2026/031: Frankenstein in Baghdad — Ahmed Saadawi (translated by Jonathan Wright)

‘I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.’ [p. 27]

Baghdad, 2005: after the American invasion and occupation, just as the sectarian civil war is kicking off. Antique (junk) dealer Hadi, trying to retrieve a friend's remains after a car bomb, finds that body parts at the mortuary are all jumbled together, with little effort to reconstruct each corpse. He begins to assemble a body, picking and choosing from the scraps of anatomy that are in plentiful supply on the streets of Baghdad. But it's only when a hotel guard is killed by a car bomb, and his spirit is wandering in search of a body to reunite with, that the creature -- the Whatsitsname, says Hadi -- becomes animate. And the Whatsitsname is keen on justice: he wants to avenge the owners of each of his constituent parts. This endeavour is somewhat complicated by the fact that those parts will rot and fall off if he doesn't complete his vengeance within a certain, undefined period of time.

Add to this Hadi's neighbour Elishva, who's convinced that St George has promised the return of her son Daniel (lost in the Iran-Iraq war) and who believes the Whatsisname is Daniel, somewhat changed by his experiences; ambitious young journalist Mahmoud, who hears Hadi's story, writes it up as 'Urban Legends from the Streets of Iraq' and isn't happy when his boss retitles it 'Frankenstein in Baghdad'; and Co lonel Brigadier Majid, head of the Tracking and Pursuit Department, is wondering why his squad of fortune-tellers, astrologers and magicians can't predict where the Whatsitsname will strike next. (I did like this conceit: "... the Americans, besides their arsenal of advanced military hardware, possessed a formidable army of djinn, which was able to destroy the djinn that this magician and his assistants had mobilized." [p. 144]

As in Shelley's original, the creature is the most eloquent of the narrators. (Interestingly, most of the people who recognise the story as Frankenstein are remembering the Robert de Niro film.) When the Whatsitsname records his account of his actions, we begin to understand that there are many shades of criminality and innocence in both his victims and those he's avenging. He hopes for an end to the killing, so that he can rest. 'I’m the only justice there is in this country,' he laments.

This is a rambling novel, often blackly comic, sometimes phantasmagorical: a commentary on the continuing conflict, a satire on the American 'intelligence' that fails to predict or prevent 'serious security incidents'. The Whatsitsname's story is as poignant as Shelley's original, and his sense of a balance to be restored, of vengeance to be wrought, gives him more purpose than most of the other characters.

Sometimes gory, often featuring grim scenes of bombs and executions, Frankenstein in Baghdad was an unexpectedly enjoyable read. Perhaps there were slightly too many viewpoint characters: perhaps the ending is overly open. But it's a window opening on a culture, a society and a city that is constantly in the news: and it made me think.