A thing of shreds and patches

On the wall of her tumbledown house in central Baghdad, an elderly Christian widow named Elishva has a beloved icon of St George with his lance raised. She chats with the saint like an old friend, but wonders why, in the picture, he stays frozen mid-thrust and why ‘he hadn’t killed the dragon years ago’. As her ravaged city suffers an interminable ‘binge of death and devastation’, Elishva frets that ‘everything remained half-completed’, three years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. During the blood-soaked interregnum, which continues to this day, monsters breed.

Out of this limbo of unfinished business, from a people suspended in agony between present and past, life and death, Ahmed Saadawi has wrenched a fable that puts a cherished Romantic myth to urgent new use. In 2014, this novel won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the ‘Arabic Booker’). With Baghdad still scourged by sectarian violence, it now appears in Jonathan Wright’s salty, pacey translation.