Published in 2024, this is by Kaveh Akbar. He's well known as a poet, but I hadn't come across him until I watched Sara Colangelo's 2018 movie The Kindergarten Teacher. Akbar (along with Ocean Vuong) was asked to write the kind of poems that would have been written by the five-year-old Jimmy, the apparent prodigy who forms the crux of the movie.

Martyr! is Akbar's first novel.

My audio-version was brilliantly read by Arian Moayed. This is another novel that deserves to be heard.



Our protagonist is Cyrus Shams. An Iranian American, a poet, a recovering addict, a depressive. He grows up with the knowledge that the plane his mother (Roya) was travelling on was shot out of the sky in 1988 by missiles from the USS Vincennes (that incident was still reverberating in Iran over a decade later when I was working on Iranian press material). To Cyrus, her death feels utterly meaningless. His bereft father (Ali) takes his small son to the US shortly afterwards. He gets a job on an industrial chicken farm in Indiana, and spends the rest of his life working long days, and drinking for consolation. Cyrus starts to study at Keady University, and his father dies shortly afterwards, leaving his so to think with infinite sadness on that life trajectory, too: "My dad died anonymous after spending decades cleaning chicken shit," he tells his AA sponsor.

Cyrus, already burdened with this tragic family history, and a difficult in-between status as the product of two cultures, also has to cope with an innate "big pathological sad", the discovery that sobriety makes everything rather mehh (he feels he's stuck in an unproductive "textureless middle"), and an inability to shake off the question about what makes lives matter. Not surprising, perhaps, he comes up with the idea for a "Book of Martyrs". And, we suspect, the completion of this study of deaths that, by definition, retrospectively give lives a purpose, will be his own suicide.

It is at this point that he comes across Orkideh, a terminally ill Iranian American artist, who -- Marina Abramovic-style -- has decided to make herself her last exhbit, living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, and talking to people about death. Cyrus decides this is exactly the sort of person he needs to consult, and heads for New York, accompanied by his loyal flat-mate and sometime lover, Zee.

Cyrus and Orkideh really connect, and you start to suspect that there's something we're missing here, but I won't spoil the big reveal (which I have to say I didn't see coming).


The photos were taken in Yazd, a quarter of a century ago...

It's not the kind of structure I naturally take to. The running narrative, which follows Cyrus, is set in 2017 (the first year of "President Invective", as Cyrus and Zee style him), but multiple flashbacks fill in the details of Cyrus's family. We also get snippets from the martyr book. And there are dreamlike sequences involving conversations between Cyrus's family members and famous people. He has long suffered from insomnia, and used to imagine conversations between two characters to get him through the long wakeful nights.

It was the last element that I found myself resisting. But Akbar has such a winning explanation that you end up thinking, oh well, all right then: "The Roman poet Horace famously said that good art is dulce et utile -- sweet and useful -- with a lot of translations saying that art should delight and instruct. And I think about that contract a lot. The opportunity cost of spending 12 hours with my novel is unprecedented in the history of our species... The reader is giving me the gift of their time and therefore deserves light, which doesn’t mean wacky punchlines and rainbows, but an encounter with language that surprises them. Things they wouldn’t be expecting to see in a piece of literary fiction, like long dialogues with Lisa Simpson, or Rumi smoking a blunt outside of a hardcore show. The contract, as Horace has situated it, says that in exchange for your most finite resource, I will give you a measure of delight and instruction. I take that intensely seriously."

It's in something of the same spirit that the title bears its exclamation mark. Without it, says Akbar, "it would have felt kind of joyless, maybe relentlessly sad or relentlessly somber, and that's not the sort of book that it is".



Because this novel is supposed to be a big, wild, zany razzmatazz of impressions, I can't agree that it's "let down by a lack of subtlety", or suffers from "emotive overkill". Even less can I agree that the "riotous energy... makes it hard for us to truly care [about Cyrus]".

Me, I TOTALLY cared about Cyrus. He had me straight from the start. Manic, self-doubting, courageous, he makes it painfully obvious that he might well be recovering from addiction, but he is still very much in the grip of depression. His sadness, impossible to shrug off, is "like a giant bowling ball on the bed... [and] everything kind of rolls into it". As he role-plays a dying patient to a trainee doctor (his day-job at a hospital), he slips at one point into something that's way more real than fained: "'Do you have this organ here?' Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. 'A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop... I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it’s still in me, that doom organ.' He pointed again at his neck. 'It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art -- that shit just numbs it for a second...'" Powerful indeed. It reminded me of Olive Kitteridge, and her thing that "swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me". When Cyrus's AA mentor asks him at one point about his most cherished dreams, he can't stop himself saying: "I want to die."

I thought his inability to "fit" was very poignantly rendered: "[He was] awash in the world and its checkboxes -- neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim." This is all very reminiscent of other stories I've read recently: Wherever You May Be, about a Vietnamese woman growing up in Germany, or The Reluctant Fundamentalist, about a Pakistani unable to feel at home in America... And, as in that second one, Cyrus is on the receiving end of that whole post-9/11 neurosis: "[He] could see it in their chests when they looked at him. It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart." Christopher Kitteridge again...



But there's more to Cyrus's struggle than being depressed, or not fitting in, or having parents whose deaths make no sense, or fighting his way back from addiction. His is a kind of existential struggle, as he beats his head against a world that just doesn't make sense. Katy Waldman, in a very perceptive review, explains that "for Cyrus, who craves enormity, dying offers a way to scale himself up -- to both escape from and reject a world that is determined to categorize his suffering and that of the people he cares about as meaningless".

Cyrus is a writer, but he's all too aware of the limitations of language: "It’s damned, right? And I am too, for giving my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they’re supposed to." It's as though he's poised on the edge of a cliff: "He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental defectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt."

Which brings us to the ending... There's a big bust-up with Zee (such an endearing character, who loves Cyrus so unflinchingly). And Orkideh dies (possibly with a little help from her own hand, but then she was so close to the end anyway), and Cyrus finds out that all this matters more to him than he ever could have envisaged when he started visiting her. With a lot to digest, he passes out, and has to be helped by bystanders. Then there seems to be a reconciliation with Zee. But at this point, it's all big and flowery, almost a dream sequence, full of birds and blossom and surreality. As I listened, I thought, surely this is a little too easy, after all that emotional turmoil...

Then, skimming through commentary, I found that some readers thought Cyrus had died, and this last bit was coming from beyond the grave, from beyond the cruel world that had finally proved too much... Oh, I thought, did I completely misunderstand this finale? Did that old foot injury turn to septicaemia (we did hear a lot about how he got it)...? He fainted just now, and was clearly not OK even though he said he was... And it is awfully cold in that park he's sitting in...

So, did he die, after all?

But maybe it'll be all right. Maybe that floaty language is a product of hallucination from the cold or the fever. Maybe he'll wake up in hospital with Zee alongside him...

I'll quote Waldman again: "Cyrus experiences a profound exhaustion with art and language. Akbar, his beneficent Creator, hears his prayer and gives him the apocalypse, replete with wild horses, smoke, and flowers raining from the sky. It’s an appropriately gonzo finale -- the most unequivocal statement that an author with Akbar’s appetite for nuance could have provided. Art cannot heal the fallen world; it can only function as a kind of palliative care, like the therapies that were presented to Cyrus during his gigs as a medical actor. And so, instead of laboring over his phrases, Cyrus gives them up, entering a heaven in which words come unmoored from their meanings -- a place where birds and blossoms 'fall like fists of snow,' and the tortured poet can luxuriate in the deficiency that once caused him pain." So that's a little ambiguous, but hopeful-sounding, with the euphoria as a blissful letting-go of vain striving and an embrace of love and beauty for their own sake.

And there are others who also sound more positive: "Finding meaning in one’s life, finding meaning through art, the importance of connection in this imperfect world, the risk and necessity of loving, even though we are destined to be left, and destined to leave others, is the real exclamation point of the novel."

I'm also encouraged to hope by Akbar's own testimony to a feeling of "living a bonus lifetime", post-addiction: "I’ve seen the lives of so many of my friends and people I love, they accrue some amount of sober time and then they drink or use again and it’s back to where it began. And we’re here talking about a book that I wrote. It’s hard to distinguish this from what I would describe as heaven." I hope this is what happened for Cyrus too...

I'm not sure, though... And the fact that we spend time wondering and caring bears witness that the book has engaged and moved us.



***

What else was memorable?

-- Orikideh's choices. She says at one point: "It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art." She is a martyr to art, then, giving her life to it, and turning her back on all else. Partly, she was forced down this path (a same-sex relationship would have been problematic in Iran); partly, she chose it (turning a cruel trick of fate into an opportunity for a total life transformation). Selfish? Single-minded? Dedicated to creating a legacy that makes sense of her life in a way nothing else could? Akbar leaves us to judge.

-- Arash, Roya's brother and Cyrus's uncle. His military role, during the Iran-Iraq war, was to play the role of the Angel of Death... At night, dressed in dark robes, his face illuminated by a flashlight, he was tasked with riding a horse over the battlefields where men lay dying. If they saw the angel, it was thought, they wouldn't be tempted to dispatch themselves prematurely, but would patiently wait for the death that made them martyrs... Arash, surrounded by these sights year after year, ends up with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He never fully recovers. Did this Angel of Death thing really happen? According to Akbar: "The Persian death avatar is, according to my dad, a very real thing. My dad served in the Iranian army, and I’m not a journalist so I didn’t exhaustively vet his story, but the way that such a character would literalise so much of what is in the subcutaneous culture in Iran since 1979, and honestly since antiquity… It’s just one of the most striking images I’ve ever heard." His interviewer, a second-generation Iranian immigrant to the UK, underscores: "The liminal potential of death -- as both end and beginning, tragedy and hagiography -- is deeply engrained within Iranian culture." Certainly, there is frequent recourse to the language of martyrdom in contexts that sound odd to other cultures (eg: "Armed men martyred two traffic police officers in the southeastern province of Kerman on Saturday"). My one visit to Iran coincided with Ashura, the great annual commemoration of what is seen as the martyrdom of Imam Husayn (in October 680 during the Battle of Karbala). My diary records the processions we saw: To the sound of drums, boys beat themselves with flails, while a nakhl -- a massive replica of Husayn's bier -- was borne along by sweating men. All the mosques were decorated with black Ashura banners, the calligraphy picked out in various colours. It was certainly sobering.


A nakhl

-- Kaveh Akbar is a fascinating figure in his own right. He, too, feels acutely his dual identity: "I was born there, raised here. I love Ferdowsi. I love the Shahnameh. I love Hafez. I love Islam. But I also love Erykah Badu. I love EPMD and Vogue and Sonic Youth. And it has shaped the person that I am. It has shaped the identity that I walk through the world, just as yours has you and everyone's has." And he writes Cyrus's recovery story from personal experience: "I am in recovery... And all of my work orbits recovery in one way or another, explicitly or implicitly. And every experience of my life, every interaction that I have, my spouse, my dog, my teaching position, the fact that we're sat here right now, is predicated on the fact of my recovery, right? Had I not recovered, I wouldn't have any of this... I'm no less an addict today than I was 11 years ago. I just have better tools with which to cope with it. You learn techniques. You gain a community upon which you can draw. And so it's not like I'm walking around white-knuckling it today." Like Cyrus, Akbar came to the United States as a child, when his parents fled the theocratic regime in Iran. He has retained his spiritual link to Islam: "I think there are many Muslims around the world who would look at my practice and say, there’s no Islam in that. But I understand Islam to be a direct one-to-one, unmediated relationship between yourself and a higher power. It doesn’t need to be vetted by anyone else’s approval."

In all, a fascinating book, and a fascinating author.