When the Apocalypse Takes a Day Off

How the grim family saga The Iranian Diary evolved from an icy techno-thriller into a global farce—and why that’s the best thing that could have happened to the genre.

In contemporary literature, there is an unspoken rule: if you begin writing a serious drama about a nuclear threat, you must end it with either catharsis or ash. The author of this cycle breaks this rule with the grace of a card sharp.

If you have read the first three novellas of The Iranian Diary (Isfahan, Shiraz, Fordo), you know Yuri Melnikov as a master of psychological noir. He virtuoso-immersed us in the world of the Iranian atomic program, where love is measured in half-lives and family reunions take place in the crosshairs of intelligence services. It was prose of the highest caliber: smart, tragic, and hopelessly serious.

But the concluding novella of the tetralogy, Operation “Stray Dog”, executes an unexpected pirouette: the author takes his heroes—the exhausted physicist Zahra, her intelligence-officer husband Amirkhan, their daughters, and the sinister General Alavi—and hurls them from the stage of a Greek tragedy into the set of a farce à la Dr. Strangelove or The Death of Stalin, turning a monumental drama into an uproariously funny and terrifyingly plausible satire in the spirit of Tom Sharpe and Kurt Vonnegut.

From Tragedy to Absurdity

To understand the scale of the author’s intent, one must look back.

The cycle began with Isfahan—a sterile, claustrophobic thriller where plasma physics served as a metaphor for human relationships, and the protagonist, Zahra Mousavi, lived in a quantum superposition between treason and patriotism.

Then came Shiraz—an intellectual prequel exploring the roots of evil. Here, the author brilliantly dissected conspiratorial thinking, showing how the neoreactionary ideas of the «Dark Enlightenment” can become a virus that destroys generations.

The third part, Fordo, brought the leaden sky of the post-apocalypse crashing down on the reader. It was a family drama on the ruins of the world, where survival became the only morality. It seemed the story had reached its logical, tragic conclusion.

But the author decided otherwise. In Stray Dog, he changes optics. Instead of mourning the (ostensibly) destroyed world, he decides to laugh at it. And this laughter turns out to be scarier than tears.

Doomsday Vacuum Cleaners

The plot of Stray Dog is built around the launch of a North Korean nuclear missile assembled from stolen blueprints and chips harvested from robot vacuum cleaners. The missile, guided by an overheated Xiaomi artificial intelligence, decides not to fly to Washington but instead embarks on a tour of Eurasia and Africa.

This narrative device allows the author to gather all the key players at one table (albeit a virtual one): from soju-swilling generals in Pyongyang to vegan pacifists at MIT, from cynical Russian military bureaucrats to Ukrainian mercenaries in the Sahara.

The narrative style mutates here. If Isfahan inherited the chill of Le Carré, and Fordo the magical realism of Márquez, then Stray Dog is pure gonzo absurdity. Generals saving their pornography collections instead of the country; an American president for whom a round of golf is more important than Armageddon; an Iranian family plotting an escape to Tel Aviv to join the brother of the Iranian nuclear program’s developer—these are all pieces of one insane mosaic.

Yuri Melnikov deconstructs the myth of the “competence of evil.” In his universe, the world is ruled not by powerful Masons (whom the characters in Shiraz feared so much), but by total, all-consuming stupidity multiplied by chance. The world is saved not by James Bonds, but by World of Tanks gamers and bureaucrats who are simply too lazy to press the red button.

The Evolution of Heroes

The most amazing thing about this cycle is how he shepherds his characters through the genre shift while preserving their integrity.

Zeinab, the youngest daughter, grows from a girl listening to K-pop on the threshold of the apocalypse into a cynical MIT engineer trying to defend her “personal boundaries” in the face of nuclear war. Her dialogues with her colleague Kevin are a magnificent satire on modern Western ethics.

Amirkhan and Zahra, having passed through the hell of betrayal and war, find peace in the finale through the simple acceptance of the absurd. The business card for an Israeli falafel shop in Zahra’s purse is perhaps the most touching symbol of the victory of life over ideology.

Assodala Alavi, the “grey cardinal” of the entire story, transforms into a tragicomic figure—an old spy flying across the ocean to the daughter of his enemy-friends, simply because he has nowhere else to fly.

Laughter Through the Geiger Counter

The language remains magnificent but changes tonality. Melancholic metaphors (“the angry snow of the Zagros mountains, cutting the face like the sand of the Dasht-e Kavir desert”) are replaced by biting aphorisms:

“Gravity, that heartless bitch, colluded with gastronomy.”
“Apparently, reception is bad in hell, that’s why he’s calling from North Korea.”
“We can’t shoot down the missile without hurting the feelings of environmentalists.”
“If the world blows up, Nature will still find a reviewer.”

Verdict

The Iranian Diary tetralogy is a unique literary experiment. The author began with the question “Who is to blame?” and ended with the answer “No one, because everyone is an idiot.”

And this novella is the perfect postscript to the entire cycle. It is an iodine pill that must be taken after the radiation of the first three stories. It doesn’t cure, but it allows you to live on.

The author tells us: yes, the world is scary. Yes, we are ruled by idiots. Yes, we will all die. But until that happens, let’s at least have a laugh. Because, as it turns out in the finale, sometimes even the Apocalypse takes a day off so as not to interrupt a good game of golf.

And of course, there is the family—which, like the Mafia, is ready to burn the world for its own, but in the end saves it, because in a burnt world, there is nowhere to drink tea with cardamom.

A must-read for those who are tired of fearing the news and want to start laughing at it… And for the author—a golden putter from the President.

Levi Zeigarnik, specially for חדשות מהארץ