Monster at large in war-torn Iraq
If a bomb exploded in Auckland tomorrow and killed several people, it would dominate the news for weeks. So reading this book brings home the shocking realisation that another suicide bombing in Baghdad not only fails to register here, it barely makes the news there either.
For decades, the city has been ripped apart by a killing spree with no end in sight. Whole streets lie in ruins, no one trusts anyone in authority and normal rules no longer apply. Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi steps into this twisted reality with an eerie mix of fantasy, horror and pitch-black comedy, loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s 200-year-old classic.
The monster, known matter-of-factly as the Whatsitsname, is made by Hadi the junk dealer, after his friend Nahem dies in a suicide bombing. When Hadi goes to the morgue to retrieve Nahem’s body, he is told to take whatever limbs he can find as no one can tell which arms and legs belong to which body.
In protest, Hadi creates a composite corpse from leftover body parts he finds on the road after each new bombing. Just as Hadi finishes his creation with a distinctive nose, another suicide attack kills a hotel security guard. The guard’s soul is cut off from his obliterated body and takes refuge in the Whatsitsname, which promptly comes to life.
Then Whatsitsname decides his mission is to avenge the deaths of every person who makes up his body and begins a fresh killing spree. In the process, he comes across a range of Baghdad characters: Elishva, an elderly Assyrian Christian widow who lives next door to Hadi and thinks Whatsitsname is her son Daniel, lost in the Iran-Iraq war; Mahmoud, an ambitious young journalist, who interviews Hadi and persuades the Whatsitsname to tell his own story at length into a digital recorder, and Brigadier Majid, who uses a team of crack astrologers to track potential enemies of the state.
Just like the original version, no one calls the monster Frankenstein — except Mahmoud’s unscrupulous editor, who gleefully splashes the book’s title across the spread in his magazine.
It’s a disconcerting book to read because Saadawi switches casually between extreme brutality and sly comedy, kitchen sink realism and supernatural intervention. Saddam Hussein, the Baath Party and the occupying US forces all crop up in conversation but the real focus is the war’s dehumanising effect on ordinary people, who find ways to live as their world collapses around them.
At one point Saadawi writes: “Dead people had emerged from the dungeons of the security services and non-existent people appeared out of nowhere outside the doors of their relatives’ humble houses . . . The strange things that had happened in the past three years were too many to count.”
In modern Baghdad the story of a confused, indestructible monster that cannot stop killing