Psychoraag

Psychoraag by Suhayl Saadi
Black and White Publications. 2004. £12.99
ISBN: 1845020103

Can Suhayl Saadi, author of the deliriously insomniac novel Psychoraag, ever get any sleep? As a practising doctor as well as a novelist and playwright, one might have thought that Saadi would settle for writing slim, elegant volumes. Instead Psychoraag is an enormous sprawl of a book, a book that is large in all respects.

It is the final night at Radio Chaandni in Glasgow, and on the Junnune Show, the show of madness, DJ Zaf (‘that’s zed ay eff’) is taking no requests. ‘Let me tell ye,’ he tells his audience, ‘thur’ll be nae phone-ins thenight… Ye can aw jist relax yer minds – you can aw jist float doonstream… Tonight’s fur listenin. Dreamin. Madness. Junnune…’ And there is plenty of madness in the following six hours. As Zaf rummages through the music he also turns up his past: his father and mother’s flight from Pakistan; his junkie ex-girlfriend Zilla; Babs, his current girlfriend. Here communication is strictly one-way. Zaf is not taking calls. As he talks into the night, his words are transmitted across Glasgow to his listeners. How many? One million? One thousand? Or none at all? This strange isolation, a torrent of words that falls into seeming nothingness, gives Saadi’s book a remarkable sense of the uncanny, and perhaps is the thing that allows the language to detach from the particulars of the story to take on a phantasmagoric life of its own. The language of this novel is truly astonishing. Saadi has an unerring ear for Glaswegian, a Glaswegian that is peppered with Urdu, with Arabic, with Punjabi, with Spanish, with Gaelic and with Farsi. The glossary alone makes fascinating reading. It is, however, here that I have my one quibble with the novel. Saadi has a penchant for typographical experimentation, so that occasionally parts of the novel turn into something like concrete poetry. But for me the appearance of sudden passages in which the text is

really very big,

or words that D
                        R
                          I
                            P

down the page, or (even worse) those that appear to be modified using WordArt, do little to enhance the richness of language. To my mind this play with fonts and styles distracts from the genuinely impressive skill with which Saadi handles this polyglot material. But perhaps Saadi is attempting to bring to light the fact that language is material too, material that begins to break up and fragment as the night goes on and as memories, dreams and hallucinations begin to blend with reality leaving the reader, like Zaf, without any bearings whatsoever.

It is the music that provides the texture that underpins this novel, Zaf playing everything from the Asian Dub Foundation to the Beatles to Madonna to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And undoubtledly the best way to read this novel is to go to the playlist at the back of the book, find yourself a copy of every last track listed, drink a glass or four of cheap Bulgarian red wine to steel your nerves (the rougher the better, preferably from a plastic cup) and when the clock strikes midnight, to press ‘play’ and begin to read: ‘Salaam alaikum, sat sri akaal, namaste ji, good evening oan this hoat, hoat summer’s night…’ By six o’ clock, when the strains of the Beatles’ Day in the Life are beginning to fade, you may have taken leave of your senses entirely; but I can guarantee that you will have had one hell of a trip.

Psychoraag is, for all it’s brilliance and humour, an arduous undertaking. But at the end of the book, when I emerged blinking into the pale Glaswegian dawn and the madness had subsided, I found myself grateful that, in this age of considerable literary conservatism, anyone has the courage to write and publish a risk-taking novel such as this. Both Suhayl Saadi and his publishers, Black and White, should be congratulated.