Red Birds + Nevermoor + Instagram poets and more

Let's pretend it hasn't been almost two months since I sent out this newsletter and just plunge right into the books that I wanted to tell you about. If I write in detail about everything I’ve read in these weeks, then it’s going to be a 10,000-word newsletter and I’ll never hear from most of you again, so I’m just going to write in detail about two books: the fantastic new move-over-Harry-Potter series called Nevermoor and Mohammed Hanif's new novel.

First up, Red Birds.

Here’s the good news: Hanif’s new book is exquisite in parts and thanks to the canine philosopher king he’s created in Mutt (Red Birds is made up of a number of first-person narratives) we now have incontrovertible evidence that Hanif is a good dog; nay, a brilliant dog.

The less-good news: Red Birds is perhaps the most heartbroken and least compelling of Hanif’s fiction so far because its climax is a disappointing anti-climax.

Set in a nameless location made of up shifting sands and phantom hope, Red Birds is about war and how it warps those who survive it and those who are swallowed by it. You’ll glimpse some Catch 22 in there and a lot of the trauma that has sunken its talons into Balochistan in the novel, which is told in first person by a rag-tag group of narrators, each of whom is affected in a different way by the disappearance of a young man named Ali (or Bro Ali as his brother Momo remembers him). I suspect if you read Red Birds as a companion volume to The Baloch Who is Not Missing and Others Who Are, this book will feel more complete than it does on its own.

About 80 pages into Red Birds, Hanif tells us, “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 to forget them, when we think we have learnt to live without them, when we utter those stupid words, that we have ‘moved on’.” It’s a beautiful idea that remains stillborn in the novel because there are so many other points that Hanif wants to make and so many other nightmares that he needs to realise with words. The birds appear sporadically to a few, brilliant flashes of colour in a landscape bleached of colour and hope. Similarly, there are exquisite moments in Red Birds, but for all the punchy bits of dialogue and insight that Hanif offers through his characters, the novel feels like a collection of broken fragments that are floating away from one another instead of coming together.

Momo thinks Bro Ali is being held by the Americans in a refuelling facility that was set up near the settlement where Momo and his family live. It’s been locked down for an undefined period of time, but everyone’s waiting for it to reopen because war is an industry that brings livelihoods to many even while it blitzes the crap out of others. Hanif’s savagery glints with manic fury as he fleshes out Momo’s desperation to sell anything and everything in his line of sight to become a millionaire. These aren’t cloud castles Momo’s building, but fortresses in which the teenaged boy fantasises he will be safe from the tchaos that surrounds him in real life.
Along with Momo, two characters do much of the heavy lifting in Red Birds: Mutt, a stray dog who has adopted Ali and Momo as family; and Ellie, an American pilot who crash-lands near the village that he was supposed to bomb. Faced with the despair and violence of unending conflict, all three desperately cling to certain codes of conduct in the hope that these structure their messed-up worlds . Ellie’s is a military bro-code. Momo’s is a desperate capitalism. Mutt’s is the closest to a humanitarian worldview.

Momo hopes to use Ellie as a hostage he can exchange to get Bro Ali back. Ellie just wants to get the hell out of where he is. Mutt just wants to survive all this.

Through Ellie, Hanif satirises the military-industrial complex, as well as the attempts to make war and massacre politically-correct affairs. The real sizzle is reserved for a USAID worker known as “Lady Flowerbody”. There’s a whiff of sympathy for Ellie now and then in Hanif’s writing, but none for Lady Flowerbody who is essentially there to exploit grief with predatory persistence.

Lady Flowerbody’s polar opposite is Mother Dear, Momo and Ali’s mother. Made up of faith, love, frenzy and delusion, Mother Dear keeps Red Birds from becoming a testosterone sandwich. The novel could have done with more of Mother Dear in the initial sections, but Hanif makes her barge into the narrative towards the end and lovely as she may be, hers is an awkward cameo. It was almost as though someone had poked Hanif when he was about ¾ done with writing the novel and said, “By the way, is this novel only going to have men talking in it?” And Hanif, realising that’s exactly what had happened, said, “Nooooo” and bunged Mother Dear into the climax of Red Birds.

It doesn’t help that the climax of Red Birds is a collapse into the supernatural and a tragic, absurd mess that involves (among other things) ghosts, barbecues and a random waif of a wife.

That said in the middle of that frustratingly wretched climax, Hanif embeds one of the most stunning, heartbreaking images of Red Birds. It will haunt you (but you’ll have to stick with the novel literally till the end to find it). Weeks after finishing Red Birds, all I really remember of the book is that image and it's stuck somewhere deep inside me, like a splinter that you just can't pull out.

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I started reading the Nevermoor series because the patron saint of kiddie lit in India (and my friend) Bijal Vachharajani told me that she’d just started reading this great new book by an Australian author named Jessica Townsend. Next thing Bijal knew, the book had left her bag and was in my paws. Townsend is being tipped as the new JK Rowling. In 2016, her Nevermoor series had publishers going into a tizzy and ultimately, there was reportedly an EIGHT-way auction for its rights. Since book 1 is already a bestseller and Townsend has a three-book deal, expect a movie adaptation soon.

The first of the Nevermoor books is The Trials of Morrigan Crow, and it begins with an austere gent announcing the death of his daughter, Morrigan, who we’re told is a cursed child. Except Morrigan isn’t dead (and for much of the book, the jury’s out on whether she’s cursed). She’s in a parallel reality where you travel using umbrellas and generally having a whale of a time (give or take the minor of detail of shadowy monsters that seem to be hunting her). I read this book while on holiday in a rather lovely, old hotel in Pahalgam, which made for lovely little gurgle of resonance because Morrigan ends up living in a magical hotel that makes the Grand Budapest Hotel seem boring. Now if only someone would write about a short, fat hero/ heroine (why must every one of these franchises have protagonists who are thin and pale dammit?)… .

But I digress. Just before Morrigan is due to drop dead as per a prophecy about cursed children, a mysterious redheaded gent named Jupiter North shows up in the Crow home and whisks Morrigan away with him to the city of Nevermoor. In Nevermoor, he is an explorer, a hotelier and now, Morrigan’s guardian. Jupiter has also nominated Morrigan as his candidate in the competition to find the new candidates of Nevermoor’s magical and prestigious Wundrous Society. While she’s delighted to explore Nevermoor, there are two big worries in Morrigan’s life. One is that the Wundrous Society demands you exhibit a magical talent, and as far as Morrigan can tell, she hasn’t got one. (Jupiter is annoying unperturbed by this.) The other is that Jupiter has smuggled her into Nevermoor, which means Morrigan is an illegal alien whom the authorities want booted out of the magical city.

The similarities to Harry Potter seem obvious, but more than Rowling, it was Roald Dahl that I remembered while racing through The Trials of Morrigan Crow. Morrigan is reminiscent of heroines like Matilda (of Matilda) and Sophie (of The BFG). The way her parents fail her is very Dahl-esque as is the fact that she finds protection and shelter from a complete stranger, who is more of a family to Morrigan despite not being related to her in any way. The nod to Rowling is actually in the villain, whose name I will not reveal because Townsend does manage to keep that suspense going for a while.

In the tradition of excellent first books of a series, Townsend makes sure that the reader knows that there’s a whole lot more to Nevermoor than meets the eye. There are secrets, folklore, histories and crises, all waiting to be discovered. The last time I was this happy to know Book 2 would be out soon was when I read the first Magnus Chase. The sequel to The Trials of Morrigan Crow is The Calling of Morrigan Crow and it will be out on October 30.

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I’m going to try to sum up the other four books I’ve read in the past few weeks in a few sentences.

Washington Black: Deeply-researched novel about a slave from Barbados who travels the world. It's a lot of history and some fantasy, all folded together to create a very absorbing novel that flounders in its last third. When the story of Washington Black needs to be concluded, the ending raises more questions than it answers. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan: Fantastic and a must-read, especially if you’re interested in Indian history. Nur Jahan/ Mihr-un-Nisa’s life is the extravagant Bollywood spectacle that we deserve but haven’t got (because the industry doesn’t have the capacity to imagine real women). It’s got palaces, drama, intrigue, tragedy, a love story; in short, the whole shebang.

First Hand 2: Exclusion: Can you turn a depressing report about which communities in India remain excluded from accessing things like pension, agricultural land and other basic, public goods? Editor Vidyun Sabhaney thinks it's possible and this volume of graphic narratives shows you both how well it can work and how badly it goes when the idea falls flat. Some of the stories here — like Without Permit Entry Prohibited about the Jarawas of Andaman — are fantastically illustrated and told. Others — like Devadasi, Ek Pehchan — feel preachy, disjoint and fail to use illustrations and text in a way that the two complement one another.

Kama’s Last Sutra: Just don’t. Life is short.

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I loved reading (and seeing) this interview of Olivia Laing's in which she talks about her processes and shares screenshots that show just how meticulously organised this woman is. If she ever wants to try her hand at criminality, I'm pretty sure she'd be undetectable because of how well-planned her crime would be. Especially if you like art, you should read Laing's The Lonely City, an ode to loneliness, solitude, modern art and New York City.

This article on Instagram 'saving' modern poetry was an interesting read. I don't know where I stand on this business of commercialising poetry. At one level, anything that makes it possible for people to make their living from only their writing has my vote. The problem, as always, isn't that poetry is going from Instagram posts to billboards, but how this impacts what is written and created. Who are you writing for? Do you stop writing (or working on writing) that isn't seen as inspirational and doesn't get enough likes? Poet Rebecca's ninja attack on Instagram poets is well worth a read. Sure, she sounds a bit grumpy, but do you have an answer to this: "What good is a flourishing poetry market, if what we read in poetry books renders us more confused, less appreciative of nuance, less able to engage with ideas, more indignant about the things that annoy us, and more resentful of others who appear to be different from us? The ability to draw a crowd, attract an audience or assemble a mob does not itself render a thing intrinsically good: witness Donald Trump. ... Just as [Hollie] McNish insults those she expects to buy her books — condescending to an uneducated class with which she professes solidarity, while simultaneously rejecting her spoken-word roots — the critics and publishers who praise her for 'telling it like it is' debase us as readers by peddling writing of the poorest quality because they think this is all we deserve."

Ouch.

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Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon (no, really, pinkie-swear).