IT’S A MAD WORLD by Alan Whelan
In his collection of nightmarish short stories The Madman of Freedom Square, Hassan Blasim sets out to portray Iraq and the fall-out of the war as a place that is brutish yet laced with farce.
Blasim’s stories are tangentially linked through place and time and occasionally by character that build a wretched world of fetishised violence of car bombs and mutilation, of dark paranoia and the madness of refugees. The overall effect draws out the reader’s disgust and taunts our capacity to understand such events.
The opening tale, “The Reality and the Record”, describes an Iraqi’s attempts to tell his story in such a way that succeeds in him gaining asylum in Sweden. The suggestion is that if he were to stick to the facts he would not be believed. The detainee, a Baghdad ambulance driver in his past life, tells how his nightmare begins when he is kidnapped by terrorists who force him to re-enact their ritualistic broadcast – hanging a black cloth banner behind him, setting up a video camera, then forcing him to recite his ‘guilt’ from a prepared speech. The nightmare turns into farce, and Blasim seems to be saying that the telling of stories of our lives is dependent on perspective and how that story is to be used: the terrorists have a need for one story, the Swedish immigration authorities another, the reader yet another. Blasim is most concerned about how to tell stories about these experiences and questions who has the right to tell them. In some cases the reader is wrong-footed by the teller and the told; in others the narrator cannot be relied upon because either he is already dead and the stories are told through another or they admit they have two stories, ‘the real one and the one for the record.’
“An Army Newspaper” is also a moral tale about stealing stories, this time by an army censor speaking from beyond the grave to a judge, his accuser. He is sent a collection of inventive manuscripts from a soldier at the front who soon after is killed. The censor adopts them as his own and looks forward to a life of literary success. But all is not what it seems…
Blasim displays all the fine instincts of the best short story writers: a concise style that coolly transports the reader to another world, a surprising or ambiguous ending that makes one re-assess what we have just read, and a revealing intimacy with his characters. What is not so successful is the use of fantasy to underline the themes in the book. The prose can be showy and occasionally does not add to the whole. This can be seen in “That Inauspicious Smile” about a man who cannot stop smiling in a world full of signs he cannot interpret. He sees himself as a permanent outsider – ‘Do I really have bad luck? Or was I born by mistake?’ He is beaten up by a gang of neo-Nazis and sees his life flash before him, ‘A burnt brain flew by on giant wings. A shoal of fish swam past carrying scraps of a young girl’s flesh.’ There are examples of awkward syntax which may be due to the translation – I cannot know that for sure – and there are also some typographical errors that take the shine off this collection.
Describing war, the effects of terrorism and the dislocation of refugees from an occupied country to a reader who has no experience of such things is no easy task but the collection succeeds in this regard on its own terms. There is necessarily a lot of death and violence in this book but if you are interested in discovering more about the cost and human fallout of the Iraq War from an unusual viewpoint, there is much here to enjoy.
Alan Whelan www.inkwellpr.co.uk and Alan’s Travel Writing African Brew Ha-Ha is at www.abhaha.com
The Madman of Freedom Square by Hassan Blasim is published by Comma Press and is available at http://www.commapress.co.uk/?section=books&page=MadmanofFreedomSquare