Arts & Events

"Saddam's Parrot" by Jim Curry
(Aignos Publishing, 2017)

Reviewed by Gar Smith
Saturday August 26, 2017 - 09:28:00 AM

A new book that recently landed on my desk provided for a very entertaining weekend read—beginning with one of the year's best dedications: "To Blessed Elephants, Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution." 

Saddam's Parrot, by Seattle-based writer (and Berkeley grad) Jim Currie, is a rollicking good read filled with a bevy of offbeat characters, a host of colorful settings (ranging from Telegraph Avenue to San Francisco beat bars to Las Vegas high-rise suites to the dusty villages of India), and garnished with outbreaks of salty crime-sleuth dialogue that evoke Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard. Want a sample? How about the character who references "the old saw that even the son of a blind pig butcher occasionally finds an almond." 

The title character is a gray parrot named Alex—a bird with one heck of a backstory. It turns out this poly was originally known as Ali, a verbally gifted research subject from Baghdad U's Animal Communications Lab, who became the personal pet of doomed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. After Saddam's overthrow, Ali is seized as a war trophy, renamed him Alex, and presented to George W. Bush. 

But what the denizens of the Bush White House don't realize is that Alex (now traumatized and mute) was still fully conversant in both Arabic and English and remained very attentive. In essence, the bird, now an oval office feature, was also serving as a feathered tape recorder who inadvertently captured some incriminating information. 

This is the premise that provides the grist and fodder for Currie's agile narrative, which is both an investigative whodunit and, at the same time, an introspective why-do-we-do-it? 

While Alex is the title character, the parrot is actually a bit player in Currie's time-traveling, episodic tale. When Alex winds up in San Francisco and starts hanging out with "the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill," I was hoping he would open up and maybe start narrating the story. Doesn't happen. Alex serves more as a Maltese Falcon, a plot device that drives humans into a spiral of high-risk pursuits. Surprisingly, Currie's tale spends much more time in the world of competitive pigeon racers and indentured elephants. 

Pankaz Panday, the human protagonist at the center of the intrigue, is a Berkeley resident and an investigative reporter for The Barb (now an online news operation with an anti-establishment mandate). Pankaz is scrawny but shrewd—quick-witted and fast to find his way into and out of one scandalous story after another. (Currie frequently interrupts his book to post "reprints" of Panday's Barb articles.) 

The book is filled with local references. There is a pie-shop on Telegraph Avenue that specializes in producing "weaponized custards" used to "pie" deserving politicians and dignitaries. 

One critical scene unfolds at Boalt Hall's UC Berkeley Law School. A presentation by a notorious UC professor (and former Bush White House torture attorney) James Mee is disrupted by a team of latter-day yuppies who manage to douse the lights and start screening censored video clips of Gitmo atrocities and Abu Ghraib tortures. 

Among those pelted with lemon cream pies are law school dean, Dr. Manfred Schmoot and Berkeley professor emeritus of constitutional law, Dr. Chiswick Bowles. ("James Mee" is, of course, a cryptogram for Bush-era lawyer and current UC professor John Yoo. Currie's book is filled with hidden references and part of the fun is unraveling the actual identities.) 

"The publisher insisted on lots of pseudonyms," Currie tells The Planet. (Vice President Dick Chaney also earns a code-name.) Currie further reveals that, while most of Panday's human "flock" of colorful outliers were invented, two were based on actual characters. The book's risk-taking radical was inspired by one of Currie's cousins while an improbable Nixon-impersonator named Darrell turns out to be Darrell Duffey, a "buddy of mine [who has] actually played Richard Nixon in Chinese movies." 

Panday's haunted past is revisited in several stunning flashbacks to a childhood in India filled with trauma and extraordinary loss. 

As the focus of the story turns toward the plight of elephants trapped in traveling circuses or wasting away in the confines of urban zoos, the reader learns a lot about the emotional nature of "elies" and what it means for the humans who care for them. 

Currie gives us a marvelous character in Marianne, a wiry and witty work-a-day waitress who spends her off-hours advocating for elephants at the SF City Zoo while trying to raise funds to establish a wildlife sanctuary far outside the city. 

The search for sanctuary funding eventually leads to a confrontation with powerful political figures from the Bush era—and a not-surprising criminal enterprise, complete with snipers. There are two end-of-the-book crescendos in the story. One involves a pigeon race; the other involves a sniper shootout in downtown San Francisco. 

The denouement is a mix of luck, close calls, good fortune, and a wistful recognition of mortality with a slow, brave hike to the end of the trail. 

This is one of those stories that you can easily imagine reappearing as a movie. Saddam's Parrot is a well-crafted bit of entertainment that rewards the reader with loads of elephant lore and many vivid and memorable moments. 

 

 



For those readers wanting more, check out @SaddamsParrot for "Alex's latest squawks on the state of the planet."