Transactions

Thick with vengeance and rife with subterfuge, the stories forming the economy of Ali Alizadeh’s new book – his seventh – gather steam through each secret exchange, each lie about a lie about a lie. Strands of life and death are woven across the globe in an attempt to articulate a pattern in the darkened back streets of the ‘Global Village’, an articulation extolling the virtues of the ultimately singular force of will undermining each sad ‘Transaction’.

A story cycle, or a collection of linked stories, Transactions gets inside the head of major and minor players in the tensions between East and West, capitalism and religion, profiteering and asylum-seeking. It gets inside the heads of assassins, escorts, refugees, war-mongers, businessmen, philanthropists, writers, film-makers; everyone from the oppressed and the oblivious to the oppressors and the defectors is implicated and no one is innocent.

The myriad angles make for a rocketing, rickety ride which rarely steps outside itself into rightous aggrandisement or moralising. Indeed, the passages in which the literary world is so heartily mocked are tacit acknowledgement of the text’s own participation in the hall of mirrors populated by fish oil salesmen Transactions imagines at the centre of the modern world.

Lubricated by Alizadeh’s unadorned and uncomplicated story-telling, the action unfolds much as an old-fashioned pot-boiling espionage tale, characters feeding each other half-truths and straight-faced lies, implicitly pleading with the reader to take their side, before the veil is lifted, often without warning, and the stories screech to a halt. Characters change in and out of each others clothes – an assassin becomes a call-girl who becomes a nanny who becomes an assassin, a missionary is a human trafficker, a refugee is a defecting prison guard with a sexually violent past – and attempts to opt out of the circus lead inevitably into the zoo.

All of which goes some way to getting at the crux of the narrative. A text of contentions, Transactions asks readers to suspend their disbelief, not so he can tell his story, but because this – all of it – really happens. If the characters appear shallow approximations of living people, it’s because the scope of Alizadeh’s project demands certain notions be conveyed in short-hand. The same can be said for the pulp coincidences and snap-together sucker punches lurking inside and behind each story. Subtlety is not the name of the game – Alizadeh says himself the book ‘attempts to expose the dark secrets of Globalisation’. In lesser hands, this would become problematic, especially given the brevity of the work, but Alizadeh’s casual intelligence and shrewd awareness of the multitudinous pulse of modern existence deliver it equally from ham-fisted posturing and evasive lucidity. It is of the moment – a fact I suspect belies my nagging desire for it to have been given time to ferment – and it is inclusively and compellingly so.

Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5