Carnival by Rawi Hage, review

A spellbinding novel that delves into the seedy world of urban cab driving grips Andrew Marszal.

Rawi Hage Photo: Allen McInnis

The precarious life of an immigrant taxi driver in an unnamed North American metropolis is an entirely appropriate subject for Lebanese-born author Rawi Hage’s third novel.

Hage, who drove a taxi shortly after emigrating to New York in the Eighties, burst on to the international literary scene in 2006 with tales of war-torn Beirut in the award-winning De Niro’s Game. In that novel the narrator’s childhood friend George becomes embroiled in a bloody militia, earning the nickname De Niro as he apes Hollywood-style violence on the front lines of Lebanon’s civil war.

Few of the real-life De Niro’s roles were bloodier than that of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which showed how packed with human drama life behind a steering wheel and a frantically ticking meter can be.

The parallel set-up here allows Hage to cast his blackly comic eye across the absurd and squalid in modern urban life. As the novel’s protagonist puts it: “The bottom of my car is a swamp where eventually everything rests.” The result is a spellbinding success.

The narrator Fly, who was born into a travelling circus family that toured Europe in his boyhood, lives a solitary life, working through the dead of night to pick up customers on the city’s seediest streets. His occupation brings him into contact with an assorted underbelly of Western society, from drug lords and prostitutes to dominatrix novelists and horny, beer-swilling sports fans.

Set before and during the city’s carnival, in which the streets throng with debauched revellers whose identities are concealed by masks, the novel constantly draws attention to the immoral, bigoted and vulgar side of the humanity bubbling beneath the city’s surface. But Fly’s fantastical perspective – the novel shares Taxi Driver’s dreamlike qualities – and the author’s affectionate description of society’s weaknesses and vices mean the novel is more a humorous, pensive mockery than a didactic tale.
Various narratives soon emerge, and even the aloof, philosophical Fly can’t avoid getting caught up in the city’s everyday conflicts. His friend and old circus associate Otto turns up unexpectedly asking for help, having been incarcerated in a mental asylum after a run-in with the police. Meanwhile, an informal and initially titillating arrangement to drive a powerful drug dealer round town quickly transforms into more sinister employment. Both relationships lead to murders that challenge Fly’s cherished isolation. Fragments of Fly’s troubled childhood emerge with accelerating regularity, too. The result is a diverse yet tautly constructed novel that is evidently the work of a master storyteller.
But above all this is a sympathetic portrait of a sweet and innocent – if narcissistic and confused – young man who never quite seems to grasp the decadence and immorality surrounding him. Fly lives adrift from society, never emotionally engaging with his sordid array of clients; when one character refers to Camus’s L’Etranger, the parallel is clear.
Yet Fly, a bookish naif with a compulsive predilection for masturbating, differs from Camus’s tragic protagonist in his arrogant airs. “I showed off my eloquent thoughts and gallant manners,” he reports of one taxi conversation, imagining himself as a modern-day Don Quixote.
These airs quickly emerge as affected, papering over the true sadness of his transient life: whereas Camus’s Algerian outsider was tragic in his innate bluntness and simplicity, Fly is pathetic for his complex insecurities, rootless existence and desperate flights into fantasy.
In fact, Hage’s ability to render a world populated by insalubrious men with violent streaks in an entrancing style arguably has more in common with the works of South American writer Roberto Bolaño. Indeed, the closing chapter’s description of two young murderers who call themselves “The Savage Capitalists” seems a direct nod to Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, while Hage’s graphic but dispassionate descriptions of grisly homicides are straight out of the Chilean author’s masterpiece 2666.
Although immediately ebullient, distinctive and poetic, it still remains to be seen whether Hage’s writing can quite reach those heights of prose. But in Carnival he has produced a tremendous novel – both laugh-out-loud hilarious and full of pathos; deftly constructed, affectionate yet disconcerting, and utterly engaging.