Sirens of Baghdad
by Yasmina Khadra, translated by John Cullen

Cities are suspect to the newly converted puritan. This novel begins with a cynical view of Beirut: “Its alleged charisma doesn’t jibe with its qualms; it’s like a silk cloth over an ugly stain.” In Wolf Dreams, the previous novel by Khadra, Algiers was pictured as a whore lifting up its skirts. The sirens of Baghdad, meanwhile, are both air-raid sirens prefiguring bombing raids, and seductive voices, singing first of a life of dissolute pleasure, and then of death. Both novels are stories of conversion, in which a young Muslim turns to violent Islamism. Wolf Dreams was set during the Algerian civil war of the 1990s (“Yasmina Khadra” is the pen name of a former officer of the Algerian army); Sirens of Baghdad is a novel of the current Iraq war.

The nameless narrator is a Bedouin, from Kafr Karam, “a village lost in the sands of the Iraqi desert, a place so discreet that it often dissolves in mirages, only to emerge at sunset”. His studies at the university of Baghdad were terminated by the invasion, as, he explains, was much else:

From one day to the next, the most passionate love affairs dissolved in tears and blood. The university was abandoned to vandals, and my dreams were destroyed, too.

So he returns to his village, where for the novel’s first third Khadra beautifully evokes a scorched quietude, the village so far untouched by the occupation as it had been by the previous dictatorship, symbolised by “the Party’s community antena, inaugurated amid fanfare thirty years previously and fallen into disrepair for lack of ideological conviction”. Satirical scenes of political arguments among the elders in the barbershop alternate with explanations of the complex structures of kinship, insult and reconciliation, studded with laconic sensuous evocation: “It was about eleven o’clock, and the sun sprinkled false oases all over the plain. A couple of birds flapped their wings against the white-hot sky.”

All at once, the war comes to Kafr Karam. A group of men are taking the village’s mentally disabled young man, Sulayman, to a clinic because he has hurt himself. Their car is stopped by American soldiers, and Sulayman tries to run away: in a brutal scene, he is riddled with bullets. Next, a wedding party is bombed from the air: “The guests were having a good time,” one witness says, “and then the chairs and tables blew away, like in a windstorm.” Finally, a group of GIs conduct a night raid on the narrator’s own house, perpetrating an unforgivable humiliation on the narrator’s aged father. According to Bedouin tradition, this insult must be “washed away in blood”, so the narrator decides to travel to Baghdad and join an Islamist cell planning an attack on London.

To direct a novel’s narrator into a conspiratorial, mass-murdering mindset not halfway through is a brave strategy. In Wolf Dreams, Khadra complicated the same transition with a virtuoso control of point-of-view, switching from first person to third person, as though the protagonist were standing outside himself watching his bloody acts, and then back to first person for a final sickening realisation of what he had done. But perhaps Khadra decided that such a creative alienation was also a kind of insulation, protecting the reader from the naked challenge of sympathy. In Sirens of Baghdad, then, we stay in the narrator’s head as he begins work in an electronics shop that is a front for explosives distribution, right up until the critical point of his mission. Meanwhile, there are other voices pondering various sides of the question of violence. There is an academic, once a successful talking head in Europe, who became sick of being a “useful raghead” and began justifying Islamist violence instead. Then there is Omar, the village’s rumbustious army deserter, telling dirty jokes and offering languid warnings: “These days, people come to Baghdad to avenge an offense they’ve suffered elsewhere, which means they tend to mistake their targets — by a lot.”

Such arguments can seem schematically staged, and overall the novel is somewhat more mechanical than Wolf Dreams. Nonethelss, Khadra expertly evokes an urban atmosphere of paranoia and random destruction. There is one particularly telling scene on the road to Baghdad where people in a traffic jam watch an American helicopter fire two rockets at nothing in particular. “We saw two masses of flames and dust rise over a ridge”: an image reminiscent of the moment in Heart of Darkness when Marlow observes a warship dully shelling the jungle, firing blind into the dark continent. Throughout the novel, meanwhile, the tension between the narrator’s home environment and his adopted world of mechanized destruction is subtly emphasized by means of natural imagery, as when he and another character say goodbye: “We part without pats or embraces, like two rivulets spilling off a rock.”

Sirens of Baghdad ends with a stunning final line that arrives with the force of desert scripture, but it cannot be revealed here. The novel has also continued another strand of fictional argument, about the ignorant rejection of Arab artistic traditions by both Islamists and their enemies. One of the narrator’s friends is a virtuoso lutenist whose instrument is destroyed in a moment of casual, random violence. The reader of Wolf Dreams, meanwhile, watches as the “Casbah of the poets” in Algiers becomes a viper’s nest, and the only unsullied character in that novel is a poet, Sid Ali. When the murderers come for him, he asks that his body be burned. “Why?” they demand to know. He replies: “To bring a little light into your dark night.”

Something close to a morbidly sarcastic inversion of that image occurs in Sirens, when the narrator speaks of “The day when brutes festooned with grenades and handcuffs burst into the gardens of Babylon, come to teach poets how to be free men.” This novel tells one story; there are many like it.