Red Birds
By Mohammed Hanif
Bloomsbury, 283 pp
If the world's endless wars are getting you down, a dose of Mohammed Hanif's dark humor might be the medicine you need. After all, how better to demonstrate the absurdity of war than by telling an absurd story?
Major Ellie was flying a mission to bomb a camp in the desert; now he's stuck in that camp with a tough-talking teenager called Momo and his philosophizing dog, Mutt. Meanwhile, Father Dear and Mother Dear are bickering about the lack of salt, and an aid worker wants to interview Momo for her research on the "young Muslim mind."
With nothing but vague notions gleaned from air force training courses with titles like "Cultural Sensitivity Towards Tribals," Ellie is ill-equipped for the realities of life in a refugee camp -- which is really just life, with all its frustrations and pettiness. After being found in the desert by Momo, he is taken to the family house where everyone seems more interested in discussing their problems than feeding a starving stranger. When the oblivious Father Dear starts devouring freshly cooked meat while Ellie is served rice in milk, he is incredulous. "I have a feeling that I am being treated like a refugee," he thinks to himself.
As in any good satire, the situations are often ridiculous and the language sharp-tongued. The most pointed barbs are reserved for American soldiers and international aid programs. In Momo's words, "They think even if we are not bad Arabs we must be up to something."
We are never told which country the Camp is in or which war this is, and that's the point -- the war machine grinds on no matter the location. "I get PTSD, she gets a per diem in US dollars," Momo thinks, as his young Muslim mind is being researched. He dreams of making millions through his entrepreneurial ventures -- Falcons for Ethical Hunting and Sands Global -- with his trusty sidekick Mutt, who provides a dryly comic counterpoint to Momo's swagger. But the two later have more serious business to take care of.
Irreverence is Hanif's modus operandi, as illustrated by his cutting depiction of Colonel Slatter, a caricature of a military man whose lecture on surviving in the desert is as unprintable (in this publication) as it is illustrative of one of the novel's central ideas -- that Western powers are less concerned about whether anyone on the scene is benefited by war as the economies war creates.
"If I didn't bomb some place, how would she save that place? If I didn't rain fire from the skies, how would she douse that fire on the ground?" Ellie thinks about aid worker Lady Flowerbody, in a moment that reminds us why Hanif has a reputation as a brilliant lampooner.
Through the voices of the three main narrators -- Momo, Mutt and Ellie -- it soon becomes clear that something sinister is going on. Momo's older brother, Bro Ali, went to work for the Americans and never came back, like many boys before him. The bombs stopped around the same time, and the nearby Hangar was abruptly abandoned. Mutt is seeing ghosts and the alarm keeps going off at odd hours at the Hangar, which shadows the story until the very end. The chaos of the final scene falls a little flat but it also tenderly reveals the grief at the heart of this novel. Like the families whose boys have disappeared, we are left with little more than ghosts.
-- By Kiri Falls
Japan News Staff Writer
Maruzen price 1,876 yen plus tax
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