LITERARY FICTION
RED BIRDS by Mohammed Hanif
(Bloomsbury £16.99, 304 pp) A MUCH-ABUSED pet dog is one of the narrators of Mohammed Hanif’s scabrous new novel, set among the scorching sands of an unnamed Muslim country under siege from aerial attacks by Western forces.
A crash-landed U.S. pilot arrives at a refugee town near an abandoned military base and is trying to pass himself off as an aid worker, rather than the enemy.
Momo, a teenage cynic and would-be money-maker at the camp, doesn’t believe him for a second, but hopes the pilot can be of use in tracking down his older sibling, who once worked for the Americans, but has disappeared.
Deploying a relentlessly grim gallows humour, Hanif skewers the entrenched insanity of a conflict in which occupying powers send therapists into a war zone largely of their own making to understand ‘the teenage Muslim mind’, but plays, I think disastrously, with reality itself, as events take on the hallucinatory untrustworthiness of a desert mirage.
Hanif’s bleak, formidable use of irony burns deeply, but the novel is also, alas, a bit of a shaggy-dog story.
KILLING COMMENDATORE by Haruki Murakami
(Harvill Secker £20, 704 pp) I HAVE always suspected that there is something of the emperor’s new clothes about Haruki Murakami and, while it would be unfair to offer a novel that’s far from his best as proof, this sex-obsessed trip down the rabbit hole does him few favours.
After the break-up of his marriage, the nameless narrator, a respected portrait painter, holes up in the empty mountain home of his best friend’s father, a famous, but now senile, artist. His subjects include an enigmatic tech boom entrepreneur who lives across the valley.
It’s soon apparent that something weird is going on, involving odd noises at night, a shrine that the narrator possibly shouldn’t have broken open, and a 13-year-old girl who may or may not be the neighbour’s daughter.
Events turn plain silly, however, when a painting of Don Giovanni with anti-fascist overtones comes to life.
Visual perspective, thwarted parenthood and middle-aged loneliness are recurring riffs in a story that, like so many Murakami novels, loads its meaning on to a network of signs, riddles and ruptures with reality, but, at around, 700 baggy pages, it’s more punitive than profound.
SHELL by Kristina Olsson
(S&S £12.99, 384 pp) CAN a novel be too beautifully written? You begin to wonder, reading this latest by Kristina Olsson, set in Sydney in the Sixties. A Swedish glass artist has arrived to honour the ambition of architect Jorn Utzon, whose visionary plans for the new opera house are severely testing engineering know-how and the government’s purse strings.
There, he begins a relationship with Pearl, a politically minded young journalist haunted by the fact she abandoned her two younger brothers to an orphanage after their mother died and who is now trying to atone by preventing them from being drafted to serve in Vietnam — if she can find them first, that is.
The growing physical intimacy between the two allows each to unburden hidden feelings of historic legacy and personal shame. Yet the artful writing is so determined to reflect the same languid shimmer of light on water that obsessed Utzon, it perversely distracts attention from the novel’s themes.