[In the following review, King offers a negative assessment of Fear of Mirrors, calling the work confusing, poorly written, and clichéd.]

Fear of Mirrors belongs to a literary subgenre that has not been fashionable during recent decades. Like many political novels, it attempts a grand story and has an epic feel resulting from the characters' involvement in major historical events. Tariq Ali tells of the rise and fall of communism as experienced by some Central European Jews who, rebelling against their enclosed society and against violent persecutions, were early communists. The novel moves back and forth between characters and places and times as several generations of family, friends, and lovers devote themselves to the revolution, become disillusioned, are betrayed and exterminated, or want to learn about, explain, or justify the past.

The story takes place against such events as Lenin's distrust of Stalin, Stalin's gaining control of the Communist Party, the failure of the revolution in Germany, the shift in the party line from global revolution to defense of the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, the many purges, the way those who knew of Stalin's crimes hid them either from fear or because of the need first to defeat fascism, the fate of reform movements, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of Germany. Fictional characters are mixed with well-known public figures, including known spies. As in many political novels the movement is from hopes to disillusionments; a constant theme is betrayal, either from fear of others and the truth, personal weakness, lies, or for political reasons. Husbands are betrayed by their wives, children by their mothers, and all are betrayed by their dream of a future of social justice.

Most of the novel takes the form of a long letter concerning family history from a father to his son in which he tries to explain the generations who gave their lives and killed others for a now lost cause. The novel curiously ends happily with several reunions, forgiveness, and even the suggestion that some form of Marxism is likely to be a major force once more as global capitalism is unable to be a solve the world's economic and social problems. Ali implies that communism was a noble experiment which went off the track because of Stalin. While he sees his characters as deluded, they have no other alternatives. Although ambiguity is rather mechanically worked into the comments characters make about Marxism, there is not a good word in the book for anything noncommunist. There is none of the considered criticism of communism often found in Europe, where, after examining what Marxism had produced around the world, many intellectuals feel that the faults were inherent in the theory and utopianism.

Ali is a well-known editor and author of New Left political publications, but Fear of Mirrors is a badly written novel. There is hardly a paragraph without clichés, political jargon, textbook political summaries, unbelievable dialogue, inappropriate diction, heavy-handed explanations. The characters seldom are credible as presented. The structure of the novel is overelaborate, confusing, and requires rereading. The characters blur into one another. Drama is faked by ellipses and revelations. While there is the power that comes from a crude version of a thriller, Ali has shown that the distinction between creative and other forms of writing still holds true.