THE DRAMATIC arrests yesterday of the remaining London bombing suspects seemed — with their armed police siege and bomb disposal teams — to be yet another episode of normal British life mistakenly mixed with the plot of a Tom Clancy thriller.

Such bestsellers will no longer provide the escapism you yearn for as you set off on your summer holiday, but over the past few weeks I have been convinced that not to read them is a dangerous mistake.

What? I hear you asking. Isn’t it when Britain feels under threat that reading novels appears to be the most trivial of pastimes? What is fiction for, other than a bit of make-believe to fill the gaps at airports or pretentious dinner parties? Well let me first take you to Downing Street, where I watched the Prime Minister hold his last press conference this week before his own summer break. One of the questions that most gave him pause is also the one that has been hanging heavy over the nation.

“In the past two weeks,” asked an eager television reporter, “have you come up with any understanding as to how people who grew up here, received their education here, enjoyed cricket, enjoyed so much about British life, could have turned on their own people?”

Tony Blair fumbled some reply, but the answer should have been lying on his bedside table. For the past ten years, contemporary British fiction has been sending out warnings — not coded, but clear — about what has been happening under our noses.

First, and perhaps most acute, is My Son The Fanatic, a short story by Hanif Kureishi that was turned into a well-received film. First published in 1993, to read it now is to find its prescience chilling.

It is set in a northern town similar to the homes of the London suicide bombers, and starts with a boy born in Britain of Pakistani parents growing up as a good son — by which his father means a happy, cricket-loving accountancy student. This is the typical path for second-generation immigrants: successful, integrated children who make their parents proud. But in the story Ali starts acting strangely. His parents worry that he might have turned to drugs, but are even more appalled by the truth: he has become a jihad-hungry Muslim fundamentalist, and a stranger.

“What has made you like this?” his taxi-driving father, Parvez, asks in horror, and Ali replies: “Living in this country.”

Parvez is shocked. “But I love England,” he says, “they let you do almost anything here.”

Ali says: “That is the problem.”

The film, by the way, ends with an image that has a horrible resonance following this month’s attacks: when Ali is cast out by his father, he sets off with a loaded backpack on his back.

Seven years on Zadie Smith drew on an uncannily similar conflict as a central theme of White Teeth, her bestselling debut. Samad, a Bangladeshi immigrant working in an Indian restaurant is, like Parvez, slightly cowed as well as uncomprehending of his son Millat’s conversion to an extremist Muslim sect. The teenage Millat is as North London as they come, fashionable, good at football, popular with the girls, but inside he seethes with a macho “righteous anger”, desperate to prove himself.

“If the game was God, if the game was a fight against the West . . . he was determined to win it.”

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