The lighter side of life in war-torn Iraq

Saad Hossain’s debut Escape from Baghdad! is war fiction that is not the typical racy edge-of-seat thriller but a repository of dark humour.

Hossain, a Dhaka native, deals with elan a kind of dark humour in the backdrop of a macabre setting like a war-torn Iraq ravaged by American bombing after Saddam Hussein’s death. Also coming from a country like Bangladesh, where liberals have been killed recently, Hossain’s view about religion is also slightly different.

The author’s style of writing has a tongue-in-cheek flavour which probably is a statement against those with dogmatic beliefs.

Coming to the story, which has three characters, the protagonists are as different as chalk and cheese. Kinza is an illegal arms dealer, who is ready to live by the bullet and use a few to kill those who came in his way. There is Dagr, a professor of mathematics, who has lost his family during the war but still has the uncanny ability to form complex formulae in tense situations.

Then there is Hameed, once Saddam’s chief torturer and now Kinza’s captive. All three want to escape from Baghdad where the Mahdi Army (a group of religious extremists) as well as the American army is searching for them.

The fourth angle of this rectangular war thriller is provided by US marine Hoffman, a corrupt yet lovable buffoon.

There are two parallel stories where the trio of Kinza, Dagr and Hameed attempt to escape from Baghdad to Mosul where, according to Hameed, secret gold has been stashed away.

On the other hand, it is Hoffman who is trying to help people escape the prying eyes of Mahdi Army And Americans. The imagery of a devastated Baghdad has been created excellently by the author who has also shown how America’s efforts to free Iraq from the clutches of Saddam’s dictatorship had damaged the lives of ordinary Iraqi civilians.

At the same time, in a humorous yet touching manner, Hossain has depicted the perils of being an American soldier in an Iraq where one loses his sanity, becomes a zombie among bombs, blood and ruins.

The dialogues by the character Ancelotti evokes laughs but one can also feel his emptiness.