Books: Frankenstein in Baghdad

Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. It is set in Iraq’s capital in 2005, then occupied by the US military, at a time of escalating violence. I felt that this novel is a cousin to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Here too a city is beset by the forces of disorder and the supernatural is set loose, although Frankenstein in Baghdad is much, much bloodier.

The characters and events of this novel are riddled with ambiguity. Characters are described in contradictory ways. Good people turn into bad people and justice becomes vengeance. A miraculous occurrence may just be the delusion of a sad old woman. The victim of a suicide bomber may inhabit a Frankenstein’s monster or it may just be a hoax. The book is framed as a manuscript presented as evidence for a government inquiry. The confession of the Whatsitsname (as the monster is known) is presented as the transcript of a video recording. Nothing is certain.

Saadawi creates an impressively heterogeneous group of characters. There is Elishva, an elderly woman who prays for the return for her son, Daniel, lost long ago in the Iran–Iraq War. Hadi is a junk dealer who creates the Whatsitsname, stitching it together from bodies as a protest against the authorities. Mahmoud is a hardworking, ambitious, but naive journalist always on the backfoot as he chases the story of the Whatsitsname. Pathos, tragedy, and horror permeate the lives of the characters.

But there is black comedy too. The Iraqi government’s murky Tracking and Pursuit Department, one of the groups hunting down the Whatsitsname, is staffed by soothsayers and astrologists, and, as the violence mounts and the different factions start massacring each other, the various actors blur into an indistinguishable chaos. The novel perhaps dissolves a little too much into actual incoherence, and the ending, although neat for the characters, is not entirely satisfying.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2018