Cyrus Shams has been adrift for years. Born in Iran, he lost his mother very early when her plane was shot down by mistake by a U.S. Navy warship. (This really happened. Look up Iran Air Flight 655 for more information.) His father took Cyrus to Indiana, of all places, where he worked himself to death on a chicken farm before Cyrus had finished college. In 2017, Cyrus has sobered up and finally graduated, but he’s still hanging around his college town, bumming around at open mic nights with his friends and subsisting on wages from part-time jobs like acting as a patient receiving bad news from medical students.
Cyrus is a poet, and his new work is based on his obsession with death, particularly martyrdom. Cyrus thinks he might want to die, but he also wants his life to have meant something. It’s a conundrum.
Martyr! is a curious novel. Despite being Cyrus’s story, it switches perspectives to show us the lives of his mother, father, uncle, and best friend Zee, a Polish-Egyptian-American who might be in love with Cyrus. There are also excerpts from news reports concerning the plane crash, accounts of Cyrus’s dreams starring both his dead relatives and various celebrities, and snippets of Cyrus’s poems about martyrs.
I have to admit that most of these interludes served as distractions to me. I thought they took away from the narrative thrust of the book and grew repetitive and desultory over time. I don’t read a lot of modern poetry, but Cyrus’s poems didn’t strike me as showcasing any major talent, and his dreams just served as a way for Akbar to spoon-feed ideas to the reader instead of introducing them more subtly into the plot.
Eventually, Cyrus’s martyrdom project brings him face-to-face with another death-obsessed Iranian artist, and their interactions lead Cyrus to question everything he thought he knew and believed about his life and life on Earth.
Akbar has a unique voice and a creative mind, but his attempt to do something genre-bending and completely different leaves the reader a little stranded.