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. In their bicentenary year, Mary Shelley’s scientist and his creature will take plenty of contemporary spins. Surely, no updated journey will be more necessary than Saadawi’s.
He tells a nightmarish, but horridly hilarious, tale of a vengeful ghoul stitched from the body parts of victims daily slain by limb-shredding suicide bombs in a city that reeks of ‘smoke, the burning of plastic and seat cushions, the roasting of human flesh’. Our cut-price Dr Frankenstein is the junk dealer Hadi, who lives next door to Elishva in a ramshackle ‘Jewish ruin’. Saadawi gently reminds us of the Jews who fled Baghdad, and the Christians fleeing now — Elishva’s scattered family keep in touch via Father Josiah’s cellphone. ‘Decades of disaster’ have hollowed out this city’s soul.
From the dismembered chunks he scavenges, Hadi builds his ‘composite of victims’ — called Daniel after the son Elishva lost to Saddam’s tyranny.
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