I wanted to like this book. I expected to like this book, and did so at the start. Eventually, some 180 pages in, I found I could no longer turn the pages to find out how this story of Ellie, the American pilot who crashes in the desert, teenager Momo who lives in a refugee camp, and Momo's dog, the most intelligent of the three, pannned out. The book has a strange, disconnected feel to it which I enjoyed at first, but in the end I .... just gave up. ( )

"You must have heard that god created couples so that his creation could multiply and overpopulate the world. But god also created couples so that they could hound each other in life, betray each other and then haunt each other after one of them dies"

I am not sure that I would have kept reading this if it wasn't for being an ARC. Lots of smart comments about aid, international relations and foreign colonial wars, but the story didn't grab me. One downed pilot, one dog and one fifteen year old refugee who has lost his brother. Although initially it read to me as if it was something that felt all too real, it was as though the author lost faith in telling that story and instead diverted into magical realism territory.

"When someone dies in a raid or a shooting or when someone’s throat is slit, their last drop of blood transforms into a tiny red bird and flies away. And then reappears when we are trying hard to forget them, when we think we have forgotten them, when we think we have learnt to live without them, when we utter those stupid words that we have ‘moved on’. It’s just a reminder that they may have gone but they haven’t really left yet. ( )

Major Ellie, an American pilot, crash lands in an unnamed desert country, where he is rescued by Momo, an enterprising teenage resident of a refugee camp. Momo's older brother Ali has disappeared after going to work for the Americans at a secret desert base, and Momo wants Ellie's help in getting his brother back. We also get the point of view of Mutt the dog who narrates several chapters. Several other characters play supporting roles, including Momo's mother and father, a do-gooder social worker conducting research on the life of a teenage boy in a refugee camp, and a doctor who really isn't a doctor. This seems intended to be a satire on the absurdities of war, but, despite occasional witty one-liners, it never achieves the power of a novel like Catch 22, and instead dissolves into the absurdities of surrealism. I never got into this. ( )

My brain feels a little scrambled right now. I thought I knew what I was getting with this book and, for the first two thirds, I did get that, more or less: an ironic satire on the modern cycle of war and international aid. We’re introduced to the bleak aftermath of war in a remote corner of an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Smart, ambitious teenager Momo has dreams of becoming a billionaire entrepreneur, fuelled by the stories he’s read in his dad’s magazine about the Fortune 500. But how’s a kid to get started in a place like this, where even the aid workers have given up and drifted away, and the local American air base has shut up shop? To make matters worse, Momo’s big brother has been missing for months, his dog Mutt has got himself electrocuted, and an American pilot has just wandered in from the desert. And what of those red birds? Well, that’s where it all gets more than a little weird...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/11/04/red-birds-mohammed-hanif/ ( )

Major Ellie is a fighter pilot who is shot down in the desert in an unnamed country. After several days, near to death, he finds shelter in the refugee camp he was sent to bomb. He is rescued by Momo, a young man who is eager to begin his career in entrepreneurship, even though he lives in a camp where there is nothing left to sell, or even steal.

Momo’s dog, Mutt, (who is shown rather more concern than Ellie, perhaps deservedly so) is a wise observer of all the goings-on in the camp, with a sound observation of Momo’s family, the major, and the woman Momo’s mother calls Lady Flowerbody, a western aid worker who is apparently conducting research there.

Narrating dog aside, this initially feels like a realist narrative with some nice satirical touches, like Momo’s use of business jargon gleaned from intermittent TV and the occasional copy of Forbes. Ellie realises the inadequacy of his cultural awareness training, Momo looks for ways to co-opt Lady Flowerbody to his schemes, his father continues to perform his duties for the military, even though they left and stopped paying him some time ago. Underlying it all is a sense of both grief and the relentless desire to survive, even in the most hopeless of circumstances.

Gradually, you realise that all is not all it seems. The mysterious Hangar, where Momo’s brother went to work and never returned, the absent military, some elements of Ellie’s story that don’t quite make sense, lead to an awareness that this is a world where all is not quite as it appears.

I really enjoyed the early part of the novel, the absurdist humour, the vivid characters. For me the end, where things should have moved faster, felt a little too drawn out. However I did find myself thinking about this book, and what it meant, for several days after I’d read it.
*
I received a copy of Red Birds from the publisher via Netgalley.
Read more of my reviews on my blog at https://katevane.com ( )