Book Review: 'Rabbit Rap: A Fable For The 21st Century'

Book: Rabbit Rap: A Fable For The 21st Century
Author: Musharraf Ali Farooqi & Michelle Farooqi
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Pages: 296 pages
Price: Rs499

South Asian countries in the twentieth century are ripe for the most exciting political satire. Greedy, sold out, violent, hungry, crazy and pathetic, these countries gone mad on late global capital are ripe for a 21st-century Orwellian take. A biting South Asian Animal Farm is just what we need. But if you think Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Michelle Farooqi are going to give it to you in Rabbit Rap, perish the thought immediately.

Touting itself somewhat ambitiously as “a fable for the twentieth century” and dealing with “politics, ecology, feminism and corporate greed,” as “a tale for our times” no less, Rabbit Rap begs the question: whose times? While the conditions in the book could easily apply to India or Pakistan, the facts and key elements of what constitute these contexts is missing and the authors somewhat boringly and prissily avoid any clear markers, which makes one wonder where this fable is actually located.

Moreover, a fable must have a clear purpose, a point of critique, if not a lesson to teach. Rabbit Rap has none of these. Indeed, the end is so unbelievably banal that one wonders what the whole fuss was about to begin with. Of the claims: politics is dealt with predictably; ecology somewhat obviously; feminism, not at all; and corporate greed, well, there’s not much you can do with corporate greed except show it as corporate greed.

The mind-numbing story is of one terribly boring and pathetically-unsuccessful rabbit called Hab, who tries to ride the neo-liberal corporate wave transforming agriculture. Hab is thwarted by family, friend and foe. The one element of horror that runs like a thread through the book somewhat monotonously is that of greed and more greed, and is espoused by practically all the protagonists who are also the antagonists.

Written with a pretentious and forced energy and littered with the most appalling Enid Blyton-Brer Rabbit-type illustrations (by Michelle Farooqi), one labours through the book with its wincingly bad poetry and embarrassingly juvenile rap song centrepiece, only to be left feeling confused about to whom this book is addressed and to what end it was written.

Should it have been a Puffin book for children (who would doubtless not understand the overwrought English and be bored by it? Perhaps it was intended for young adults (who might be a little more informed about the world around them through it at best and be bored at worst)? Or is it for toddlers who may look at the illustrations and laugh if adults wove a slapstick comedy story around them?

While it is one thing to say that everyone is complicit with the neo-liberal regimes and their fallouts in South Asia, it is quite another to put organic farmers on the same plane as corporate fertiliser and genetically modified producer companies, and to put scheming old women in families and duplicitous femme fatales on par with feminists. It is not clear who the objects of the Farooqis’ critiques are (apart from everyone) and as the contrived narrative moves into more and more mindless tiers of meaningless complication, it becomes clear that not much thought has gone into this fable, apart from some half-baked and mindless cynicism.

Buy this book for someone you really hate. Or whose children you really despise. And listen to ‘Rabbit Run’ by Eminem instead, which will give you insights into the problems with the authors of this book.