‘Fire in the Unnameable Country’ by Ghalib Islam

Reviewed by Rachel Carlson

Fire in the Unnameable Country is the inventive debut novel of Ghalib Islam; Hedayat is our half-man, half-owl protagonist and narrator who can swivel his head 180 degrees. Like the Roman god Janus, Hedayat can look into the past and the future, and rules over gateways and passages, beginnings, change, and time. Hedayat is an ideal figure to guide us through an intergenerational journey to explore history, politics, oppression, survival, war, and love in the unnameable country.

Born through a miraculous series of events as his mother rose into the sky on a magic carpet, Hedayat advances through her birth canal and releases a single cry upon entry to the world. Silence follows for years afterwards until the owl-boy begins to speak in tongues. His birth could not be anything other than fantastical in a country plagued by a mysterious sleeping illness that gives rise to a somnambulant citizenship; a country taken over by a vast reality television show called The Mirror; a nation of ghost hospices where the dead come to live and die again on human blood sustenance baked into puddings.

Yet the unnameable country is as supernormal as it is ordinary. As Hedayat reaches back in time to tell the stories of his forebears we find his relations swallowed by government administration. They work jobs that they hate in order to survive. They are secret poets who work as border guards, bureaucrats, and spies for the state while wishing for another life. Like any good piece of speculative fiction, Hedayat’s narrative makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.

Accordingly, throughout the narrative we see our lives and our histories reflected back at us in unsettling ways. Like George Orwell’s 1984, the citizenry of the unnameable country is spied upon as their thoughts are recorded, edited, and parsed to create narratives of terrorist intent. Enormous offices and departments are filled with workers listening to the thoughts of their fellow-citizens. While it seems absurd, it is a somewhat accurate reflection of the dragnet data-collection perpetrated by the NSA in the hunt for terrorist suspects. A comparison to the works of Franz Kafka also cannot be avoided as Islam chronicles an unfeeling, senseless, and bloated government body that becomes so convoluted even its creator can no longer navigate it.

Indeed, literary parallels abound in this work. The magical realism employed by authors such as Salman Rushdie and Nega Mezlekia, who use fairy tale enchantment to satirize and hyperbolize political, social, and historical events, is everywhere in Islam’s work. Like Rushdie, Islam builds a history for an imagined country based on reality. The Unnameable country is a dizzying amalgam of American imperialism, European colonialism, and contemporary globalization that shifts through time and through space.

While Islam often uses a number of literary styles to great postmodern effect, the narrative is overly reliant on intertextuality to create meaning and structure. It feels as though Islam relies on his readership’s familiarity with Orwell to construct a certain paranoia, a caution against the state. The text is littered with literary references from Gargantua and Pantagruel to Crime and Punishment. Even the anthropomorphized creatures of Beatrix Potter are suggested in the rabbit warrens below the city of La Maga. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it can be tiring to chase down meaning through an ever-expanding maze of reference.

At the same time, Fire in the Unnameable Country is deeply imaginative and entertaining. Irreverent and snort-worthy humour emerges in the narrative unexpectedly to mock venerated histories and institutions:

No one knew when [Maxwell] had arrived and some even claimed that he had disguised himself as a member of Parliament for years, but surely noticed him one day during a desperate meal when what remained of the original Privy Council was trying to plan what to do now after ek dum fut-a-fut, hosanna, everything down the Thomas Crapper.

With a deft and wry mockery, Islam lambasts the American hegemony and arrogance that defines any number of regime replacements throughout the world to prove the subversive power of humour:

… he extracted a figurine of Ronald Reagan from his person and drew the string on its back. The presidential doll began to speak. It informed that before them sat a man who had been granted moral authority by the American government to supervise all affairs within reason in the unnameable country at this time of great crisis, my friends, please bestow upon him all the love you would upon me.

While Islam takes great risks with humour, he also experiments with style. Whole paragraphs read like spoken word poetry:

Samir Gallili, a Chicago Boy inculcated into the black arts of global finance by the tutelage of Milton Friedman/ no stopping the tenebrous palsy of his hands/ at dinner circus legislature mornings/ lend voice to crumpled shaky paper/ shot by unknown assailants in his sleep…

The text sings with a rhythmic beauty in such passages that begs to be read aloud. The imagery and prosody are linked in the symbolism of the labyrinth. Whole sentences and paragraphs end without punctuation, with only a blank open space to indicate their terminus, like a cartoon character who hasn’t yet realized they have run over a cliff. Again, the reader is simultaneously frustrated, edified, and entertained by the story’s innumerable dead ends, red herrings, and secret passages.

Yet there is a cost to the a text densely packed with literary devices, historical references, and dead end plot twists. It is difficult to follow the arc of the story or maintain any meaningful connection with the characters when the narrative lurches between past and present and is littered with inconsequential figures who appear suddenly and then vanish. At times, the novel reads like a television screen flicking from channel to channel alighting on news, soap operas, science fiction, and reality TV. I persisted in frustration and in the hope of finding the elusive centre in the literary labyrinth of Fire in the Unnameable Country, but maybe it cannot hold together — and maybe that’s the point.

Hamish Hamilton Ca | 464 pages |  $30.00 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0670067008