Review no 40: Jojo Rabbit, film by Taika Waititi (New Zealand)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

****

Early reviews of this 2019 film suggested it was a “Marmite” movie: you were either going to love it or hate it, no half measures. I’d watched Waititi’s earlier features, including the hugely entertaining What we do in the Shadows (2014, a mock reality TV documentary about vampires) and the kooky and charming runaway-kid movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), so I was interested to see if he’d succeeded in making a Nazi comedy that wouldn’t simultaneously be deeply offensive…

Jojo Rabbit is based on the 2008 novel Caging Skies. In the movie, Johannes (Jojo) is a sensitive and essentially kind 10-year-old boy (played by Roman Griffin Davis) who is, in theory, an eager member of the Hitler Youth. He lives with his mother Rosie, played in a range of super-stylish outfits and pin-curled hair by Scarlett Johansson, in a house full of enviable polished wood interiors; his older sister Inge has died, while his father is supposedly away fighting in the war. Meanwhile, Sam Rockwell steals the show with a great support role as Hitler Youth leader Captain Klenzendorf, who is macho with more than a touch of camp.

Jojo has an imaginary friend, a childish version of Hitler, who starts off brash and funny and supportive. When Jojo discovers his mother is sheltering a teenage Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), however, his assumptions are increasingly challenged, while his imaginary pal shows a meaner, more petulant side. Waititi not only wrote and directed the movie, but also took on the role of Hitler, after apparently finding it difficult to persuade anyone else to do it. He told the Hollywood Reporter “I think it was a little difficult for people to figure out if it was a good career move, and I can fucking totally understand. Who really wants to see themselves as Adolf Hitler on a poster?”

The film starts off compellingly and audaciously, by intersplicing contemporary scenes from the film with archive Nazi propaganda footage set to a soundtrack of screaming Beatles fans. However, it loses the courage of its convictions as the action unfolds, and veers a little more towards heart-warming schmaltz, staying the safe side of the line delineating the difference between a cuddly family film and an art house comedy-drama. Nevertheless, although with this film Waititi has been accused of ‘smugness’ and ‘tweeness’, I didn’t come away feeling the film was either of those things.

I saw the film with my husband and three children aged 10 to 15, and they all loved it. I liked it a lot but thought it stopped short of brilliance. On balance I preferred Waititi’s earlier films, and feel Hunt for the Wilderpeople remains his real masterpiece to date.

However, I enjoyed the film’s slightly leftfield perspective (it sometimes reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie), I was moved by the film, and the soundtrack, including Bowie’s German-language version of Heroes and Love’s Everybody’s Gotta Live, felt pitch-perfect. I also felt the lines from Rilke that closed the movie were a wonderful choice, and something we might all benefit from keeping in mind:

“Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.”

Review no 39: A Girl Made of Dust, Nathalie abi-Ezzi (Lebanon)

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

I recently joined the Shelterbox Book Club, which for a donation of £10 a month sends me a regular book for discussion as part on an online book club, and also helps to provide emergency shelter and resources for families affected by disaster worldwide.

The most recent book that I received was A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie abi-Ezzi, who was born in Lebanon, and moved to the UK at the age of 11, when Israel invaded the country of her birth. The book was first published in 2008, and was not a title I was previously aware of.

The story is written from the perspective of a young girl, Ruba, during the Lebanese conflict in the 1980s, and deals with issues such as the civilian experience of war, the pervasive and destructive effects of trauma, and dark family secrets.

Privileging the female experience of conflict is a welcome way of balancing accounts of the war experience. As Rachel Cusk has written in her essay on female writers, Shakespeare’s Sisters: “masculine values …. prevail … This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because if deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.” Well, here, A Girl Made of Dust gives us both the scene of conflict and the shop.

Ruba’s home environment is richly described, with vivid depictions of, for example, her mother’s cooking, and with a strong sense of place. I found the device of using a child’s viewpoint to tell the story to be both appealing and powerful. Ruba doesn’t understand the political situation behind the conflict, and she doesn’t always understand the motivation of the adults around her, but is guided by her emotions and her sometimes fantastical imagination.

The book was good on the incomprehensible and senseless brutality of war, and the way civilians can, through necessity, become partly inured to constant fear, and it had a satisfying resolution. Nevertheless, the characters didn’t quite ring true for me, and I found the writing wasn’t strong enough to carry the overall lack of pace. The book was somewhat reminiscent of the work of best-selling Afghanistani writer Khaled Hosseini, in its juxtapositions of the domestic lives of people and a place riven by conflict. However, I find his books to be more gripping – albeit more emotionally manipulative.

Review no 38: Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), The Snow Queen and other stories (Denmark)

EUROPE

What better choice for Christmas Eve than a cold, seasonal fairy tale from that master of the form, Hans Christian Andersen?

When I was very young, we used to visit my grandparents, and in the evening I would be put to bed with a selection of the few children’s books that my grandmother kept in her house: ’70s annuals featuring famous actresses and that omnipresent (at the time!) symbol of wealth and sex appeal, a pet tiger; Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies; and an old book of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. I can still remember a line from The Tinderbox, about the dog with eyes as big as teacups.

However, I subsequently forgot about Andersen until decades later, when I blithely read The Little Match Girl to my then 6-year-old daughter, having forgotten the story’s heart-breaking ending.

We all think that we know these old fairy tales backwards, and references to them have passed into idiomatic, everyday speech. Here, in northern Europe, we’ve all heard of the “Emperor’s new clothes”. But how often is it that we sit down with a fairy tale as an adult? Even when I used to read collections of fairy stories to my daughters, they were always abridged, and tended to have been rewritten in modern language.

So, I decided it was time to rediscover Andersen’s writing, and revisit those stories I had thought I knew so well, as well as a few I didn’t know at all.

On reading a selection of stories, it was clear that they often don’t carry any strong moral message (although one faintly surreal tale, The False Collar, has a go at incorporating one). Nor do they make any attempt to protect the innocence of children: The Tinderbox is basically amoral, while The Little Match Girl is disturbing in its evocation of poverty and an uncomfortable ideation of death as a joyous escape from a life of misery.

As well as tackling a few short stories, I also read the much longer, seven-part The Snow Queen, which is one of Andersen’s best-known stories.

The Snow Queen is an iconic figure, with a kind of icy sexual power, and inspired both C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories and the massive Disney franchise Frozen. The Snow Queen was apparently originally modelled on the opera singer Jenny Lind – a fictionalised version of whom also pops up in US blockbuster movie The Greatest Showman – who rejected Andersen’s advances.

The main characters in the story of The Snow Queen, Gerda and Kay, are best friends (“They were not brother and sister; but they cared for each other as much as if they were”). However, when Kay gets a fine splinter of glass from an enchanted mirror in his eye and in his heart, his nature becomes icy cold. He is spirited away by the mysterious Snow Queen, and Gerda eventually sets off to find him, though she faces obstacles at every turn.

It is remarkable really that in this 19th century story the boy, Kay, is the vulnerable victim, while both his kidnap and the efforts to bring about his rescue are undertaken by a number of strong, female characters.

Overall, I found The Snow Queen to be startling in both its originality and its glittering, evocative language, as well its undercurrents of nascent sexuality.

Do you have any favourite fairy tales, whether by Hans Christian Andersen or by other writers?

Review no 37: Rembrandt and Light, art exhibition (Netherlands)

@ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London until 2 February 2020

EUROPE

This temporary exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery focuses on the period 1639-58, when Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) was living in his dream home in Amsterdam (now the Museum Het Rembrandthuis), with a light-infused studio. (He eventually lost the property, due to financial problems.)

Dulwich Picture Gallery was recently the victim of an attempted robbery, and two stolen paintings, which made it as far as the gallery gardens before being recovered, were unavailable for viewing, having since been returned to their respective lenders.

Rembrandt is famous for his attention to detail, his realism (at a time when most artists were creating idealised images), his focus on expression and his use of light to accentuate both theatricality and spiritual intensity.

I took one of the free audio guides, which included some great anecdotes. Rembrandt taught students at his house, and female life models were sometimes (shockingly) used. Apparently one young man waited for his female model to undress, then undressed himself stating “now like Adam and Eve we are naked!”. Rembrandt listening in, opened the door, and threw them both out, exclaiming “Now, like Adam and Eve, you are expelled!”

I hoped I could edit the tilt on this photo, but I couldn't, but it does capture the effective use of light

The picture above is the Denial of St Peter. (I’d intended to edit the photo as it is a bit skew-whiff, but was unable to -please excuse the bad alignment!) The important thing I wanted to show was the incredible luminosity and effective use of light in this religious scene, in which Peter denies to a servant girl that he knows Christ; in the back right, Christ can be seen turning towards Peter and the scene of his betrayal.

In certain rooms, the gallery has mocked up lighting to mimic the effects that Rembrandt would have experienced (for example, candlelight), and his own methods of filtering light have also been reproduced (see below):

What I loved most in this exhibition, though, were the portraits. I always love a portrait…

Rembrandt is said to have displayed the picture below (Girl at a Window) in his own window, and passers-by were apparently stunned that the servant girl they noticed had remained still for so long. Whether or not this anecdote is apocryphal, we are made aware of the judicious use of paint to add to the vitality of the painting: the servant girls’ suntanned hand and lower arm are darker than the skin further up, and there is a tiny dot of white paint on her nose, adding to her air of animation.

Meanwhile, in the intimate painting below, A Woman Bathing in a Stream, the water is illuminated by light, as the woman (presumed to be Rembrandt’s lover) lifts her chemise as she wades into the pool.

All in all, this technically informative and fascinating exhibition was well worth the hefty-ish entrance fee.

Review no 36: Mariama Bâ (1929-81), Une Si Longue Lettre/So Long a Letter (Senegal)

Translated from the French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas

AFRICA

So Long a Letter is an epistolary novel (rare in African literature) and seminal African feminist work that laments injustices in the female experience in Senegal. The book was published in French in 1979, and first appeared in English in 1981. It has been judged to be one of the top 12 African books of the 20 century. The book won the inaugural Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980. The text is generally regarded as semi-autobiographical.

Teacher Ramatoulaye is a Muslim woman and recent widow who relays news of the death of her husband Modou to her close friend Aissatou, and reflects on the unfolding of her marriage to Modou, during the course of which she bore him 12 children. In keeping with an intimate letter between friends, the book is deeply personal. We learn that, like Aissatou’s husband, and despite having married for love, Modou in later years took a second, very young bride – in his case, the best friend of one of his daughters.

As the novel proceeds, Ramatoulaye asserts an increasing sense of agency and power in her own actions, throwing off her compliance with certain patriarchal traditions – such as the assumption by Modou’s brother that she will now become his wife.

Unusually for a post-colonial African novel, Ramatoulaye is not always critical of the European influence on her country. She writes of the educational opportunities she and her peers were given in gaining access to a French colonial school:

“…to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us: these were the aims of our admirable headmistress. The word ‘love’ had a particular resonance in her. She loved us without patronizing us, with our plaits either standing on end or bent down, with our loose blouses, our wrappers. She knew how to discover and appreciate our qualities.”

Although the book is short (at less than 100 pages), I found it heavy going at times. However the narrative, while sometimes stilted, can be beautifully evocative:

“Coconut trees with their interlacing leaves, gave protection from the sun. Succulent sapodilla stood next to sweet-smelling pomegranates. Heavy mangoes weighed down the branches. Pawpaws resembling breasts of different shapes hung tempting and inaccessible from the tops of elongated trunks.”

It is difficult to be fair to this book as it is very much not something I would usually read. It’s certainly not a light or even a particularly enjoyable read. But it does give interesting insights into the issues experienced by post-colonial West African women in the late 20th century, and poses questions about how best to live as a modern woman in that place and at that time. These issues parallel concurrent debates about whether the Senegal of the late 1970s should plot a traditional or more modern course.

The book is considered hugely important in the field of African studies, and at the time of publication in English So Long a Letter was described by literary academic Abiola Irele as “the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction“.

Review no 35: South Korean Artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006), exhibition @ Tate Modern

until 9th February 2020 @ Tate Modern, London, UK

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

Nam June Paik’s work blends artistic vision with an intense interest in the technological advances of the 20th century. The work also draws on a fascination with Zen Buddhism, meditation and popular culture, while the artist collaborated productively with many other creative figures, including performance artist and sometime topless cellist Charlotte Moorman, artist Joseph Beuys, George Maciunas (founder of experimental artists’ group Fluxus) and composer John Cage.

Born in Seoul, Paik fled with his family during the Korean war, and he subsequently travelled widely, living in Hong Kong, Japan, Germany and the USA. His rather nomadic lifestyle led him to challenge the status quo, particularly concerning ideas pertaining to borders and cultural differences, amid a world of burgeoning technological connections. An early progenitor of video art, he is credited with coining the phrase “electronic superhighway”. Why hadn’t I heard of this man?

TV Garden (below, 1974-77), is a strangely beautiful, futuristic landscape populated with television sets and living plants. Paik believed that the future would involve the cohabitation of the natural world with the technological, and the Tate’s literature tells us that this complied with his Buddhist faith, which consider everything to be “interdependent and closely connected”. The TV sets display a bewilderingly entrancing eclectic, frenetic and kinetic melange of high and low culture, spanning Beethoven to Japanese TV ads.

Paik’s interest in TVs and other forms of audio-visual technology dated back much further than the above work, from at least the early 1960s. The Tate exhibition displays work in which TV broadcasts have been disturbed and distorted through the use of magnets, in an effort to “reveal their manipulative power”. This primitive robot (below, 1964) tries to cut through the arcane knowledge and complexity underpinning much technology, to create a primitive humanoid, that could walk, play sounds “and even urinate”.

In my art reviews I like to include portraits and self-portraits, where possible. The one shown below, dating from 2005, is probably the most eccentric self-portrait I’ve yet featured.

Self-portrait

One of Paik’s last works, this is a self-portrait crudely painted with permanent oil marker onto a TV screen, which is transmitting images of and by the artist.

It works much better than it sounds as though it should!

TV sculpture, signed in English, Korean and Chinese.

There is so much more to be seen in this exhibition, which is highly imaginative, hugely intriguing and undeniably unusual. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re in London!

Review no 34: Such Small Hands, Andrés Barba (Spain)

Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

EUROPE

This creepy little book by Andrés Barba (published in Spanish in 2008, and in translation in 2017) seemed like the perfect quick read for December, which calls out to me for a creepy story or three.

The cover art is pretty horrible. My daughter asked me to move the book off the table as it was creeping her out so much she couldn’t do her maths homework. Fair enough!

This is the sort of unsettling and disturbing read that is hard to shake off. The short, unadorned opening sentence is effective in piquing curiosity and luring you straight in, and the line is repeated throughout the book, like a chorus:

“Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital“.

Marina, strange and impassive, after recovering in hospital from the injuries arising from the car crash that killed her parents, is discharged with a new doll, also called Marina, to an orphanage. The doll is gifted to her by the medical staff, perhaps intended as some kind of transitional object for comfort, or a tool for processing trauma, and is central to the plot.

From Parts 2 of the book there is a switch to the third person plural, a “we” of the other girls at the orphanage. Marina is different. The physical scars from the horrific injuries she has survived literally mark her out as alien, while her talk of the normal, midde-class childhood she has so recently lost, with trips to Disneyland, provokes jealousy from her institutionalised peers.

“We’d been happy until Marina showed up with her past … we were plagued by a feeling of rage and surprise, and we wanted to gnaw away at her, little by little.”

Gothic motifs abound: a vulnerable female, an uncanny institution, dreams and fantasies; even a disturbing Freudian eroticism creeps in. The book is psychologically acute in evoking the swirling, inchoate hive mind of childhood, as the novella builds to its inevitable conclusion.

Review no 33: Artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), exhibition (Germany)

Free entry, until 12th January 2020 @ The British Museum, London

“As an artist I have the right to extract the emotional content from everything, to let it work on me and then give it outward form.”

EUROPE

I saw this touring exhibition of prints and etchings at the British Museum in London. I was impressed both by Kollwitz’s work as an early feminist, pursuing her artistic ambitions unreservedly while simultaneously raising her two young sons, and by her emotionally raw depictions of the strength of maternal feeling.

The Director of the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, where the exhibition kicked off, has written that: “She was an artist who pushed hard in the direction of equality for women in all walks of life … often placing an emphasis on what was distinct in women’s experience … She believed that art, while aspiring to aesthetic purity, could be a force for good in society.”

Although themes of death and maternal grief abound, there is also a more hopeful side to Kollwitz’s work. She was fascinated by labouring, working-class people, not purely owing to her strong social concerns, but their “speed and movement, the strength and grace of their bodies” (Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz, Frances Carey and Max Egremont).

Arbeiterfrau im Profil nach links (Working Woman in Profile facing left), 1903 Crayon and brush lithograph with scraper, printed on grey laid paper

Kollwitz was a keen advocate of workers’ rights and of gender equality at a time when that idea must have seemed more or less ridiculous. That she achieved such great success as a graphic artist when painting and sculpture were so much more highly esteemed is doubly notable. Kollwitz produced over 1,000 drawings, 275 prints and 43 sculptures.

Her interest in print-making seems partly to have been a response to the fact that, with two small children to accommodate, it took up less room than painting. Parenting is the sort of little detail that male artists seem to have been able to evade for centuries. However, as Frances Carey writes, for Kollwitz “motherhood was not the ‘enemy of promise’ but a vital aspect of her identity and growth, as were the personal stories and the broader implications of the social problems around her.”

Muter mit Kind auf dem Arm (Mother with a Child on her Arm), 1910 Etching, drypoint and sandpaper printed on copperplate, overworked with brown wash

Her print Frau mit totem Kind (Woman with Dead Child) was posed using her seven-year-old son Peter, seeming to uncannily presage Peter’s death in the First World War at the age of just 18. The work makes use of an unusual combination of techniques, employing etching and lithography.

Woman with Dead Child (1903) Etching with lithograpy

When war broke out, Kollwitz’s eldest son Hans enlisted, and his younger brother Peter longer to join him. As Peter was still underage he required his father’s signature in order to sign up; Kathe persuaded Peter’s father Karl to sign.

Just after Peter was killed, she produced the print entitled The Wait (Das Warten – not on display in this exhibition). After Peter’s death she came to focus more on sculpture, planning a memorial to her lost son. That memorial, The Grieving Parents, now stands in the Vladslo German Military Ceremony in Belgium (“I stood before the woman, looked at her -my own face – wept and stroked her cheeks”).

The devastating woodcut below, Die Eltern (The Parents) (1921-22) is on display as part of the exhibition:

Meanwhile, her woodcut series Kreig (War), completed in 1922, uses the powerful image of a circle of mothers defending their children:

Die Mutter (The Mothers) 1921-1922 Woodcut on Japan paper

Kollwitz’s life straddled both World Wars, and she tragically lost her grandson, also named Peter, to the Second World War in 1943. Kollwitz was no fan of the Nazis (and was at one point threatened with deportation to a concentration camp); with the loss of her son she had also become a resolute pacifist. Meanwhile, despite their own obsession with images of the mother and child, Egremont tells us that the Nazis “criticised her maternal figures for not being proud enough nurturers of future warriors”.

Self-portrait (1924):

Review no 32: The Chambermaid, film by Lila Avilés (Mexico)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

The Chambermaid (La Camarista), released in 2019, came up as a special offer, “film of the day” rental on the excellent Curzon home cinema app (a recent discovery), and I decided to give it a watch.

My original plan had been to watch Roma (2018) as my Mexican film. With its focus on the life of a housekeeper, Roma seems to cover similar territory as The Chambermaid, which follows the day to day travails and dreams of a young hotel maid, Eve (Evelia). However, Roma‘s slightly earlier release date means that The Chambermaid was perhaps a little overshadowed by the hype that surrounded Roma‘s distribution principally via Netflix (it was shown in only a tiny number of cinemas) and the subsequent Oscar buzz. In keeping with the tone of the film, it felt like time to root for the underdog. I was also drawn to The Chambermaid by the fact that it was directed (and co-written) by a woman, Lila Avilés, who now has the unsought honour of appearing as the first female director on this blog. In 2019 female directors remain a rarity.

The film’s action follows Eve (played with enigmatic restraint by Gabriela Cartol) as she works in a luxury hotel in Mexico City, populated primarily by international guests. Eve has been allocated the rooms on the 21st floor. She is doing well: the higher the floor level, the greater the prestige, but Eve aspires to working on the sumptuous 42nd floor, the luxury penthouse level.

Eve’s role is one of quiet understatement and we follow her largely as if watching a fly on the wall documentary. The film is shot as if a hidden camera is trained on Eve as she goes about her day, and we see what she sees, building up a strong sense of the monotony of her days, her invisibility to the patrons, and her tentative desires and ambitions.

The film takes place within the insulated blankness of the hotel. We can see panoramic views of the city from the hotel windows, but Eve is hermetically sealed within them, as if contained in one of the air-tight Tupperware tubs another staff member keeps trying to flog to her.

Eve is 24, with a four-year-old son who she seems to barely see. Instead she finds herself blankly rocking the baby son of a bored guest who seems sickeningly spoilt in comparison, and who slips Eve a bit of cash to watch the baby so that she can take some time to herself; later, she insincerely offers Eve a job with the family back in Argentina, then checks out without a goodbye.

Meanwhile, a boorish, overweight man acknowledges Eva only to demand more toiletries and loo rolls to add to his ludicrously over-stocked bathroom shelves, gazing vacantly at the TV screen as she busies herself around him, or intoning a self-important voiceover to his laptop over a nature documentary (“An equal number of males and females are born into the pack … it’s survival of the fittest”). Is he actually a voiceover guy, or just a bit … weird?

The Chambermaid is a slow film, tenderly shot, and not without humour, which casts a light on the realities of a side of human life that most tourists prefer to turn away from.

Review no 31: Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq)

Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

This is a strange book with an excellent title, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 and shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker international prize. (I often wonder what prompts a particular book to be translated into English, and thereby gain access to a wider readership, and I wonder if the use of a Western canonical reference, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, consciously or unconsciously helped the book to gain wider attention.)

I participated in the massive protest march in London in 2003 against UK government “intervention” in Iraq, and reading this book highlights the fact that far from solving Iraq’s woes, that intervention unleashed a new kind of horror.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is a complicated book with a diverse cast and many strands and sub-strands of plot, which combines a sort of mordant humour with gothic tropes, political intrigue, magical realism and myth.

I found the structure a bit baggy and the prose didn’t flow entirely smoothly, though whether this was down to the the writing, the translation or my own tilted expectations as a non-expert on Iraqi and Arabic fiction I don’t know!

Junk dealer Hadi, a drunk and a fantasist, cobbles together a creature, the Whatsitsname, from the parts of people killed in explosions in the Iraqi capital, in order to make a body that is complete “…so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.”

However, soon the errant spirit of a young bomb victim, whose own body has been vaporised by a suicide attack, seeks a corporeal home, and occupies the grisly patchwork corpse. Given “life”, the Whatitsname starts to roam the streets to avenge those who have lost their lives in conflict-riven Iraq.

“In Sadr City they spoke of him as a Wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist. The Iraqi government described him as an agent of foreign powers, while the spokesman for the US State Department said he was an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project in Iraq.”

The book, although pacy, is somehow tensionless. Plenty happens, but I felt that the plot was almost beside the point. The overarching allegory of the Whatitsname as a symbol of the absurdity and cruel ridiculousness of conflict, or even the amoral chaos of post-“Operation Shock and Awe” Baghdad itself, is what lies at the heart of the novel. Indeed the monster, as he becomes ever more indiscriminate in his prey, muses:

“There are no innocents who are completely innocent, and no criminals who are completely criminal … every criminal he had killed was also a victim.”

As his original body parts begin to decompose, the Whatitsname is compelled to replace them, using the limbs of his victims and even followers who readily martyr themselves to the cause.

“Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds – ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes – I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen, he thinks.”

Passages such as these were both interesting and powerful, although the overall effect was of a lack of affect, as the characters were little more than ciphers. As a result I didn’t find the novel particularly emotional engaging, despite the grisly horror of the characters’ circumstances. However, the novel works as an intense and thought-provoking response to the real world rampant devastation wrought on Iraq, both from outside and from within.

“Baghdad, a city he no longer recognized … the city had abandoned him, becoming a place of murder and gratuitous violence.”