Red Birds

April 1, 2019

Major Ellie, a beleaguered American fighter pilot, has crash-landed in the desert during a bombing run. He's rescued by Momo, a resourceful, street-smart 15-year-old resident of the refugee camp that had been the target of the operation. This seems like good fortune to Momo, as he's busy planning a rescue mission to the nearby American base to retrieve his older brother, who has disappeared after going to work there. The bulk of the novel comprises alternating chapters from the perspectives of Ellie, Momo, and Momo's loyal canine companion, unceremoniously named Mutt, who is the wisest and most articulate of the three. Even the philosophizing Mutt, though, is blind to his own prejudices, and much sly humor results from hearing the same incidents recounted by three unreliable narrators. As Ellie half-heartedly plots an escape from the chaotic refugee camp, whose residents have been largely abandoned by Western aid societies, the perceptive Mutt is the first to sniff out that something is not quite right about the American. VERDICT Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) has written a biting satire in the form of a literary ghost story brimming with boundless compassion and a deep appreciation for absurdity in what is, ultimately, an unwinnable conflict.--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2019
A satire of American military power that skirts didacticism while skewering our nation's misadventures in the Middle East. Hanif (Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, 2012, etc.) sets us down in an unidentified Middle Eastern country, where a darkly cynical American fighter pilot named Ellie has been sent on a possibly unethical bombing run by a mysterious institution called Central Command. Ellie--whose military training combined deadly firepower with cultural sensitivity lessons like "Eat and Drink with the Enemy"--bows to pressure from Col. Slatter to flatten a compound he insists is "a real bad place full of bad bad people. You can smell the evil from the skies." Ellie crash-lands on his way to the compound, though, and finds himself wandering the desert, desperate to survive. That bad, bad compound turns out to be a refugee camp for victims of the American war. Momo, a wisecracking teenager with delusional schemes of capitalist grandeur and a world-weary suspicion of everything around him, lives there with his grieving mother, feckless father, and brother, Ali. Momo is given to dark proclamations on the world's moral state. "How're you gonna keep your integrity in a place where thievery is not only accepted but also expected?" he asks early in the book. He tromps around the camp wearing an "I Heart NY" cap and drives a Jeep through the desert. By the time the novel opens, Ali, who was an informant giving bombing targets to the Americans, has gone to work at a nearby American military facility known simply as the Hangar--and never returns. Ever since he's disappeared, American bombings have ceased. Momo is determined to figure out what's behind Ali's disappearance, and when Ellie arrives at the camp at the same time as an American aid worker and academic nicknamed Lady Flowerbody, the boy hatches a plan to retrieve his brother. Amid all this, supernatural occurrences are happening in the desert beyond the compound. Momo's journey to get his brother back will take him into the heart of the American presence in his country--and that presence is not at all what he expects. Narrated in the first-person from multiple perspectives--Ellie's, Momo's, and even that of Momo's dog, Mutt--Hanif's novel maneuvers between compelling, hilarious voices with the fast pace of a slapstick comedy, albeit a comedy with teeth. In a surreal flourish, the book climaxes with a final act that is a little too frantic for its own good. Thankfully, by the time the ending arrives, we've gotten to spend quality time with Hanif's indelible characters. Funny, fresh, and not afraid to draw blood, this is an unusual gem of a book.

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Starred review from April 29, 2019
Hanif, Booker-longlisted for A Case of Exploding Mangoes, dives headfirst into an unnamed desert in the present day and the disparate characters stuck in it. Ellie, an American bomber pilot who’s crash-landed, struggles through the desert half-hallucinating until he comes upon a dog. The dog, Mutt, is no stray, but rather the beloved and disgruntled pet of Momo, a shrewd and scheming 15-year-old. Momo lives in a nearby refugee camp with his family, who have been devastated by the disappearance of Momo’s older brother, Ali, who left the camp to work at a mysterious American army outpost that was recently nearby. As Ellie recovers in the camp he was intended to bomb, hoping for rescue and suppressing a major trauma he left back at home in the States, Momo develops a plan to use the American soldier as leverage to get his brother back. Narrated in turns by Ellie, Momo, aid workers, Momo’s mother, and rather beautifully by Mutt, Hanif’s portrait of the surrealism and commonplaceness of America’s wars in Muslim countries is nearly impossible to put down. The camp in particular crackles with humanity, bizarreness, and banality—at one point, Ellie thinks, “I was beginning to like this, people talking earnestly about sewage and cheating spouses, about the need for winter shelters and better ways of teaching math.” The novel manages to remain delightful and unpredictable even in its darkest moments, highlighting the hypocrisies and constant confusions of American intervention abroad.

Starred review from April 15, 2019
When an American pilot's plane goes down somewhere in the Middle East, Major Ellie finds himself alone in the desert, where he wanders for eight days and nights before he is finally rescued by a reluctant savior, a 15-year-old boy named Momo, who takes Ellie back to the refugee camp that, ironically, Ellie had been sent to bomb. A self-styled entrepreneur who wants to own the world, Momo is a young man with a mission: he is determined to find his older brother, Ali, who has vanished after being sent to work with the Americans at the nearby hangar, which has now been abandoned, leaving Momo to dream of turning it into a shopping mall. Hanif's superb novel, with its elements of magic realism, is told from multiple points of view, principally those of Momo, Ellie, and?in a whimsical touch?Momo's dog, Mutt, who may be wiser than the humans. It is Mutt, after all, who sees the multiplicity of tiny blood-red birds that have begun appearing around the camp and, to the dog's bewilderment, have no scent?but, then, neither does Ellie. Stranger and stranger. Hanif has written a splendidly satirical novel that beautifully captures the absurdity and folly of war and its ineluctable impact on its survivors. At turns funny and heartbreaking, it is a memorable contribution to the literature of conflict.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)