TRUTH IS A FLIGHTLESS BIRD, East Africa-set thriller with several gallons of rage in its belly

TRUTH IS A FLIGHTLESS BIRD
AKBAR HUSSAIN
Iskanchi Press
$25.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: President Obama's impending arrival to Nairobi is the electric backdrop to this dazzling debut, Truth is a Flightless Bird. Yet, beneath the glittering celebrations, beats the pulse of a city aflame.

It is into this crucible that Nice (real name Theresa) lands, fleeing her Somali drug-dealer boyfriend, her brutal UN work in Mogadishu, and the life choices stalking her. So desperate is she to flee that she involves one of her oldest friends, Duncan, an American pastor heading a church in Nairobi. On the way back from the airport, their car crashes, and Nice is abducted by a crooked immigration cop, Hinga.

Duncan awakes after the car crash to find himself captive to the sociopathic Hinga, and the charmingly amoral Ciru. Plucked from his middle class bubble, Duncan must plunge into the moral complexities of the under-city to rescue Nice. But how deep can Duncan go, without destroying his faith, and himself?

Truth is a Flightless Bird is a brutal love letter to the frontier town that is present-day Nairobi: a studied observation of the the failures of bare-knuckled capitalism, the inequality machines our cities have become, and—ultimately—the profoundly irrational human capacity to hope, to risk everything in order to have something in which to believe.

With Truth is a Flightless Bird, Hussain establishes a remarkable voice, one truly his own.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The African view...especially the Kenyan view...of Barack Obama's presidency wasn't like the US view in most particulars. Kenyans saw the son of one of their own people rise to the most powerful position in the world and felt slightly awed and overjoyed. (I don't need to discuss what happened here. You know.) It was a moment of real hope, much like the moment the war criminals in charge squandered when the World Trade Center was brought down.

When there aren't "legitimate" means to make a living, improve one's lot in life, people find other means to accomplish those eternally applicable goals. That the drug-smuggling world brings misery and poverty to millions, and millions to the very, very few, doesn't matter to those whose needs include enough food and a decent place to live. (Nor do these same concerns animate the decisions of the tens of thousands in this country who work for defense contractors, or chemical manufacturers.) Nice, as young Theresa is called, is a bored American girl whose needs are catered to by a drug-dealing Somali boyfriend...she's in Mogadishu on an international-aid financed jamboree...and she's cajoled into becoming a drug mule. Fly from Mogadishu to Nairobi, deliver the goods, come back and all will be well.

All is not well.

Nice is kidnapped by people who would prefer their own profits get fattened by the cargo inside Nice. Duncan, her fellow American and a truly clueless White Savior spreadin' the Gospel to people he begins to realize need something to explain the randomness of the Universe and he's there, so he'll do. It's a sobering moment, facing up the fact you're really not qualified to speak for God. Especially when that's the path you've chosen to tread.

When it comes to the Kenyans who set the plot's stressful parts in motion, they're all driven by Big Needs. You know, Revenge and Power and stuff like that. Nothing important...no one here's hurtin' for their next meal. What I got most clearly when I read this uniquely sourced thriller was that there's really no one in it who has one single solitary excuse for what they're doing to make others miserable. Lots of reasons! Not one excuse.

The other thing I learned is that it's hugely dangerous to imagine you're in any way immune from the consequences of your actions. Long may it be so, only a little more equitably distributed and on a thriller novel's time scale. Every one of these souls is screwed over, screwed up, and just plain screwed when the story ends. I wonder if any of them learned anything...I wonder what they dream about when they think of their time in Nairobi. I suspect a lot of "what might have been"s are thought.

None of the characters have great depths that get plumbed but this is a thriller so why would they? What we're offered instead is telling moments...a man thinks of his worthlessness while looking at a grieving father's earlobes in the strong sunshine through a window, a woman picking up an airplane-food omelette whole and shoving it into her mouth...that concisely delineate the characters' inner states. The quietness of it could be read as an absence of effort on the author's part. I say it is, rather, a subtle and really quite uncharitable summing-up of the people in question.

These aren't the details a writer of schlock calls to your attention. They're subtle selections presented at an oblique angle. They are the epitome of show me, don't just tell me. To be sure, there are moments of telling me what might profitably been shown:

To this revelation, which crystallized so much of Duncan's recent experience, Edmund delivered that devastating dialectical upper cut. With a curl of his lip, he asked, "So what?"

Duncan was too stunned and stoned to formulate a sentence.

Too bald. Too prescriptive...I can only be allowed one response to someone who has curled a lip...and not in keeping with the best moments of storytelling in here.

I'll still recommend to y'all that this book join your library. I think what it offers is what the best kinds of thrillers offer: A window into the worst moments of an unremarkably decent person's life. A view into a world not quite as you thought it was, or should be; that no one thinks is as good as it could be. And the bonus is that you're in competent hands guided by eyes and ears that have been where they're telling you about often enough and long enough to command your belief. There's the indefinable air of a person with local knowledge imparting it to you.

Go on the trip, give your thriller-eater the trip, or best of all do both.