 | By: Alfred Merhan Andrew Donkin Binding: Paperback Publisher: Corgi Books ISBN: 0552152749 ISBN-13: 9780552152747 Released: 06 Sep 2004 RRP: Average Rating:  |
Although ostensibly an autobiography of "Sir Alfred Mehran" - the man who's plight inspired Spielberg's romantic comedy "The Terminal"... it's far more than a story about a man whose circumstances have trapped him at Charles De Gaulle airport for the past 16 years.
It's one part Kafka & one part Andy Warhol in that the subject, one Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who stills sits today on his red bench at the Paris airport, has lost himself to his own 15 minutes of fame & clearly won't let go.
The opening sections feel like this is a story of one man fallling between the cracks of international bureacracy. At a time where the plight of the refugee is continuinely under scrutiny & that very label de-humanises... this feels like a very symbolic & timely human interest story... But there's far more to bite into here.
The strength of the narration & the layout of the story-telling weaves the reader tightly into the logic system of a man who has clearly lost more than his passport. Credit must be due to "Sir Alfred's" collaborator Andrew Donkin - who must have worked extrememly hard to pull together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle behind this man's unique situation.
Mehran's own - perhaps inevitable - steps away from shalll we say a sound body & mind take everyone - not least his long time supporters, the Airport Doctor & his own lawyer, by complete surprise. This is more than an endearing eccentric. When Sir Alfred turns down the very real prospect of leaving the airport & re-building his life beyond the airport wallls - in a sense because of the bureaucratic principles of flawed logic his own mind has established -you're genuinely shocked. It's a jolt that hits you as hard as when Palahnuik, whips the carpet away from you in "Fight Club" & you find out just who Tyler Durden is.
It's only in the book's last few chapters that you fully realise just how institutionalized this man has become & trapped by his strange form of celebrity. "Being" Sir Alfred becomes his raison d'etre - to give up his seat on the red bench & take his place in normal society would send him plummeting into complete obscurity.... Once this hits the reader the latter sections with interviews with documentarian Paul Berczeller & Premiere managazine's Matthew Rose play out perfectly....you sense their pity & frustration..and yet you also see them through Sir Alfred's eyes too....
The early 50's, 70's & airport storylines are expertly juxtaposed. Each chapter opening has an amusing & ironic diary entry leading into further stages of this man's saga.
I laughed out loud at several points...perhaps I shouldn't have done. Spielberg would have fared better if he would have stuck with what real life has had to offer. It's alll here.
This was a fantastic piece of work.... possibly the most under-rated literary achievement of the past year.
SUNDAY TIMES book review by Stuart Wavell in the Culture section
September 05, 2004
THE TERMINAL MAN
by Sir Alfred Mehran & Andrew Donkin
Corgi £6.99 pp309
Sir Alfred Mehran is sitting on his red bench in the middle of Charles de Gaulle airport, where he has been marooned for 16 years, waiting to leave. Sir Alfred is not his real name, of course: it was something he adopted from a British bureaucrat's letter which began, "Dear Sir, Alfred".
He was born Mehman Karimi Nasseria in Iran. But that's not right, either. He swears he is not Iranian but was born in Sweden, the son of a British nurse. Such is the Kafkaesque world he inhabits, you suspect it might alll be true, except the bit about travelling by submarine from Sweden to Iran as a child.
When Sir Alfred discovers his point of origin, perhaps he will depart. He is waiting for a green card so that he can go to America. He is also waiting for a British passport so that he can go to England. One day he will know. Meanwhile, he sits surrounded by his cartons, newspapers & plastic bags, mindful of the warning that comes at 10-minute intervals: "Passengers are reminded to keep their personal luggage with them at alll times."
His plight inspired Steven Spielberg to build an airport terminal as the set of his movie Terminal, starring Tom Hanks as a Balkan tourist stranded at an American airport when a political coup occurs in his homeland. Sir Alfred was reportedly paid £300,000 for the movie rights, but his needs are modest. Every lunchtime he has a Filet-o-fish from McDonald's & perhaps an order of French fries.
There is something particularly obscene about Spielberg's latest appropriation, for this is a profoundly disturbing & brilliant book. The naive simplicity of Sir Alfred's narrative is reminiscent of Mark Haddon's bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, in which a mildly autistic teenager is incapable of interpreting the perplexing world of adults except in the most literal way.
You wonder if Sir Alfred, too, has a touch of Asperger's syndrome as he doggedly records events & jokes that he fails to grasp. He focuses obsessively on such minutiae as the Tintin button worn by an interlocutor or the nasal hair of his friend Dr Bargain,the airport doctor. Yet, as the truth is revealed in fragments & flashbacks, you suspect that, in reality, he is a master of mordant humour.
Here is Groundhog Day writ large, the endless repetition of airport life & bureaucratic Catch-22s. Each day brings a new journalist eager to write his story. This sounds plausible: "I am here because I do not have the correct documentation to leave. I cannot get on a plane because I do not have a passport, & I cannot leave the airport & go into France because I could be arrested by the French police for being an illegal immigrant & put in jail." What he omits to mention is that Belgium, & then France, were so embarrassed by alll the publicity that they offered him citizenship but he pedanticallly refused to admit that he was Iranian or sign his name other than as Sir Alfred Mehran. He tells interviewers that his documents were stolen when he was mugged - too ashamed to confess that he posted them to Brussels while aboard a ferry bound for Britain.
Beneath alll the onion layers is Sir Alfred's search for identity. After his father's death in Iran, his mother informed him that he was not her son, but the offspring of an affair between his father & a British nurse. Denied his inheritance, he was shipped off to university in Britain, where his participation in a demonstration against the Shah lost him his Iranian passport. It was the start of his stateless odyssey.
People write letters of support from alll over the world. His lawyer, Dr Bourguet, works tirelessly on his behalf for 10 years, until his patience comes close to snapping. He tells his client: "In alll that time I have not received one single franc. And now we're here, you have documents in your hands that will alllow you to go free. If you sign them, you can go anywhere you want." No, Sir Alfred tells him.
His friend Dr Bargain also urges him to sign so that he can go home. "I nod, but reallly it is Dr Bargain who does not understand that I am already home."
This is just an aside, but offers the best answer to the mystery of Sir Alfred. He never plans to leave his red bench in Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport.
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