In a squalid, lawless “fugee” camp (the letters R and e have fallen off the entrance gate) that looks and smells like a giant Portaloo, one of the characters in Mohammed Hanif’s ambitious third novel considers running away to the desert. “What’s the worst that can happen,” he thinks. “I’ll starve to death. I’ll roast under the sun. God left this place a long time ago… He had had enough. I have had a bit more than that.”
This philosophical passage is spoken by a dog called Mutt, and Hanif’s book is undoubtedly a high-wire act. Red Birds constantly threatens to fall apart, its characters and locations both achingly realistic and elusively metaphysical. But that’s part of its charm: you never know where Hanif’s farce will go next.
He starts with an American pilot crashing in the desert near a downgraded refugee camp “full of human scum” he was supposed to bomb. When Major Ellie finally reaches the outskirts of the camp, Mutt introduces him to a teenage refugee named Momo, who is using an old copy of Fortune as his guide to becoming a hotshot businessman.
Momo is also being harassed by a USAID worker nicknamed “Lady Flowerbody”, who sees him as ideal material for her book on the “teenage Muslim mind”. The irony is not lost on Momo’s mother, mourning for her eldest son, Bro Ali, who has mysteriously disappeared in the Hangar – an abandoned American refuelling facility next to the camp.
“First they bomb our house, then they take away my son, and now [they] are here to make us feel all right,” she says.
Red Birds is full of sharp lines like this – Hanif employing a tone of gentle exasperation at the absurdities of endless faraway wars that begin with carpet bombing and end in “craft classes for refugees”. The author of the Man Booker-longlisted A Case of Exploding Mangoes and follow-up Our Lady of Alice Bhatti has always operated in the space where the ridiculous and the profound overlap, and Red Birds is similarly irreverent, dripping with exuberant disdain for the way in which western power has corrupted the world.
But for all these acutely observed insights, Red Birds’ narrative is marginally less effective than in Hanif’s previous books. There is plenty of pleasure to be had in Momo’s anarchic journey to find his brother, or in Mutt’s canine slapstick, but the shift towards a figurative world in the final third doesn’t entirely satisfy. While the nods to purgatory work in and of themselves as a paean to the missing and forgotten in war, the ghostly chaos and additional chorus of indistinct voices overpowers the book’s careful set-up.
Red Birds doesn’t always soar, but it’s an effective satire that reminds us that everybody – refugees, distraught mothers, unthinking airmen, well-meaning aid workers, dogs and ghosts – has a need to love, and be loved.
• Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy for £13.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846
