01 Sep 2013 23:38:36
Fly, the cool-cat narrator of Rawi Hage's third novel, is a taxi driver living in a house full of books and rats in an unnamed city in Latin America. As he roams town he encounters night owls including a cuckolded husband, a drug lord who makes him his mule, and a pimp who claims to have been a child soldier in Angola. After a shift, he enjoys flirty philosophical debates with his next-door neighbour (and idle crush) Zainab.
These stories are told in a colourful style: Fly thinks of college girls blowing bubbles in his back seat as "tarty little monkeys giving oral birth to balloons in the shape of apocalyptic nuclear mushroom clouds".
He tells us a lot about how he likes to masturbate but he's eccentric rather than sleazy, and always one step ahead. "I am no bitch," he tells a couple of chancers trying to skip the fare, "I am the man who always gets paid." He's armed with a featherduster and a screwdriver just to make sure.
The diary-like form imposes little by way of structure and it's easy to sit back and enjoy the ride in Fly's excellent company.
Yet his taxonomy of street life doesn't skimp on its hazards or hardships. There's a serial killer targeting Fly's fellow drivers; and of all the novel's many cameos, the one with most airtime is an anti-capitalist activist whose inability to reconcile himself to colonial ills leads him into indiscriminate murder.
