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Red Birds
An American pilot crash lands in the desert, unprepared for any situation that can’t be resolved with the After Eight mints in his survival kit. Hallucinating palm trees and dehydrating isn’t Major Ellie’s idea of a good time, but he figures it’s less of a hassle than another marital spat back home. In a neighbouring refugee camp, Momo has his own problems; his money-making schemes aren’t working out as planned, his dog has ideas above his station and an academic researcher has shown up to study him for her thesis on the Teenage Muslim Mind. And then there’s the matter of his missing brother…
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2018
182 people are currently reading
2204 people want to read
About the author
Mohammed Hanif
29 books599 followersMohammed Hanif is a Pakistani writer and journalist. He was born at Okara. He was graduated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as a pilot officer but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. He initially worked for Newsline, The Washington Post and India Today. In 1996, he moved to London to work for the BBC. Later, he became the head of the BBC's Urdu service in London.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed...
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 297 reviews
February 24, 2021
Hanif is Pakistan's Joseph Heller,this is his Catch 22 and it is almost as bad.
Mohammad Hanif likes to make fun of things.He has a gift for satire which he used brilliantly in his first,rather controversial book,A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
Red Birds begins well,with Hanif's trademark sarcasm,and after that,it falls flat.I liked the basic idea,a satire on America's recent wars,which rely heavily on aerial bombardment.(Hanif,by the way,was himself trained as pilot though he never saw active service).
Red Birds has been compared to Joseph Heller's Catch 22.Heller was also a pilot turned satirist.I didn't like Catch 22 and have a similar opinion of Red Birds.
An American pilot,Major Ellie is sent to bomb a Middle Eastern country and crashes in the desert.A teenager Momo and his dog Mutt,rescue him.The narration of the book is shared by Ellie,Momo and the dog,Mutt.
There are observations about life at the refugee camp and the brutality of war.
As he likes to do,Hanif makes fun of everything,those who are bombing and those who are being bombed.
There are some good lines.
But there are far too many pages to fill and not enough of a plot,coherent story or action.The sarcasm can only go so far.
This book had promise but it ended up as a rather disappointing effort.I found it a struggle to finish as my attention kept wandering.
Mohammad Hanif likes to make fun of things.He has a gift for satire which he used brilliantly in his first,rather controversial book,A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
Red Birds begins well,with Hanif's trademark sarcasm,and after that,it falls flat.I liked the basic idea,a satire on America's recent wars,which rely heavily on aerial bombardment.(Hanif,by the way,was himself trained as pilot though he never saw active service).
Red Birds has been compared to Joseph Heller's Catch 22.Heller was also a pilot turned satirist.I didn't like Catch 22 and have a similar opinion of Red Birds.
An American pilot,Major Ellie is sent to bomb a Middle Eastern country and crashes in the desert.A teenager Momo and his dog Mutt,rescue him.The narration of the book is shared by Ellie,Momo and the dog,Mutt.
There are observations about life at the refugee camp and the brutality of war.
As he likes to do,Hanif makes fun of everything,those who are bombing and those who are being bombed.
There are some good lines.
But there are far too many pages to fill and not enough of a plot,coherent story or action.The sarcasm can only go so far.
This book had promise but it ended up as a rather disappointing effort.I found it a struggle to finish as my attention kept wandering.
May 30, 2019
It's probably not a great sign when I started wondering how much I had to read at 42% of the book. Honestly, I learned more about this book just reading every other reader's reviews ranging from 2 to 5 stars.
Personally, I feel like a mixed box of last year's crayons. Pieces of this book worked for me while others didn't. My favorite narrator was Mutt the dog who really just seemed like he was more intelligent and I longed for the moment when he could break free of the humans around him. Usually I find novels with a satirical flavor quite enjoyable. Perhaps someday I will try and re-read this one.
Published 14/05/19
Goodreads Review 14/05/19
Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a digital galley in exchange for an honest review.
Personally, I feel like a mixed box of last year's crayons. Pieces of this book worked for me while others didn't. My favorite narrator was Mutt the dog who really just seemed like he was more intelligent and I longed for the moment when he could break free of the humans around him. Usually I find novels with a satirical flavor quite enjoyable. Perhaps someday I will try and re-read this one.
Published 14/05/19
Goodreads Review 14/05/19
Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a digital galley in exchange for an honest review.
October 17, 2018
Wow, this novel is greater than the sum of all of its collective parts, even when those components are spectacular in their own right. Firstly, I wish to address the many reviewers who have labelled this as weird, and just like those kids who were labelled as such throughout my school years, all it really means is different. If different, unique and inspired aren't words that pique your interest and feed your fascination for reading this book then I can't think what would.
Sumptuous and beautifully poetic, Hanif's prose simply sings from the pages and truly denotes a master at work, a wordsmith if you will. What makes this particularly refreshing is that the author tells the story through various unusual devices, including Mutt, the talking dog who narrates. Some people found it difficult to take this part of the plot seriously, but I feel it was an ingenious move which tells the powerful tale through a different medium. Despite the story being one of darkness, poverty and war, it encompasses so much more than that, with a smattering of humour interspersed throughout creating a balance and contrast between the light and dark. The final denouement was also a fitting way to conclude.
I am a strong believer that some of the best things in life are "weird", and this certainly applies in the case of Red Birds. I'll be going back to read Hanif's previous novels and look forward to reading more of his work in the future. A fully deserved five-stars, I'd give it more if I could!
Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC. I was not required to post a review, and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.
Sumptuous and beautifully poetic, Hanif's prose simply sings from the pages and truly denotes a master at work, a wordsmith if you will. What makes this particularly refreshing is that the author tells the story through various unusual devices, including Mutt, the talking dog who narrates. Some people found it difficult to take this part of the plot seriously, but I feel it was an ingenious move which tells the powerful tale through a different medium. Despite the story being one of darkness, poverty and war, it encompasses so much more than that, with a smattering of humour interspersed throughout creating a balance and contrast between the light and dark. The final denouement was also a fitting way to conclude.
I am a strong believer that some of the best things in life are "weird", and this certainly applies in the case of Red Birds. I'll be going back to read Hanif's previous novels and look forward to reading more of his work in the future. A fully deserved five-stars, I'd give it more if I could!
Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC. I was not required to post a review, and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.
July 12, 2018
I’ll start with a confession. If I had known before I picked this book up that a large part of it would be narrated by a dog, I probably would not have wanted to read it. I have a poor track record with books narrated by animals. Perhaps especially, as in this book, when the animal concerned turns out to be the most erudite, intelligent and eloquent of the narrators.
Is it a good thing, then, that I did not know this and requested a copy of the book via NetGalley? I find this an almost impossible question to answer because I am really not sure what to make of this novel.
The set up in the opening chapters is fairly straightforward and is at least partly explained in the publisher’s advance blurb (release is scheduled for Autumn 2018). Ellie is a pilot in the US Air Force whose plane has come down for reasons we never quite understand and who finds himself lost in the desert. He is musing on his relationship with Cath back in the US. Momo lives in a refugee camp where he is worried about the disappearance of his brother Ali. And Mutt is his dog. These three characters act as our narrators taking turns to narrate a chapter (until the final sections of the book when there is an explosion of new narrators). When events conspire to mean Mutt heads out into the desert to escape from the camp, it is not difficult to work out how the stories will merge.
However, once all the protagonists come together, things gradually start to get weirder and weirder and the final chapters of the book are very strange. Hanif has been asked where the book is set and will only say “in my head” and this is a sort of clue to the weirdness that arrives. And whilst the final 100 pages of the book are fairly difficult to read because of the dreamlike narrative where lots of strange things start to happen, it is clear that there is some kind of logic behind it. It really is a bit like a dream where things don’t make that much sense in the cold light of day, but the intent and the message is not lost because of that.
The crux of the matter appears to be what has happened to Ali. Ali is hardly seen in the book, but his fate, or uncertainty about it, is what drives the plot and triggers the almost hallucinatory conclusion. It makes the novel one about family and love in a time of war and about difficulties caused by American intervention. There is much more to war than the front line fighting and we see some of that here. I look forward to reading what some of my American Goodreads friends make of the book. Some of this doesn’t become properly apparent until you finish the book and are able to reflect back on it - whilst reading, you have to grab hold of your hat and hold on until you get to the end, but once you get there, you can sit back and reflect.
I know it is purely personal, but the book is spoiled for me by the non-human narrator. But, apart from that, it is an interesting novel to read.
My thanks to Bloomsbury via NetGalley for a review copy in advance of publication.
Is it a good thing, then, that I did not know this and requested a copy of the book via NetGalley? I find this an almost impossible question to answer because I am really not sure what to make of this novel.
The set up in the opening chapters is fairly straightforward and is at least partly explained in the publisher’s advance blurb (release is scheduled for Autumn 2018). Ellie is a pilot in the US Air Force whose plane has come down for reasons we never quite understand and who finds himself lost in the desert. He is musing on his relationship with Cath back in the US. Momo lives in a refugee camp where he is worried about the disappearance of his brother Ali. And Mutt is his dog. These three characters act as our narrators taking turns to narrate a chapter (until the final sections of the book when there is an explosion of new narrators). When events conspire to mean Mutt heads out into the desert to escape from the camp, it is not difficult to work out how the stories will merge.
However, once all the protagonists come together, things gradually start to get weirder and weirder and the final chapters of the book are very strange. Hanif has been asked where the book is set and will only say “in my head” and this is a sort of clue to the weirdness that arrives. And whilst the final 100 pages of the book are fairly difficult to read because of the dreamlike narrative where lots of strange things start to happen, it is clear that there is some kind of logic behind it. It really is a bit like a dream where things don’t make that much sense in the cold light of day, but the intent and the message is not lost because of that.
The crux of the matter appears to be what has happened to Ali. Ali is hardly seen in the book, but his fate, or uncertainty about it, is what drives the plot and triggers the almost hallucinatory conclusion. It makes the novel one about family and love in a time of war and about difficulties caused by American intervention. There is much more to war than the front line fighting and we see some of that here. I look forward to reading what some of my American Goodreads friends make of the book. Some of this doesn’t become properly apparent until you finish the book and are able to reflect back on it - whilst reading, you have to grab hold of your hat and hold on until you get to the end, but once you get there, you can sit back and reflect.
I know it is purely personal, but the book is spoiled for me by the non-human narrator. But, apart from that, it is an interesting novel to read.
My thanks to Bloomsbury via NetGalley for a review copy in advance of publication.
October 19, 2023
Most of the time when I don’t like a book, reviewing it seems like such a burden. I want to simply say "Hated it, don’t read" and be done with the whole reviewing process, but I never thought I’d be saying this about a Mohammad Hanif book.
And it’s not just because his other novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, was good, but because he writes nonfiction so well. All of his stuff on NYT and BBC Urdu has always been entertaining and engaging, which was why this book came as a particular shock.
Make no mistake, his commentary is still on-point. When talking about war’s absurdities or the intricacies of familial love, Hanif combines humor with fact to create that wry, satirical tone that I’ve known and loved in many of his columns. In fact, the only parts of the book that I actually enjoyed were when the writing disassociated from the protagonist and entered into an observational mode, commenting on the things around them rather than on developing the character or moving the plot along.
It’s a well-known fact that those under assault from outside take it out on their own. The opium eater gets kicked in the bazaar and since he can’t hit back, he comes home and kicks his kids. Big, rich nations get a bloody nose in far-off countries and start slashing the milk money for poor babies at home. You can’t bring an enemy plane down with a stone, but you can smash your neighbour’s window.
But while the sparkling insight and funny bits are all good and well in shorter articles, for a novel you still need some actual narrative arc and characters worth reading about in order to feel invested. And while Hanif’s non-fiction is what I’ve always enjoyed, it's clear that his fiction writing is just not for me. Which is ironic since his novels are what brought his name to my attention in the first place. But after almost falling asleep in the first quarter of the novel, and continuously checking how many pages were left once I passed the halfway mark, I knew this book and I were not meant to be.
Maybe that had something to do with the characters, who all felt entirely boring and purposeless: Ellie, an American pilot who crashes near the site he was supposed to be bombing, gets rescued by Momo, a money-obsessed teenager who dreams about rescuing his missing brother, and is accompanied by Mutt, an actual dog who is our third protagonist.
One could argue that there are lots of hidden depths to the novel, especially in the characterization of Momo, who alternates between dreaming of various entrepreneurial schemes and being interviewed by a young researcher who has come to study The Young Muslim Mind. Momo is an interesting character entirely wasted in this book, and—once again can’t believe I’m saying this—could have been so much more with a better author.
‘We used to drink wine from our enemy’s skull. Now we drink purified water from paper cups made by cutting down trees.” She looks relieved. I think I have given her a glimpse into my young, troubled Muslim mind.
In fact, there are lots of potential opportunities in this novel that are so thoroughly missed that it feels sort of disappointing. ‘Good idea, bad execution’ is not a tag I thought I would use with a Hanif novel, but here we are. Even Ellie, who could have grown from the cynical, vaguely misogynistic, mostly repulsive adult male, manages to have no proper development and learn no lessons. And while I don’t necessarily expect my characters to change in order to justify their presence in a story, I do expect at least some reason for them to exist within the narrative. Sadly enough, the only time when Ellie becomes relevant is when the author uses him as a mouth piece to indulge in the sort of outrageous, in-your-face statements that he’s known for.
If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? If I didn’t rain fire from the skies, who would need her to douse that fire on the ground? Why would you need somebody to throw blankets on burning babies if there were no burning babies? If I didn’t take out homes, who would provide shelter? If I didn’t take out homes who would need shelter? If I didn’t obliterate cities, how would you get to set up refugee camps? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go? If I stop wearing this uniform and quit my job, the world’s sympathy machine will grind to a halt. You don’t hold candlelight vigils for those dying of old age and neglect. You need fireworks to ignite human imagination.
Even the character of the mother, from whom I was expecting some three-dimensional complexity, gets reduced to her obsession with bringing her son back. I’ll admit, a significant portion of my expectation came from the fact that Alice Bhatti, the protagonist of Mohammad Hanif’s 2011 novel, was such a self-aware and interesting female character, but all of the things that made her alive and relevant seem completely missing here.
And on a much more random note, I also couldn’t stand the fact that she was constantly called ‘Mother Dear’. It’s entirely possible that, in college classes where this novel might become required reading in the future, there might be interpretations and reasons for why this particular title was relevant, but I didn’t care for it, and it needlessly irritated me.
Mother Dear doesn’t need consultants in this house. She doesn’t need psychological assistance to get a grip on her life. She doesn’t need folklore or any such sad-ass lectures to get her life-work balance right. She wants her son back.
What also irritated me—and there is unfortunately such a long list in this novel—is the dog as a narrator. Matlab, what? Why? An animal as a main character might be cute in certain books, but my god was Mutt a pointless protagonist. Random and rambling and mostly not engaging enough, all of Mutt’s chapters were a test of my patience, except in the places where Hanif broke out of character, taking on the tone of an omnipresent narrator providing commentary from above.
God left this place a long time ago, and I don’t harbour any delusions about my own role on this earth but I can imagine what he must have felt like. He had had enough. I have had a bit more than that.
In fact, pretty much the only person whose existence Hanif has fun with is the young female researcher, Lady Flowerbody, who embodies the sort of do-gooder humanitarian who has come to save the souls of the poor, ravaged children of war. It is in her characterization that his snark truly manages to shine, showering disdain and amusement in equal measures at the very idea of people like her. Reference after reference after reference fluctuates between scorn and a healthy dose of hilarity when talking about those who travel to war-ravaged areas and attempt to ‘save’ the people over there.
First they bomb us from the skies, then they work hard to cure our stress.
Now if only Hanif could have concentrated on channeling his sarcasm, we could have been saved from the frankly disastrous ending. And this won’t even be a spoiler, because to spoil an ending you have to be able to understand what actually happened. Because ghosts? And magical realism? And what the what now? I want to be able to understand what happened at the end, not to have to guess. And I get that allegory and metaphors and allusions to things can make for great literature, but it’s usually a hit or miss, and this time it’s a definite miss for me.
Red birds are real. The reason we don’t see them is because we don’t want to. Because if we see them, we’ll remember. 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.
I guess the only redeemable thing about this novel is the fact that Mohammad Hanif is still as intensely quotable as always. In shorter bursts he writes well, and in certain paragraphs the authority he has over the language really shows through. Overall though, I just didn’t care for the plot, or the characters, or even about the fact that it had been written by such an esteemed writer. As a recommendation, I’d say I personally didn’t care for it, but everyone is welcome to give it a go.
You got killed, now you are gonna stay killed. It doesn’t matter whether you died bravely or left this world shitting in your pants. White or brown, dead is dead.
***
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Couldn't wait for this to finish. I'm in shock, it was so bad. Bleugh. Review to come.
***
I review Pakistani Fiction, and talk about Pakistani fiction, and want to talk to people who like to talk about fiction (Pakistani and otherwise, take your pick.) To read more reviews or just contact me so you can talk about books, check out my Blog or follow me on Twitter!
And it’s not just because his other novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, was good, but because he writes nonfiction so well. All of his stuff on NYT and BBC Urdu has always been entertaining and engaging, which was why this book came as a particular shock.
Make no mistake, his commentary is still on-point. When talking about war’s absurdities or the intricacies of familial love, Hanif combines humor with fact to create that wry, satirical tone that I’ve known and loved in many of his columns. In fact, the only parts of the book that I actually enjoyed were when the writing disassociated from the protagonist and entered into an observational mode, commenting on the things around them rather than on developing the character or moving the plot along.
It’s a well-known fact that those under assault from outside take it out on their own. The opium eater gets kicked in the bazaar and since he can’t hit back, he comes home and kicks his kids. Big, rich nations get a bloody nose in far-off countries and start slashing the milk money for poor babies at home. You can’t bring an enemy plane down with a stone, but you can smash your neighbour’s window.
But while the sparkling insight and funny bits are all good and well in shorter articles, for a novel you still need some actual narrative arc and characters worth reading about in order to feel invested. And while Hanif’s non-fiction is what I’ve always enjoyed, it's clear that his fiction writing is just not for me. Which is ironic since his novels are what brought his name to my attention in the first place. But after almost falling asleep in the first quarter of the novel, and continuously checking how many pages were left once I passed the halfway mark, I knew this book and I were not meant to be.
Maybe that had something to do with the characters, who all felt entirely boring and purposeless: Ellie, an American pilot who crashes near the site he was supposed to be bombing, gets rescued by Momo, a money-obsessed teenager who dreams about rescuing his missing brother, and is accompanied by Mutt, an actual dog who is our third protagonist.
One could argue that there are lots of hidden depths to the novel, especially in the characterization of Momo, who alternates between dreaming of various entrepreneurial schemes and being interviewed by a young researcher who has come to study The Young Muslim Mind. Momo is an interesting character entirely wasted in this book, and—once again can’t believe I’m saying this—could have been so much more with a better author.
‘We used to drink wine from our enemy’s skull. Now we drink purified water from paper cups made by cutting down trees.” She looks relieved. I think I have given her a glimpse into my young, troubled Muslim mind.
In fact, there are lots of potential opportunities in this novel that are so thoroughly missed that it feels sort of disappointing. ‘Good idea, bad execution’ is not a tag I thought I would use with a Hanif novel, but here we are. Even Ellie, who could have grown from the cynical, vaguely misogynistic, mostly repulsive adult male, manages to have no proper development and learn no lessons. And while I don’t necessarily expect my characters to change in order to justify their presence in a story, I do expect at least some reason for them to exist within the narrative. Sadly enough, the only time when Ellie becomes relevant is when the author uses him as a mouth piece to indulge in the sort of outrageous, in-your-face statements that he’s known for.
If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? If I didn’t rain fire from the skies, who would need her to douse that fire on the ground? Why would you need somebody to throw blankets on burning babies if there were no burning babies? If I didn’t take out homes, who would provide shelter? If I didn’t take out homes who would need shelter? If I didn’t obliterate cities, how would you get to set up refugee camps? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go? If I stop wearing this uniform and quit my job, the world’s sympathy machine will grind to a halt. You don’t hold candlelight vigils for those dying of old age and neglect. You need fireworks to ignite human imagination.
Even the character of the mother, from whom I was expecting some three-dimensional complexity, gets reduced to her obsession with bringing her son back. I’ll admit, a significant portion of my expectation came from the fact that Alice Bhatti, the protagonist of Mohammad Hanif’s 2011 novel, was such a self-aware and interesting female character, but all of the things that made her alive and relevant seem completely missing here.
And on a much more random note, I also couldn’t stand the fact that she was constantly called ‘Mother Dear’. It’s entirely possible that, in college classes where this novel might become required reading in the future, there might be interpretations and reasons for why this particular title was relevant, but I didn’t care for it, and it needlessly irritated me.
Mother Dear doesn’t need consultants in this house. She doesn’t need psychological assistance to get a grip on her life. She doesn’t need folklore or any such sad-ass lectures to get her life-work balance right. She wants her son back.
What also irritated me—and there is unfortunately such a long list in this novel—is the dog as a narrator. Matlab, what? Why? An animal as a main character might be cute in certain books, but my god was Mutt a pointless protagonist. Random and rambling and mostly not engaging enough, all of Mutt’s chapters were a test of my patience, except in the places where Hanif broke out of character, taking on the tone of an omnipresent narrator providing commentary from above.
God left this place a long time ago, and I don’t harbour any delusions about my own role on this earth but I can imagine what he must have felt like. He had had enough. I have had a bit more than that.
In fact, pretty much the only person whose existence Hanif has fun with is the young female researcher, Lady Flowerbody, who embodies the sort of do-gooder humanitarian who has come to save the souls of the poor, ravaged children of war. It is in her characterization that his snark truly manages to shine, showering disdain and amusement in equal measures at the very idea of people like her. Reference after reference after reference fluctuates between scorn and a healthy dose of hilarity when talking about those who travel to war-ravaged areas and attempt to ‘save’ the people over there.
First they bomb us from the skies, then they work hard to cure our stress.
Now if only Hanif could have concentrated on channeling his sarcasm, we could have been saved from the frankly disastrous ending. And this won’t even be a spoiler, because to spoil an ending you have to be able to understand what actually happened. Because ghosts? And magical realism? And what the what now? I want to be able to understand what happened at the end, not to have to guess. And I get that allegory and metaphors and allusions to things can make for great literature, but it’s usually a hit or miss, and this time it’s a definite miss for me.
Red birds are real. The reason we don’t see them is because we don’t want to. Because if we see them, we’ll remember. 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.
I guess the only redeemable thing about this novel is the fact that Mohammad Hanif is still as intensely quotable as always. In shorter bursts he writes well, and in certain paragraphs the authority he has over the language really shows through. Overall though, I just didn’t care for the plot, or the characters, or even about the fact that it had been written by such an esteemed writer. As a recommendation, I’d say I personally didn’t care for it, but everyone is welcome to give it a go.
You got killed, now you are gonna stay killed. It doesn’t matter whether you died bravely or left this world shitting in your pants. White or brown, dead is dead.
***
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Couldn't wait for this to finish. I'm in shock, it was so bad. Bleugh. Review to come.
***
I review Pakistani Fiction, and talk about Pakistani fiction, and want to talk to people who like to talk about fiction (Pakistani and otherwise, take your pick.) To read more reviews or just contact me so you can talk about books, check out my Blog or follow me on Twitter!
September 12, 2018
We are not here to save our national honour, we are not here to save our national anything [...] There can be no victory if I don't take my firstborn home. My son's safety is my victory. That's my entire war plan. That's my ideology. That's my tactics. That's my strategy.
If we crossed Catch-22 with Frankenstein in Baghdad, threw in some Salman Rushdie stylistics and maybe a soupcon of Home Fire, with a smattering of The Girl in Green over the top would Red Birds be the result?
I see other reviewers have used the word 'weird' about it with some consistency and I can understand why: this is certainly a book where we need to let go of linear storytelling expectations and ditch realism as a mode of understanding and reflecting the world. Hanif combines the logical absurdity of war made famous by Heller with a wonderfully imaginative way of engaging with existentialist fundamentals of life and death. And he's funny in a sharp, observational, politically-astute way, something that he shares with Derek B. Miller: 'she has a stash of bottled water somewhere. I am gonna save the world but let me first ensure there is enough Perrier', 'it was simple, they bombed us and then sent well-educated people to look into our mental health needs'.
Having one of the narrators a dog called Mutt (what else?) might make this sound twee but it isn't in this case. Mutt is both perhaps the most self-consciously philosophical of all the characters and the most stoical and enduring, even when his leg is broken by his young master. His love is unconditional and he understands instinctively the significance of the titular red birds when the doctor is floundering with scientific explanations.
There's a slight lull in the middle but Hanif gathers everything together for a spectacular finale: imaginative, figurative and quite urgent in its emotions. It's rare for an author to be so in control of his material, especially when his palette is as broad as the one here: war, contemporary politics, American interventionism, family, love, life and death. And even more rare that a text can combine satirical throwaways with characters endowed with life, and deal with such big matters with such imaginative originality. I'm in danger of gushing but, honestly, I loved this!
Many thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley
December 29, 2018
When a US pilot, Ellie, crash lands near the refugee camp he was sent to bomb, he is stranded in the hot desert, starving and thirsty. He finds a wounded dog, Mutt, (who is a key character in the book) and eventually the dog and Ellie are 'rescued' by the teenage Momo. Written in alternating POVs between these 3 main characters, the chapters tell a mix of the past and present, the agony and despair of what is left behind when war stops and people are trying to regroup and move on with the weight of grief and a sense of hopelessness when the aide food has stopped falling from the sky months ago.
I loved the way this book started, we got a sense of each character and how they were rooted in their own belief of what was happening, who was to blame, the infidels, the stubborn Americans, even the French!..but I didn't like the way it ended at all. I was ok with the talking orphaned mutt in the middle east, even if he seemed very wise, educated and with a great grasp of the English language. But.
Its a very funny, sharp witted read and I enjoyed Hanif's portrayal of the 'fugee' camp. I will be sourcing out more of his writing for my to-be-read stack.
Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.
I loved the way this book started, we got a sense of each character and how they were rooted in their own belief of what was happening, who was to blame, the infidels, the stubborn Americans, even the French!..but I didn't like the way it ended at all. I was ok with the talking orphaned mutt in the middle east, even if he seemed very wise, educated and with a great grasp of the English language. But.
Its a very funny, sharp witted read and I enjoyed Hanif's portrayal of the 'fugee' camp. I will be sourcing out more of his writing for my to-be-read stack.
Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.
July 27, 2018
One of several disappointments in this year's Man Booker list was the lack of any non UK/Irish and North American voices, a lack that is increasingly becoming a feature of the prize in recent years. One obvious omission was this book, the latest novel by Mohammed Hanif, who was previously longlisted for his debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, in the deliberately more diverse list chosen by the 2008 jury. Interestingly though the 2008 panel had to call in the novel as it wasn't submitted by the publishers, and one wonder if publishers rather than the jury are responsible for the rather narrow 2018 list.
Red Birds is set in and around a refugee camp in the desert in an unnamed country, under US military occupation, albeit the reason for the intervention seems unclear to those on the ground on both sides ("this place may look poorer than Afghanistan, and more violent than Sudan, but thank god there is no ideology at stake. Not for them, not for us. They bomb us because they assume we are related to bad Arabs. We steal from them because that’s all we can do.")
The novel mainly switches between three first person narrators:
Ellie, a US an air-force pilot who has crash landed in the desert after a bombing mission failed, a follow up to a mission on which his superior, Colonel Slattert disappeared. He is disoriented and struggling with the adequacy of his survival kit:
"They give you a 65-million-dollar machine to fly, with the smartest bomb that some beam rider in Salt Lake City took years to design, you burn fuel at the rate of fifteen gallons per second and if you get screwed they expect you to survive on four energy biscuits and an organic smoothie. And look, a mini pack of After Eights. Somebody’s really spent a lot of time trying to provide the comforts of a threestar hotel. Here, have another towel. Now go die."
Momo, a 15 year old boy in the camp, but a self-designated entrepreneur with ambitious plans e.g. for a Scorpions Racing Circuit:
"I became a businessman. I buy and I sell. I provide services and I charge. I make deals and I take my percent age. While people discuss problems of growing up, I find solutions to the problems that grown-ups have. Some might say that I am an evil entrepreneur, a post-war profiteer, a petty black marketer, and I am gonna tell you that is jealousy speak."
And Mutt, Momo's dog (!). Mutt' s narration is the first sign of the somewhat fantastical nature of the story. His thoughts are partly on a dog's perspective on humans:
"There’s a big difference between biters and lickers but the human race is not given to subtleties and most people can’t spot the difference. They see the bared teeth, they don’t see the lolling tongue. They see the curled up, shivering tail and not the intellect at work. They hear the growl and not the whine that says give me some love, oh please give me some love."
But he is also the most philosophical of all the characters, something he explains by an incident just before the book started where he was electrocuted:
"Yet in that moment I became me. Before that I was just another above-average Mutt with common desires, beastly urges and an appetite for home-cooked food, but in that moment I rose above the ranks of common strays who had adopted troubled families and were trying their best. Momo says my brain got fried in that accident. I think I became a philosopher that day. It was the worst day of my life. But who knows maybe it was the best day of my life."
In particular, Mutt is the one who theorises about the significance of the red birds (see below).
The sections narrated by Ellie have a flavour of Catch 22, and in part I suspect reflect the author's own experience as an air force pilot. From a New Yorker interview in 2016:
"In the Air Force, Hanif trained as a fighter pilot, flying an American-made T-37 twin-engine jet. But, he said, “I hated every minute I was there.” Whenever he could, he shirked duty to immerse himself in novels by Graham Greene and Joseph Heller; sometimes he read to his fellow-officers from “Catch-22,” which seemed especially relevant. “This was the life we’d been living, minus the war,” he said."
(www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09...)
Ellie ends up being saved (reluctantly) by Mutt and Momo and is taken to the camp, which he realises is the very one he was sent to bomb:
"I guess it might have been a village once but now it’s only a settlement of sorts. I have never seen a refugee camp for real, only in pictures and TV news. I expect neat rows of tents, gleaming ambulances, people standing in orderly queues waiting to get their rations from gap-year students with dreadlocks and nose rings. What I see is what I have already seen on my Strike Eagle’s monitor, just before I hesitated to press the button: a series of junkyards, rows of burnt-out cars piled on each other, abandoned tanks and armoured vehicles, a small mountain of disused keyboards and mobile phone shells, piles of rubbish with smoke rising off them. The camp is a sea of corrugated blue plastic roofs, stretching like a low, filthy sky, broken by piles of grey plastic poles and overflowing blue plastic rubbish bins.
This is the kind of place where evil festers, Colonel Slatter had said. All I can see are failed attempts at starting kitchen gardens, neat squares marked with pebbles, half-grown stumps in little plastic pots. No littering signs over piles of litter. This seems like a failing effort to keep some distance between children and the impending plague. This place needed no help from the skies. What was I thinking? What was Colonel Slatter thinking?"
But he rationalises:
"If I didn’t obliterate cities, who would build refugee camps? If I didn’t destroy, who would rebuild? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go? If I stop wearing this uniform and quit my job, the world’s sympathy machine will grind to a halt."
The area is home to many small red birds. The camp's resident scientist speculates that these are canaries mutated by depleted uranium, but Mutt has a different explanation:
"Red birds are real. The reason we don’t see them is because we don’t want to. Because if we see them, we’ll remember. 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’."
And the concept of those missing in conflict seems key to the novel, not just Colonel Slattery and indeed Ellie himself but also Momo's elder brother, Ali. Momo and Alis's father worked in logistics in the US hangar that neighbours the camp and Ali had worked as a spotter for the US airforce for their bombing raids, which makes it all the more strange when their own house is bombed. Their father then took Ali, several months before the novel, to sign on for a permanent job at the hangar but Ali never returns and the hangar is abandoned.
The final section of the novel takes a metaphysical turn as a group suddenly return to the hangar "some dressed in uniform like those soldiers who used to come out in convoys to get their water supply, now a bunch of tired soldiers returning to their base. They are floating over the sand heading towards the Hangar." Mutt notices something particularly odd - they have no smell.
"The gates of the Hangar are open, the floodlights have been turned on, there are no aeroplanes but the windsock is fluttering, the giant machines in the Hangar are squeaking and whirling. Why have they come back? Have they brought our Bro back? Suddenly I remember. My fried brains might be slow but they can do the job. I know the person who doesn’t have a smell. I need to go tell Momo that there is a ghost under our own roof."
Overall a book that doesn't yield its messages easily and one that I would have like to see on the Booker longlist, if only to discuss with other readers.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
3.5 stars
Red Birds is set in and around a refugee camp in the desert in an unnamed country, under US military occupation, albeit the reason for the intervention seems unclear to those on the ground on both sides ("this place may look poorer than Afghanistan, and more violent than Sudan, but thank god there is no ideology at stake. Not for them, not for us. They bomb us because they assume we are related to bad Arabs. We steal from them because that’s all we can do.")
The novel mainly switches between three first person narrators:
Ellie, a US an air-force pilot who has crash landed in the desert after a bombing mission failed, a follow up to a mission on which his superior, Colonel Slattert disappeared. He is disoriented and struggling with the adequacy of his survival kit:
"They give you a 65-million-dollar machine to fly, with the smartest bomb that some beam rider in Salt Lake City took years to design, you burn fuel at the rate of fifteen gallons per second and if you get screwed they expect you to survive on four energy biscuits and an organic smoothie. And look, a mini pack of After Eights. Somebody’s really spent a lot of time trying to provide the comforts of a threestar hotel. Here, have another towel. Now go die."
Momo, a 15 year old boy in the camp, but a self-designated entrepreneur with ambitious plans e.g. for a Scorpions Racing Circuit:
"I became a businessman. I buy and I sell. I provide services and I charge. I make deals and I take my percent age. While people discuss problems of growing up, I find solutions to the problems that grown-ups have. Some might say that I am an evil entrepreneur, a post-war profiteer, a petty black marketer, and I am gonna tell you that is jealousy speak."
And Mutt, Momo's dog (!). Mutt' s narration is the first sign of the somewhat fantastical nature of the story. His thoughts are partly on a dog's perspective on humans:
"There’s a big difference between biters and lickers but the human race is not given to subtleties and most people can’t spot the difference. They see the bared teeth, they don’t see the lolling tongue. They see the curled up, shivering tail and not the intellect at work. They hear the growl and not the whine that says give me some love, oh please give me some love."
But he is also the most philosophical of all the characters, something he explains by an incident just before the book started where he was electrocuted:
"Yet in that moment I became me. Before that I was just another above-average Mutt with common desires, beastly urges and an appetite for home-cooked food, but in that moment I rose above the ranks of common strays who had adopted troubled families and were trying their best. Momo says my brain got fried in that accident. I think I became a philosopher that day. It was the worst day of my life. But who knows maybe it was the best day of my life."
In particular, Mutt is the one who theorises about the significance of the red birds (see below).
The sections narrated by Ellie have a flavour of Catch 22, and in part I suspect reflect the author's own experience as an air force pilot. From a New Yorker interview in 2016:
"In the Air Force, Hanif trained as a fighter pilot, flying an American-made T-37 twin-engine jet. But, he said, “I hated every minute I was there.” Whenever he could, he shirked duty to immerse himself in novels by Graham Greene and Joseph Heller; sometimes he read to his fellow-officers from “Catch-22,” which seemed especially relevant. “This was the life we’d been living, minus the war,” he said."
(www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09...)
Ellie ends up being saved (reluctantly) by Mutt and Momo and is taken to the camp, which he realises is the very one he was sent to bomb:
"I guess it might have been a village once but now it’s only a settlement of sorts. I have never seen a refugee camp for real, only in pictures and TV news. I expect neat rows of tents, gleaming ambulances, people standing in orderly queues waiting to get their rations from gap-year students with dreadlocks and nose rings. What I see is what I have already seen on my Strike Eagle’s monitor, just before I hesitated to press the button: a series of junkyards, rows of burnt-out cars piled on each other, abandoned tanks and armoured vehicles, a small mountain of disused keyboards and mobile phone shells, piles of rubbish with smoke rising off them. The camp is a sea of corrugated blue plastic roofs, stretching like a low, filthy sky, broken by piles of grey plastic poles and overflowing blue plastic rubbish bins.
This is the kind of place where evil festers, Colonel Slatter had said. All I can see are failed attempts at starting kitchen gardens, neat squares marked with pebbles, half-grown stumps in little plastic pots. No littering signs over piles of litter. This seems like a failing effort to keep some distance between children and the impending plague. This place needed no help from the skies. What was I thinking? What was Colonel Slatter thinking?"
But he rationalises:
"If I didn’t obliterate cities, who would build refugee camps? If I didn’t destroy, who would rebuild? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go? If I stop wearing this uniform and quit my job, the world’s sympathy machine will grind to a halt."
The area is home to many small red birds. The camp's resident scientist speculates that these are canaries mutated by depleted uranium, but Mutt has a different explanation:
"Red birds are real. The reason we don’t see them is because we don’t want to. Because if we see them, we’ll remember. 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’."
And the concept of those missing in conflict seems key to the novel, not just Colonel Slattery and indeed Ellie himself but also Momo's elder brother, Ali. Momo and Alis's father worked in logistics in the US hangar that neighbours the camp and Ali had worked as a spotter for the US airforce for their bombing raids, which makes it all the more strange when their own house is bombed. Their father then took Ali, several months before the novel, to sign on for a permanent job at the hangar but Ali never returns and the hangar is abandoned.
The final section of the novel takes a metaphysical turn as a group suddenly return to the hangar "some dressed in uniform like those soldiers who used to come out in convoys to get their water supply, now a bunch of tired soldiers returning to their base. They are floating over the sand heading towards the Hangar." Mutt notices something particularly odd - they have no smell.
"The gates of the Hangar are open, the floodlights have been turned on, there are no aeroplanes but the windsock is fluttering, the giant machines in the Hangar are squeaking and whirling. Why have they come back? Have they brought our Bro back? Suddenly I remember. My fried brains might be slow but they can do the job. I know the person who doesn’t have a smell. I need to go tell Momo that there is a ghost under our own roof."
Overall a book that doesn't yield its messages easily and one that I would have like to see on the Booker longlist, if only to discuss with other readers.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
3.5 stars
November 11, 2018
The irony of war for peace or even democracy has struck this world over and over again. The hypocrisy of countries such as America, UK, Russia and France when it comes to wars and conflict in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Latin American countries and African countries is crystal clear to those who are the recieving end of it and those who are witnessing it. But unfortunately it is openly ignored by a large percentage of the population in the countries mentioned above. That is because they are made to believe by their govts that these wars are necessary, that their armies are knights in shining armours saving hungry children and emancipating women. But the reality is miles away from that.
This book brings you that reality. The satire goes through your heart and wakes you up if you have been blind to the chaos and madness that post war organisations like USAID introduce into a place already torn down by an unnecessary war.
With Mutt the all knowing dog, Momo a lost teenager in a desert fraught by war, a mother awaiting her lost son, a father unable to accept the reality, a lost American pilot who was supposed to bomb the very camp he has landed in, and a researcher trying to piece stories together; this book will make you laugh and cringe with sadness at the same time. The deadpan irony is delivered in a razor sharp narrative.
This book brings you that reality. The satire goes through your heart and wakes you up if you have been blind to the chaos and madness that post war organisations like USAID introduce into a place already torn down by an unnecessary war.
With Mutt the all knowing dog, Momo a lost teenager in a desert fraught by war, a mother awaiting her lost son, a father unable to accept the reality, a lost American pilot who was supposed to bomb the very camp he has landed in, and a researcher trying to piece stories together; this book will make you laugh and cringe with sadness at the same time. The deadpan irony is delivered in a razor sharp narrative.
May 5, 2019
Not my cup of tea.
May 15, 2019
A surrealist tale seen through the eyes of three characters: US airman Ellie, who crash-lands in the desert, a 15-year-old teenager Momo living in a bombed-out refugee camp, and his dog Mutt. It has some very droll passages as Hanif cleverly intersperses the story of how Ellie is brought into Momo’s family compound with the cognitive dissonance of two uncomprehending cultures.
Momo sees himself as a businessman (his source material is a Fortune 500 article about the importance of a business’s “supply chain”) with three wonderfully loopy but doomed ventures; and his sexual knowledge (apart from unwanted information from his father, the camp’s official ‘sex educator’) comes from Cosmopolitan, which “had nothing about how to build a supply chain but did have a long essay on 60 Paths to Orgasm.”
Ellie simply wants to get home to his wife Cath and is desperate not be recognized as one of the Americans from the recently-closed “Hangar” which carried out regular bombing raids on the camp. His story is that he was on a humanitarian mission or supply drop. But his home life was not really the way he initially relates it, either.
Mutt is the wise, dispassionate observer, he can small deceit but his immediate needs are still very canine, (slinking off after he pees on Momo’s favourite cap.) I think I liked his voice most of all.
And there are other fascinating but discordant characters like the USAID worker “Lady Flowerbody” who is there to conduct research into the Teenage Muslim Mind – (“It was simple, they bombed us and then sent well-educated people to look after our mental health needs.”) or the Doctor, who was originally a herb farmer, but there was nobody else (“don’t worry about your wounds or your wasting organs, worry about Mother Earth because she really is gonna die.”)
Driving the story along is the absence of Momo’s older brother Bro Ali. He had disappeared a few months earlier after being given a job at the Hangar. Momo and his “Mother Dear” both think that his father sold Bro Ali to the Americans - and Red Birds is really about the quest to find him.
I was quite enjoying the book until the final third, which morphs into a sort of fantasy war between all the camp characters including Ellie, and what turn out to be ghosts in the Hangar. (I couldn’t help thinking of David Mitchell’s battle scenes in The Bone Clocks.) In this last part, the voices ricochet between too many other characters like the Doctor, Cath and so on, and it ends weakly with a reverie from Mother Dear.
It felt like Hanif had lost his way - a pity, because this could have been 4 stars.
Momo sees himself as a businessman (his source material is a Fortune 500 article about the importance of a business’s “supply chain”) with three wonderfully loopy but doomed ventures; and his sexual knowledge (apart from unwanted information from his father, the camp’s official ‘sex educator’) comes from Cosmopolitan, which “had nothing about how to build a supply chain but did have a long essay on 60 Paths to Orgasm.”
Ellie simply wants to get home to his wife Cath and is desperate not be recognized as one of the Americans from the recently-closed “Hangar” which carried out regular bombing raids on the camp. His story is that he was on a humanitarian mission or supply drop. But his home life was not really the way he initially relates it, either.
Mutt is the wise, dispassionate observer, he can small deceit but his immediate needs are still very canine, (slinking off after he pees on Momo’s favourite cap.) I think I liked his voice most of all.
And there are other fascinating but discordant characters like the USAID worker “Lady Flowerbody” who is there to conduct research into the Teenage Muslim Mind – (“It was simple, they bombed us and then sent well-educated people to look after our mental health needs.”) or the Doctor, who was originally a herb farmer, but there was nobody else (“don’t worry about your wounds or your wasting organs, worry about Mother Earth because she really is gonna die.”)
Driving the story along is the absence of Momo’s older brother Bro Ali. He had disappeared a few months earlier after being given a job at the Hangar. Momo and his “Mother Dear” both think that his father sold Bro Ali to the Americans - and Red Birds is really about the quest to find him.
I was quite enjoying the book until the final third, which morphs into a sort of fantasy war between all the camp characters including Ellie, and what turn out to be ghosts in the Hangar. (I couldn’t help thinking of David Mitchell’s battle scenes in The Bone Clocks.) In this last part, the voices ricochet between too many other characters like the Doctor, Cath and so on, and it ends weakly with a reverie from Mother Dear.
It felt like Hanif had lost his way - a pity, because this could have been 4 stars.
June 27, 2018
This book, with it's flashes of brilliance and thorough weirdness is hard for me to rate. It is the kind of book that Booker judges love. Clever, ridiculously funny in parts while it's utter grimness makes it not amusing in the slightest. There is no doubt that the author is a master of metaphor and the writing is engaging, particularly in the beginning and end but I found myself having to re-read parts to figure out whose voice I was reading.
Ellie is a pilot whose plane has come down in the desert while he is on a bombing run. He is starving, dying of thirst and reflecting on his relationship with Cath his wife while he slowly runs out of life. Mutt is a dog, fed up with the treatment he receives, he has headed out into the desert to die and comes across Ellie much to his annoyance. Next up is Momo, a teenage boy who arrives to collect Mutt and who is convinced that Ellie is stealing his dog. Ellie eventually convinces Momo to give him a ride to his village which turns out to the be the refugee camp that he was supposed to be bombing in the first place. So far so funny! But it is the kind of funny which is tinged with tragedy, threat and sorrow. The characters you meet will each have so many sadnesses as they deal with the realities of life under threat by the very armed force that supposedly keeps them safe. It is lies upon lies and weirdness galore.
I loved the final chapters of this book but the middle section was like a metaphysical journey where I was never quite sure what I was reading. I guess that was intentional, this book takes you on a journey into a world seldom seen, these people are forgotten in so many ways.
I didn't love this book but I think it is clever and interesting and I'm glad I chose it. It is a reminder that war is much bigger than the battle at the frontline.
Thanks to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for giving me access to this book.
Ellie is a pilot whose plane has come down in the desert while he is on a bombing run. He is starving, dying of thirst and reflecting on his relationship with Cath his wife while he slowly runs out of life. Mutt is a dog, fed up with the treatment he receives, he has headed out into the desert to die and comes across Ellie much to his annoyance. Next up is Momo, a teenage boy who arrives to collect Mutt and who is convinced that Ellie is stealing his dog. Ellie eventually convinces Momo to give him a ride to his village which turns out to the be the refugee camp that he was supposed to be bombing in the first place. So far so funny! But it is the kind of funny which is tinged with tragedy, threat and sorrow. The characters you meet will each have so many sadnesses as they deal with the realities of life under threat by the very armed force that supposedly keeps them safe. It is lies upon lies and weirdness galore.
I loved the final chapters of this book but the middle section was like a metaphysical journey where I was never quite sure what I was reading. I guess that was intentional, this book takes you on a journey into a world seldom seen, these people are forgotten in so many ways.
I didn't love this book but I think it is clever and interesting and I'm glad I chose it. It is a reminder that war is much bigger than the battle at the frontline.
Thanks to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for giving me access to this book.
May 13, 2019
This was a weird tale of a pilot who ejects into the desert and after eight days of wandering in a desert is (mostly) rescued by a dog called Mutt and a 15 yo go-getter from the local refugee camp. It is a nameless country, the camp is located next to an abandoned hangar left by the US, there is a USAID worker researching for the sake of researching, lost sons taken by the US, metaphors on metaphors, ghosts, a dog that is smarter than the humans, a father once employed by the US who faithfully waits for their return and the pilot with dark dreams of his wife, his purpose and of very warped cultural awareness training.
It won't be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoyed it immensely.
It won't be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoyed it immensely.
January 12, 2019
Published in Newsline Magazine in December 2018
When it comes to literary styles, satire and surrealism seem best-suited to match the illogicality of war and its aftermath, as the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller can attest to. The inherent absurdity of war is perhaps even more heightened today, with global modern warfare’s reliance on remote-controlled drone technology which has transformed the relationship between soldiers and civilians into aerial bombers and dots on a grainy screen. Contemporary fiction writers have utilized tools of satire to explore this particularly 21st century style of warfare. Earlier this year saw the publication of the English translation of Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi’s Arabic novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, an absurdist update on the original Frankenstein’s monster, only this time the creature is made up of body parts left in the wake of bombs. It makes sense that Mohammed Hanif, Pakistan’s master of the absurd, would train his literary eye to the subject as well. His latest, much-awaited novel Red Birds, takes place in a refugee camp in a land already ravaged by war. But while Red Birds’ critique of modern war is as incisive and hard-hitting as all of his analysis and commentary tends to be, as a novel it is rather disappointingly underwhelming.
Red Birds tells the story of Ellie, a brash, cynical American bomber plane pilot who, instead of bombing the refugee camp he was ordered to, crashes near it and has to live amongst the people he was meant to obliterate. In the camp itself (ominously capitalized as the Camp) lives Momo, a snarky teenager whose entrepreneurial mind seeks money-making opportunities in his war-ravaged surroundings as a way to cope with the disappearance of his brother. Rounding off the trio of narrators is Mutt, who is indeed a mutt, the wise and often omniscient pet dog of Momo. All three characters, in their own ways, are grappling with the aftermath of a war that seems increasingly meaningless the longer it goes on.
The greatest strength of Hanif’s novel is his critique of the disconnected, outsourced and technologically-dependent methods of contemporary war. At one point Ellie, espousing the war-was-better-in-the-good-old-days mentality of his superior officer, muses: “We used to have art for art’s sake; now we have war for the sake for war. No lands captured, no slaves taken, no mass rapes, fuck their oil wells, ignore their mineral deposits. You can outsource mass rape. War has been condensed to carpet-bombing followed by dry rations and craft classes for the refugees.” It’s the kind of audacious, in-your-face commentary that Hanif excels at, both in his fiction as well as his nonfiction. Further on in the narrative, Momo comments on the ridiculousness of neoliberal warfare, within which neo-imperial powers of the world commit unspeakable violence and then offer woefully inadequate relief and aid: “It was simple, they bombed us and then sent us well-educated people to look into our mental health needs. There were workshops called ‘Living with Trauma’ for parents, there was a survey about ‘Traditional Cures in a Time of Distress and Disorder.’ Our Camp was the tourist destination for foreign people with good intentions.” The ways in which war today in tied up with capitalism and empire and liberal politics are ugly, and Hanif does not shy away from exposing this ugliness. The three narrators’ voice is sometimes indistinguishable from one another, but it is a sharp, strong voice. Mutt, in particular, is a particularly engaging narrator, with a mixture of lovability and world-weariness.
Stylistically, Red Birds is different from Hanif’s earlier fiction in a number of ways. Most significantly, the satire of A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti was firmly grounded within the specificities of Pakistan’s socio-political and cultural landscape - whether it was an air force pilot in Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan or a working class Christian nurse in a chaotic, violent Karachi. In contrast, Red Birds is scant on its grounding details. Its refugee camp setting is somewhere in a never-ending desert that has been the target of a prolonged, pointless war. This lack of specificity might have been a deliberate literary choice to reflect the interchangeability of the various regions of the world currently being bombed in the minds of the bombers, but it lends the novel an unreal air which makes it harder to discern an emotional thrust to the narrative. This is exacerbated by the way in which the characters are constructed - readers encounter each character through layers of satire and irreverence which obscures any emotional core they might have. Ellie, in particular, never manages to become anything more an obnoxious, cynical American who espouses the racist rhetoric inculcated in him by his US military training, and the potential of any character growth he might go through at being forced to confront the humanity of the people he has spent a career dehumanising is sadly unfulfilled.
There’s also the matter of the plot: specifically, how there is barely any. It is only three-fourth of the way in that there is any narrative momentum, and that is too late in the game, by any stretch. Before that, Ellie, Momo and Mutt just sort of wander around and talk about their insights about war. There are hints of a plot - there is the case of Momo’s missing brother who was recruited to work for the Americans whose hanger lies near the camp, and who, along with a number of young boys, has disappeared within the hanger - but it remains vague and unclarified throughout most of the novel.
There are interesting secondary characters, including an academic researcher Lady Flowerbody who is ostensibly in the camp to study the Teenage Muslim Mind (Hanif is particularly excellent at skewering this type of person found in camps in the aftermath of war), but these characters, too, don’t go much beyond types. There is also a strange hint of misogyny in the narrative that cannot solely be ascribed to the warped narration of Ellie alone - he spends a lot of time complaining (in his head) about his nagging and emotional wife Cath, but Cath is not the only female character reduced to sexist stereotypes. There is also Momo’s Mother Dear whose characterisation is limited to “mother who would do anything for her sons”.
There is no doubt that Red Birds is extraordinarily astute in its observations on the 21st century iteration of war, where violence and trauma are wrapped up inextricably in the neoliberal system international relief organizations and rich-people fundraisers. Towards the end of the novel, Ellie ponders over the complicity and codependency of Lady Flowerbody’s line of work with his own: “If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? If I didn’t rain fire from the skies, who would need her to douse that fire on the ground? Why would you need somebody to throw blankets on burning babies if there were no burning babies? If I didn’t take our homes, who would provide shelter? If I didn’t obliterate cities, how would you get to set up refugee camps? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go?” It’s a remarkable passage, but a work of fiction needs to be more than the critique it is putting forth - it has to have robust characters and a compelling plot. It is a shame that Hanif falters at the latter aspects even as he excels at the former.
https://newslinemagazine.com/magazine...
When it comes to literary styles, satire and surrealism seem best-suited to match the illogicality of war and its aftermath, as the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller can attest to. The inherent absurdity of war is perhaps even more heightened today, with global modern warfare’s reliance on remote-controlled drone technology which has transformed the relationship between soldiers and civilians into aerial bombers and dots on a grainy screen. Contemporary fiction writers have utilized tools of satire to explore this particularly 21st century style of warfare. Earlier this year saw the publication of the English translation of Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi’s Arabic novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, an absurdist update on the original Frankenstein’s monster, only this time the creature is made up of body parts left in the wake of bombs. It makes sense that Mohammed Hanif, Pakistan’s master of the absurd, would train his literary eye to the subject as well. His latest, much-awaited novel Red Birds, takes place in a refugee camp in a land already ravaged by war. But while Red Birds’ critique of modern war is as incisive and hard-hitting as all of his analysis and commentary tends to be, as a novel it is rather disappointingly underwhelming.
Red Birds tells the story of Ellie, a brash, cynical American bomber plane pilot who, instead of bombing the refugee camp he was ordered to, crashes near it and has to live amongst the people he was meant to obliterate. In the camp itself (ominously capitalized as the Camp) lives Momo, a snarky teenager whose entrepreneurial mind seeks money-making opportunities in his war-ravaged surroundings as a way to cope with the disappearance of his brother. Rounding off the trio of narrators is Mutt, who is indeed a mutt, the wise and often omniscient pet dog of Momo. All three characters, in their own ways, are grappling with the aftermath of a war that seems increasingly meaningless the longer it goes on.
The greatest strength of Hanif’s novel is his critique of the disconnected, outsourced and technologically-dependent methods of contemporary war. At one point Ellie, espousing the war-was-better-in-the-good-old-days mentality of his superior officer, muses: “We used to have art for art’s sake; now we have war for the sake for war. No lands captured, no slaves taken, no mass rapes, fuck their oil wells, ignore their mineral deposits. You can outsource mass rape. War has been condensed to carpet-bombing followed by dry rations and craft classes for the refugees.” It’s the kind of audacious, in-your-face commentary that Hanif excels at, both in his fiction as well as his nonfiction. Further on in the narrative, Momo comments on the ridiculousness of neoliberal warfare, within which neo-imperial powers of the world commit unspeakable violence and then offer woefully inadequate relief and aid: “It was simple, they bombed us and then sent us well-educated people to look into our mental health needs. There were workshops called ‘Living with Trauma’ for parents, there was a survey about ‘Traditional Cures in a Time of Distress and Disorder.’ Our Camp was the tourist destination for foreign people with good intentions.” The ways in which war today in tied up with capitalism and empire and liberal politics are ugly, and Hanif does not shy away from exposing this ugliness. The three narrators’ voice is sometimes indistinguishable from one another, but it is a sharp, strong voice. Mutt, in particular, is a particularly engaging narrator, with a mixture of lovability and world-weariness.
Stylistically, Red Birds is different from Hanif’s earlier fiction in a number of ways. Most significantly, the satire of A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti was firmly grounded within the specificities of Pakistan’s socio-political and cultural landscape - whether it was an air force pilot in Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan or a working class Christian nurse in a chaotic, violent Karachi. In contrast, Red Birds is scant on its grounding details. Its refugee camp setting is somewhere in a never-ending desert that has been the target of a prolonged, pointless war. This lack of specificity might have been a deliberate literary choice to reflect the interchangeability of the various regions of the world currently being bombed in the minds of the bombers, but it lends the novel an unreal air which makes it harder to discern an emotional thrust to the narrative. This is exacerbated by the way in which the characters are constructed - readers encounter each character through layers of satire and irreverence which obscures any emotional core they might have. Ellie, in particular, never manages to become anything more an obnoxious, cynical American who espouses the racist rhetoric inculcated in him by his US military training, and the potential of any character growth he might go through at being forced to confront the humanity of the people he has spent a career dehumanising is sadly unfulfilled.
There’s also the matter of the plot: specifically, how there is barely any. It is only three-fourth of the way in that there is any narrative momentum, and that is too late in the game, by any stretch. Before that, Ellie, Momo and Mutt just sort of wander around and talk about their insights about war. There are hints of a plot - there is the case of Momo’s missing brother who was recruited to work for the Americans whose hanger lies near the camp, and who, along with a number of young boys, has disappeared within the hanger - but it remains vague and unclarified throughout most of the novel.
There are interesting secondary characters, including an academic researcher Lady Flowerbody who is ostensibly in the camp to study the Teenage Muslim Mind (Hanif is particularly excellent at skewering this type of person found in camps in the aftermath of war), but these characters, too, don’t go much beyond types. There is also a strange hint of misogyny in the narrative that cannot solely be ascribed to the warped narration of Ellie alone - he spends a lot of time complaining (in his head) about his nagging and emotional wife Cath, but Cath is not the only female character reduced to sexist stereotypes. There is also Momo’s Mother Dear whose characterisation is limited to “mother who would do anything for her sons”.
There is no doubt that Red Birds is extraordinarily astute in its observations on the 21st century iteration of war, where violence and trauma are wrapped up inextricably in the neoliberal system international relief organizations and rich-people fundraisers. Towards the end of the novel, Ellie ponders over the complicity and codependency of Lady Flowerbody’s line of work with his own: “If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? If I didn’t rain fire from the skies, who would need her to douse that fire on the ground? Why would you need somebody to throw blankets on burning babies if there were no burning babies? If I didn’t take our homes, who would provide shelter? If I didn’t obliterate cities, how would you get to set up refugee camps? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go?” It’s a remarkable passage, but a work of fiction needs to be more than the critique it is putting forth - it has to have robust characters and a compelling plot. It is a shame that Hanif falters at the latter aspects even as he excels at the former.
https://newslinemagazine.com/magazine...
December 29, 2018
"It's only Momo who cares about me. And really, you are lucky if you have one person in your life who does. When in pain, ask yourself who cares about you. And if you can think of one person, that pain is worth living through."
You know it's a good book when you stay up till 4 AM reading it, your eyes barely leaving the page - taking in everything the book has to offer.
Red Birds is a book that circles around war and it's aftermath; how people respond to it, how people adapt to it. In a world where tales of bloodshed have become a norm, where one usually feigns sympathy for those affected (and later forget that anything happened at all) and where one never truly realises the struggle that lies in living in such a state, this book serves a very important message: we are all trying to survive, just in our own peculiar ways.
In Red Birds we see the inner struggles of three major characters, namely: Ellie, a US major who crash landed in the middle of the dessert, with seemingly nowhere to go; Momo, the true definition of someone who has sold their soul to capitalism and entrepreneurism as he continues to think of ways to make money; and Mutt, his loyal dog, who plays his role in giving the book a comedic outlook - all three of them intersect in a refugee camp as they try to solve the biggest mystery at hand: where the hell is Bro Ali, Momo's brother?
With words that will leave an impact on you for days to come and feelings that take over you every once in a while, Red Birds is the sort of book that will leave you hopelessly longing for more, especially after the lack of closure the ending had. (Can we talk about the ending? What on earth happened? Am I losing it or did none of that make any sense whatsoever?) Despite my unanswered questions towards the end, this book was a terrific read and says a lot how wonderful of a writer Mohammed Hanif is.
You know it's a good book when you stay up till 4 AM reading it, your eyes barely leaving the page - taking in everything the book has to offer.
Red Birds is a book that circles around war and it's aftermath; how people respond to it, how people adapt to it. In a world where tales of bloodshed have become a norm, where one usually feigns sympathy for those affected (and later forget that anything happened at all) and where one never truly realises the struggle that lies in living in such a state, this book serves a very important message: we are all trying to survive, just in our own peculiar ways.
In Red Birds we see the inner struggles of three major characters, namely: Ellie, a US major who crash landed in the middle of the dessert, with seemingly nowhere to go; Momo, the true definition of someone who has sold their soul to capitalism and entrepreneurism as he continues to think of ways to make money; and Mutt, his loyal dog, who plays his role in giving the book a comedic outlook - all three of them intersect in a refugee camp as they try to solve the biggest mystery at hand: where the hell is Bro Ali, Momo's brother?
With words that will leave an impact on you for days to come and feelings that take over you every once in a while, Red Birds is the sort of book that will leave you hopelessly longing for more, especially after the lack of closure the ending had. (Can we talk about the ending? What on earth happened? Am I losing it or did none of that make any sense whatsoever?) Despite my unanswered questions towards the end, this book was a terrific read and says a lot how wonderful of a writer Mohammed Hanif is.
July 10, 2019
What are humans if not a sum of their memories?
.
.
One heart-wrenching loss. One intellectual dog. Many tormented humans. And we have what can be termed as the ultimate mess in Hanif's head - Red Birds.
.
.
US Pilot Major Ellie is on a mission to blow out a 'fugee' camp but for some goddamned reason his plane crashes and he lands in the desert, starved for several days, almost killed, until rescued by Momo.
.
.
Momo will make any end meet to have his Brother Ali back, sent to the hangar with the hope for employment and thus a better lifestyle for his family, but who never came back.
.
.
Mutt is a loyal, intellectual mutt, unlike any other mutt and will do anything within his powers to save Momo on his dangerous mission, even if that means losing his own tail.
.
.
Father dear and Mother dear are just bleak fillers in the plot.
.
.
That is more or less RED BIRDS for you. It is smart, even clever, shrewd, wry, witty, sarcastic, comic, and yet falls short of creating a mark unlike his other book I read - A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES.
.
.
That is because,
Too many POVs
Too many allegories and metaphors
Too many loose ends
Too much messiness
Too much narration
.
.
Not one I would recommend to anyone.
.
.
One heart-wrenching loss. One intellectual dog. Many tormented humans. And we have what can be termed as the ultimate mess in Hanif's head - Red Birds.
.
.
US Pilot Major Ellie is on a mission to blow out a 'fugee' camp but for some goddamned reason his plane crashes and he lands in the desert, starved for several days, almost killed, until rescued by Momo.
.
.
Momo will make any end meet to have his Brother Ali back, sent to the hangar with the hope for employment and thus a better lifestyle for his family, but who never came back.
.
.
Mutt is a loyal, intellectual mutt, unlike any other mutt and will do anything within his powers to save Momo on his dangerous mission, even if that means losing his own tail.
.
.
Father dear and Mother dear are just bleak fillers in the plot.
.
.
That is more or less RED BIRDS for you. It is smart, even clever, shrewd, wry, witty, sarcastic, comic, and yet falls short of creating a mark unlike his other book I read - A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES.
.
.
That is because,
Too many POVs
Too many allegories and metaphors
Too many loose ends
Too much messiness
Too much narration
.
.
Not one I would recommend to anyone.
May 11, 2020
I loathed the writer for not coming back to his home town; my hometown, to my people, and to his but the price is too heavy for the things he has written in the past.
Maybe there is not so much air for writers in the homeland so they leave what the love the most, the home country.
This novel is a perfect example of " what happens to the writers when they live abroad but keep writing stories of divorced land, their homeland. Same this happened to Mohsin Hamid, he also lost the sparkle of writing while living abroad.
Mr. Hanif's writing style is witty and mocking; however, plot and depth writing is very weak in this novel as compared to his former parallels.
It is written for a Western audience to catch a glimpse of war-torn areas but for any Pakistan reader there is nothing hard to digest in the novel.
Maybe there is not so much air for writers in the homeland so they leave what the love the most, the home country.
This novel is a perfect example of " what happens to the writers when they live abroad but keep writing stories of divorced land, their homeland. Same this happened to Mohsin Hamid, he also lost the sparkle of writing while living abroad.
Mr. Hanif's writing style is witty and mocking; however, plot and depth writing is very weak in this novel as compared to his former parallels.
It is written for a Western audience to catch a glimpse of war-torn areas but for any Pakistan reader there is nothing hard to digest in the novel.
December 18, 2019
The novel, basically zoning in on the absurdity and ugliness of war, posing a thriller satire on US foreign policy is narrated mostly by a teenage refugee Momo and a philosophical dog Mutt (the dog part was much better, as he views the stupidity and fatality of human behavior). I have to say that I was really hooked for most part of the novel, where Major Ellie, a US fighter pilot has crash-landed in the desert in an unnamed country, and after eight days of starving and meaninglessly wandering in the desert, is rescued by Mutt and Momo, whose brother hasn't come home for nine months after going to work for the Americans in a mysterious hanger.
However, the story gets really bizarre towards the end when the hanger is brought back to life by the ghosts of the perished; where things should have moved faster, felt a little too drawn out. The book is full of metaphors, pointing towards what it means to be human in a perilously inhumane world.
However, the story gets really bizarre towards the end when the hanger is brought back to life by the ghosts of the perished; where things should have moved faster, felt a little too drawn out. The book is full of metaphors, pointing towards what it means to be human in a perilously inhumane world.
November 13, 2018
War is Hellerish.
Few and far between are the war novels written since Catch-22 that don’t reveal something of its influence. The opening scene of Red Birds in which Major Ellie has crash landed his plane in the desert and compares the $65m cost of the F15 to his meagre survival rations of four energy biscuits, two vitamin smoothies, a roll of surgical cotton, a roll of surgical gauze, a needle and thread is pure Heller. Nevertheless, Hanif’s point about the absurdity of war is well made. Equally, Ellie’s references to his training course modules from “Cultural Sensitivity Towards Tribals” to the “Suppression of Inexplicable Urges” ring dismally, if satirically, true.
Red Birds, set in an unknown Middle East region, is told in three key voices, the fighter pilot Ellie, Momo an entrepreneurial teenager living in a refugee camp and his beloved dog Mutt. Don’t be put off by the dog; Hanif makes this conceit work very well even if, truth be told, the voices do tend to merge a bit in tone. Ellie’s voice is the least sympathetic and Momo’s the most appealing, but it is Mutt the dog who has the voice of reason - is he perhaps a canine take on Yossarian?
If the aim of this book is to convey the tedium of life in a refugee camp, then it succeeds admirably: very little happens until the (rather puzzling) ending. A muted recommendation.
My thanks to Bloomsbury for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.
Few and far between are the war novels written since Catch-22 that don’t reveal something of its influence. The opening scene of Red Birds in which Major Ellie has crash landed his plane in the desert and compares the $65m cost of the F15 to his meagre survival rations of four energy biscuits, two vitamin smoothies, a roll of surgical cotton, a roll of surgical gauze, a needle and thread is pure Heller. Nevertheless, Hanif’s point about the absurdity of war is well made. Equally, Ellie’s references to his training course modules from “Cultural Sensitivity Towards Tribals” to the “Suppression of Inexplicable Urges” ring dismally, if satirically, true.
Red Birds, set in an unknown Middle East region, is told in three key voices, the fighter pilot Ellie, Momo an entrepreneurial teenager living in a refugee camp and his beloved dog Mutt. Don’t be put off by the dog; Hanif makes this conceit work very well even if, truth be told, the voices do tend to merge a bit in tone. Ellie’s voice is the least sympathetic and Momo’s the most appealing, but it is Mutt the dog who has the voice of reason - is he perhaps a canine take on Yossarian?
If the aim of this book is to convey the tedium of life in a refugee camp, then it succeeds admirably: very little happens until the (rather puzzling) ending. A muted recommendation.
My thanks to Bloomsbury for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.
January 20, 2019
Although I found this novel clever, original and thought-provoking, it didn’t quite work for me, mainly because the author seems to be trying too hard and the result is a satire, which although pertinent is too heavy-handed with too didactic a tone. It’s the story of a US Air Force pilot (confusingly called Ellie, it took me a while to work it he was male) who crash lands near the very refugee camp he had been sent out to bomb. He is discovered in the desert by the teenage Momo, whose life isn’t going too well either since his brother Ali has gone missing in the now abandoned camp. In alternating chapters we hear from Ellie, Momo, Mutt the dog (I’m not a great fan of talking animals) and Ali and Momo’s grieving mother. As a critique of American policy in the Middle East, with its resulting destruction and chaos, Hanif eschews subtlety for laying it all on with a trowel. His observations are astute and incisive, to be sure, and often very funny, especially when describing the absurdity of the war. But in order to be effective as a satire, a novel has to have compelling characters and a compelling plot, and I found neither here. The narrative drive is diluted by frequent rants, and the ending is puzzling to say the least, an ending that seemed to me to negate the realistic polemic of the rest of the book. An interesting read, and one I would cautiously recommend, but ultimately rather a disappointing one.
February 17, 2019
Red Birds was disappointing to me. It's a satire about America and a metaphor for the uselessness of war. I don't like satires very much, so I had a hard time connecting with this story. It's also confusing and has a weird pace. This one didn't work for me. Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.
November 26, 2018
I guess maybe I expected more from this but it was too haphazard at times and the same circumstances were narrated by 3 different people in 3 subsequent chapters. Felt very repetitive at times. However it explained brilliantly the effects of war-affected areas.
October 18, 2019
Just extraordinary! but honestly I couldn't fully comprehend the resolution. Could anybody explain it for me please?
August 14, 2020
Rating: 3.5
Red Birds is a story about an American pilot who crash lands in the place he was supposed to bomb, it’s the story about a young teenage boy with entrepreneurial brain; it’s the story about a dog, who is surprisingly philosophical, who belongs to the boy.
When I began this book, I was aware that it had a lot of mixed reviews, and it became evident within the first few chapters why. I think it was the narrative, or the voice of the characters, it was unable to capture my interest. I almost thought I’ll be pushing this to my DNF pile. About a month later, I had hardly made any progress. The American pilot, Ellie, was bitter, he craved for space away from his wife despite thinking of her a lot. Momo, the teenager, on a quest to find his brother Ali who he believes has been taken by the soldiers is constantly trying to better his lifestyle while judging the way his parents conduct themselves. Mutt, the dog, simply exists outside of Momo’s whims. He adores the boy and tries his best to keep up with Momo. What I enjoyed about their stories was how Momo wasn’t written to be a sad traumatised boy affected by the war. I guess this is where Mohammad Hanif shines. He uses satire to highlight the effect of war and the damage it causes to people and appears quite dark while doing so.
I think the lack of plot or the random pontificating of each character in the first half of the book made me disinterested in the story. Another thing which felt off to me was how despite being three different point of views, you could easily mistake them for each other. After few weeks of break, I decided to go back to Red Birds again. And surprisingly, this time I was able to progress through the story at a pretty decent pace. It was perhaps because the story finally picks up. Out of all the characters, I admired Momo the most. He’s the boy who was forced to grow up, one who still continues to dream, wants to succeed in life and scorns at people who assume things about him. He has no patience for anything else and is always looking for various means to get ahead of the game.
I’m still not sure what happens in this book, the end gets really weird. Suddenly, you’re hit by an onset of magical realism and you are left unsure and confused on the characters you assumed many things about. Despite the challenges in the beginning, I’m glad i read this anyway. It tells you a story about life in a camp after being affected bombings like no other. It gives you no room to feel pity but only question and feel rage for why such acts need to be even committed. Overall, it’s a book with a lot of philosophical takes, many interesting quotes but a narrative which misses the plot. I would still recommend that you read it if you want something a bit different from the usual books out there.
Red Birds is a story about an American pilot who crash lands in the place he was supposed to bomb, it’s the story about a young teenage boy with entrepreneurial brain; it’s the story about a dog, who is surprisingly philosophical, who belongs to the boy.
When I began this book, I was aware that it had a lot of mixed reviews, and it became evident within the first few chapters why. I think it was the narrative, or the voice of the characters, it was unable to capture my interest. I almost thought I’ll be pushing this to my DNF pile. About a month later, I had hardly made any progress. The American pilot, Ellie, was bitter, he craved for space away from his wife despite thinking of her a lot. Momo, the teenager, on a quest to find his brother Ali who he believes has been taken by the soldiers is constantly trying to better his lifestyle while judging the way his parents conduct themselves. Mutt, the dog, simply exists outside of Momo’s whims. He adores the boy and tries his best to keep up with Momo. What I enjoyed about their stories was how Momo wasn’t written to be a sad traumatised boy affected by the war. I guess this is where Mohammad Hanif shines. He uses satire to highlight the effect of war and the damage it causes to people and appears quite dark while doing so.
I think the lack of plot or the random pontificating of each character in the first half of the book made me disinterested in the story. Another thing which felt off to me was how despite being three different point of views, you could easily mistake them for each other. After few weeks of break, I decided to go back to Red Birds again. And surprisingly, this time I was able to progress through the story at a pretty decent pace. It was perhaps because the story finally picks up. Out of all the characters, I admired Momo the most. He’s the boy who was forced to grow up, one who still continues to dream, wants to succeed in life and scorns at people who assume things about him. He has no patience for anything else and is always looking for various means to get ahead of the game.
I’m still not sure what happens in this book, the end gets really weird. Suddenly, you’re hit by an onset of magical realism and you are left unsure and confused on the characters you assumed many things about. Despite the challenges in the beginning, I’m glad i read this anyway. It tells you a story about life in a camp after being affected bombings like no other. It gives you no room to feel pity but only question and feel rage for why such acts need to be even committed. Overall, it’s a book with a lot of philosophical takes, many interesting quotes but a narrative which misses the plot. I would still recommend that you read it if you want something a bit different from the usual books out there.
March 6, 2019
Disclaimer : Received this book from Pansing in exchange for my honest review.
This book started out great. Funny, witty and with a twist of sarcasm from each of the characters. And the characters narrated their own chapters. Even the mutt had its own POV. But the book dragged after a few chapters. And dragged it did until the last few chapters. Where it became surreal. What the heck was that ending?
So there was Major Ellie, whose plane was shot down in the middle of the desert but no one came to rescue him for 8 days. Major Ellie has issues with his wife, Cath, a love and hate childless relationship which he pondered throughout his ordeal at the desert. Major Ellie joined the mission to run away from these issues and volunteered on a mission to destroy a camp when he got hit.
Then there is a family drama between Momo (a teen) who is angst about the elder brother that went to work and never returned (Bro Ali), Mother Dear who feels guilty that the one son who is MIA should be the other son, Father Dear who does not want to face reality and Lady Flower who is a researcher, researching on Young Muslim Minds with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
The central character of this book is Mutt. The Dog. Who seems to be the wise one and sticks the family together (he thinks) and who can see red birds (souls of the dead, he reckons).
What happens in each chapter was what each character was feeling there and then. So if you read Major Ellie's, plenty of guilt trips of what he felt for Cath. And how he felt for the country he served. And what he would rather do somewhere else.
Momo's chapters were full of anger and ambitions.
I was flipping through until the last few chapters where all the characters collided. Suddenly I could not believe what I was reading. Was the author trying to give it some surrealistic value without answering all the questions asked in the storyline? Or trying to rush through the ending? This book left me frustrated because what happened to the camp was not answered. We know the ending, but we were not told why. Why, indeed?
This book started out great. Funny, witty and with a twist of sarcasm from each of the characters. And the characters narrated their own chapters. Even the mutt had its own POV. But the book dragged after a few chapters. And dragged it did until the last few chapters. Where it became surreal. What the heck was that ending?
So there was Major Ellie, whose plane was shot down in the middle of the desert but no one came to rescue him for 8 days. Major Ellie has issues with his wife, Cath, a love and hate childless relationship which he pondered throughout his ordeal at the desert. Major Ellie joined the mission to run away from these issues and volunteered on a mission to destroy a camp when he got hit.
Then there is a family drama between Momo (a teen) who is angst about the elder brother that went to work and never returned (Bro Ali), Mother Dear who feels guilty that the one son who is MIA should be the other son, Father Dear who does not want to face reality and Lady Flower who is a researcher, researching on Young Muslim Minds with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
The central character of this book is Mutt. The Dog. Who seems to be the wise one and sticks the family together (he thinks) and who can see red birds (souls of the dead, he reckons).
What happens in each chapter was what each character was feeling there and then. So if you read Major Ellie's, plenty of guilt trips of what he felt for Cath. And how he felt for the country he served. And what he would rather do somewhere else.
Momo's chapters were full of anger and ambitions.
I was flipping through until the last few chapters where all the characters collided. Suddenly I could not believe what I was reading. Was the author trying to give it some surrealistic value without answering all the questions asked in the storyline? Or trying to rush through the ending? This book left me frustrated because what happened to the camp was not answered. We know the ending, but we were not told why. Why, indeed?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 30, 2022
(Warning: This is not a review, it is an incoherent rant about this book. Proceed at your own risk.)
I came to the book expecting a lot more than it offered, I think. It is why I wish I had started reading MH with a different book of his.
Red Birds is funny sometimes, laugh-out-loud funny, but that can only take a book so far.
The plot is confusing, and the characters barely step out of the second dimension.
They read like semi-clever plays on cliches which becomes tedious after a while.
The whole ghost arc could have been more fleshed out, and so could that of the red birds arriving in the camp, but less space is given to these then Mutt dwelling over Momo lusting after Lady Flowerbody and so they become crappy sideshows to the main plot, and feel underutilized at the end of the story.
I find it interesting that the writer chose not to disclose the ethnicity of the refugees. It would lend a global touch to them if they didn't live in a desert and Momo's father wasn't the son of a tribal chief. When you throw in such details, your dupattas and 'beta's become really out of place.
I really wish I had started MH with A Case of Exploding Mangoes. 😔😔
I came to the book expecting a lot more than it offered, I think. It is why I wish I had started reading MH with a different book of his.
Red Birds is funny sometimes, laugh-out-loud funny, but that can only take a book so far.
The plot is confusing, and the characters barely step out of the second dimension.
They read like semi-clever plays on cliches which becomes tedious after a while.
The whole ghost arc could have been more fleshed out, and so could that of the red birds arriving in the camp, but less space is given to these then Mutt dwelling over Momo lusting after Lady Flowerbody and so they become crappy sideshows to the main plot, and feel underutilized at the end of the story.
I find it interesting that the writer chose not to disclose the ethnicity of the refugees. It would lend a global touch to them if they didn't live in a desert and Momo's father wasn't the son of a tribal chief. When you throw in such details, your dupattas and 'beta's become really out of place.
I really wish I had started MH with A Case of Exploding Mangoes. 😔😔
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 9, 2021
(3.5, voordeel van de twijfel) Apart, gek, bizar boek over oorlog (en dan vooral de ‘forever wars’ van de VS) en de absurditeit daarvan. Soms heel grappig, soms spot-on cynisch bijvoorbeeld wanneer het over de ‘aid industry’ ging, maar soms ook … saai, wat repetitief en net ietsje te bizar, wat te veel losse eindjes. Het einde ontroerde dan weer wel.
March 5, 2019
An absolutely remarkable book. The most intriguing point of the book is the use of animal as the most reliable narrator in the story. Perhaps a second reading of the book will unravel some of the puzzles, the fleeting moments, the moral enigmas, and the stream of consciousness of the characters. One of the best books!
November 20, 2018
Red birds by Mohammed Hanif is a satire set in the times of war. It is impressive how the author has managed to make fun of tragic situations. This book is a wonderful satire on the condition of refugee camps where a Muslim family is in focus. A US pilot is sent to bomb a refugee camp and he ends up taking refuge in their home instead.
The book starts with the narration of a US Pilot who has crash-landed in a desert and trying really hard to survive on 4 energy biscuits and vitamin smoothies. Second narration is of a teenage boy who lives in a refugee camp and calls himself a businessman because apparently everyone has to grow up fast where he lives. The third and most interesting narration is of a dog whose name is "Mutt" who according to momo is an attention seeker, is a master of talking in satire and philosophical language and Mutt can also see Red Birds. The other characters in the book are parents of Momo and his elder brother Ali who Momo believes that is sold to American Army by his Dear father. There are about 60 chapters in this 283 pages long book consisting of narration by all of the above characters.
I am so in love with this book. Everything about it was impeccable the narration, the writing style, the humor, the satire, emotions, everything was well organized. While reading the book sometimes narration by Mutt who is one of my favorite characters from the book, made me laugh and sometimes it made me sad. If you haven't read this book yet go buy it right now if you want to read something good and moving.
The book starts with the narration of a US Pilot who has crash-landed in a desert and trying really hard to survive on 4 energy biscuits and vitamin smoothies. Second narration is of a teenage boy who lives in a refugee camp and calls himself a businessman because apparently everyone has to grow up fast where he lives. The third and most interesting narration is of a dog whose name is "Mutt" who according to momo is an attention seeker, is a master of talking in satire and philosophical language and Mutt can also see Red Birds. The other characters in the book are parents of Momo and his elder brother Ali who Momo believes that is sold to American Army by his Dear father. There are about 60 chapters in this 283 pages long book consisting of narration by all of the above characters.
I am so in love with this book. Everything about it was impeccable the narration, the writing style, the humor, the satire, emotions, everything was well organized. While reading the book sometimes narration by Mutt who is one of my favorite characters from the book, made me laugh and sometimes it made me sad. If you haven't read this book yet go buy it right now if you want to read something good and moving.
January 29, 2019
When the first book of the year is like this, I am sure rest of the year will be Wowza! 🤩
I am off to a great reading start in 2019 thanks to Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds. 😁
The story revolves around an American Pilot Ellie who has crash landed in a desert. He is taken to a refugee camp where sight of life is either very rare or full of crazy specimens. Ellie’s character is seen running away from home, who feels that dropping bombs and fighting wars is far more better than petty squabbles with his wife back home.
In the same village, a wretched teenager Momo’s money making schemes are failing, I mean there is only limited things you can do in a refugee camp right? And on top of it, his brother Ali hasn’t come back from his first day at the job. He is under the impression that his Father Dear has sold his Brother to the Hangar where all the Foreign Fighters stay. Mother Dear can be seen waiting for his second son to bring back the first son home anyhow. And then we also have Lady Flowerbody, trying to write a book in this war zone on Young Muslim Minds.
When all these people come together, they form a tale so epic which shows the absurdity of war and peace which can never be attained.
For me, Red Birds was a brilliant read!👌🏻 From characters to the satire and background setting, everything was entertaining with a powerful message. However, I didn’t like the climax that much. May be it was the attempt to give it a magical ending, but it didn’t go down well with me.
Verdict: Absolutely Brilliant 😁 (4*/5)
#QOTD: What’s your take on Red Birds?
I am off to a great reading start in 2019 thanks to Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds. 😁
The story revolves around an American Pilot Ellie who has crash landed in a desert. He is taken to a refugee camp where sight of life is either very rare or full of crazy specimens. Ellie’s character is seen running away from home, who feels that dropping bombs and fighting wars is far more better than petty squabbles with his wife back home.
In the same village, a wretched teenager Momo’s money making schemes are failing, I mean there is only limited things you can do in a refugee camp right? And on top of it, his brother Ali hasn’t come back from his first day at the job. He is under the impression that his Father Dear has sold his Brother to the Hangar where all the Foreign Fighters stay. Mother Dear can be seen waiting for his second son to bring back the first son home anyhow. And then we also have Lady Flowerbody, trying to write a book in this war zone on Young Muslim Minds.
When all these people come together, they form a tale so epic which shows the absurdity of war and peace which can never be attained.
For me, Red Birds was a brilliant read!👌🏻 From characters to the satire and background setting, everything was entertaining with a powerful message. However, I didn’t like the climax that much. May be it was the attempt to give it a magical ending, but it didn’t go down well with me.
Verdict: Absolutely Brilliant 😁 (4*/5)
#QOTD: What’s your take on Red Birds?
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