remembers watching the planes strike the towers through repeated broadcasts. He was in Jakarta, and the event’s significance is conveyed less as a report of his assignment there than as a conviction that the old way of doing things had ended. In his view, war would no longer be confined to conventional battlefields: it would be carried out by people whose ordinary appearances let them move unnoticed, and it would reach transport, public gathering places, and private rooms alike.

His reflection is expansive and deeply cynical. The language of opposing faiths and political causes, he thinks, can be stripped down to competition over power and material advantage. The attacks become, in this account, the moment that makes a world of ubiquitous conflict legible to him. This is Richards’s interpretation of history, not a neutral statement that the event itself explains every later war.

From public catastrophe to private choice

The novel places this memory alongside another consequential turning point: Bradford J. Wolgast realizes that federal agents selected him because his daughter Eva had died. Her death is not the September 11 attacks, but it reveals a parallel way that catastrophe becomes usable by institutions: a private bereavement can be treated as a reason to recruit someone for a consequential task. The contrast is between Richards’s vision of a world remade by public violence and Wolgast’s discovery that personal loss has already shaped his role in the present.

Wolgast’s later reflections make that loss more than background. He understands his grief over Eva as part of why he could recognize the vulnerability of Anthony Carter and others. The novel thus moves between large-scale history and intimate aftermath, showing how events acquire force through the choices they make possible and the people those choices bind.

Fear, blame, and collective action

Later scenes in the First Colony echo Richards’s belief that conflict can spread through everyday settings, but they show a different mechanism: fear circulates through a crowd and becomes accusation. After deaths in the community, Sam Chou blames Amy and Caleb and calls for them to be expelled. Voices in the gathering repeat his demand until Peter senses that the community’s appearance of order is close to giving way to violence. The scene does not establish that Amy caused the deaths; it shows how uncertainty can be turned into a target.

That hostility contrasts with the crowd’s earlier welcome for Peter’s traveling party. Hundreds of residents greet the newcomers with striking warmth, touching them and pressing babies forward, yet Peter senses that the welcome feels staged and disarming. The two scenes make collective feeling unstable: a crowd can offer apparent belonging, then organize around exclusion when danger and rumor take hold.

The event’s narrative significance

The September 11 attacks are not presented as a full scene in the available account; they surface retrospectively inside Richards’s thoughts. That placement makes the event function as an interpretive hinge. Richards uses it to imagine war as something with no secure boundary between battlefield and ordinary life, while the later colony scenes test the same anxiety at a smaller scale, where accusation and group pressure threaten a community from within.

The novel does not collapse these different events into equivalents. Instead, it sets public catastrophe, personal bereavement, and communal fear beside one another. Across those scales, the recurring consequence is a struggle over how violence is understood: as a changed historical condition, as a reason someone is chosen, or as a story a frightened crowd tells about who must be cast out.