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A writer’s take on Pakistan but it’s all fiction

A first novel by a London-based Pakistani journalist is being hailed as this summer’s most impressive literary debut with critics on both sides of the pond drooling over its “exuberance”, “sardonic wit” and “satirical inversions.” And there’s a reason for the hype.

Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Jonathan Cape £12.99) arrives at a time when Pakistan is a front-page story. And we all know why. So, it is a good time to be a Pakistani writer just as there was a time when it helped to be an Indian writer: remember how many mediocrities slipped through the net when Western publishers looking for the newly-opened markets in India were willing to sign up anyone with an Indian name?

Having said that it is an impressive debut in its own right, especially for an Urdu journalist (Hanif is head of BBC’s Urdu service) producing his first major work in English. The book, starting with its subject (the death of a military dictator in a mysterious air crash against the backdrop of a growing tide of Islamic fundamentalism, murderous inter-services rivalries, political skullduggery, American interference, etc) ticks all the right boxes: crisp prose though often marred by a touch of exhibitionism with too many clever one-liners and cocky swear-words; good pace; sharply-etched characters; and nail-biting dramatic tension.

Hanif, clearly, has an eye for detail but often he pushes it to the point of distraction, especially, when describing things that he is knowledgeable about — like going on and on about army drills; or Hercules C130 aircraft; G3 rifles; and M1 Abram tanks.

You, see he trained in the Pakistani army. So, he knows all about aircraft, rifles and tanks. But must he regurgitate everything he learnt at the Academy?

The book has been touted as a story about the 1988 air crash which killed Zia-ul-Haq, several of his senior generals and the then American ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel. Though dressed up as a sort of a literary whodunit it is a political spoof — a savage satire on the unholy trinity of generals, spooks and mullahs who have run Pakistan for most of its 60 years with the overt or covert backing of Washington. In Hanif’s book, the CIA man in the region is on first-name basis with Zia and has a habit of dropping in at Army House at will to humour or hector the dictator —depending on what his orders are.

God knows, what conspiracies, what plots Zia and his American friends get up to when they are together. And, completing the web of intrigue and backstabbing, is the army and the ISI constantly scheming against each other (and against the General) while pretending to be serving the nation.

Hanif also takes potshots at Pakistani nationalistic jingoism, religious fundamentalism and the hypocrisy of its ruling elite. Once, jokingly, Hanif described himself to me as a “Pakistani Pakistani” making the distinction between himself (a native-born Pakistani) and the “muhajirs.” So, what we have here is an “insider insider’s” account of Pakistan, even if it is all fiction.

Critics say Hanif appears to have been heavily influenced by Joseph Heller’s Catch -22. (I detected echoes of his compatriot Mohsin Hamid whose own first novel Moth Smoke was a triumph and whom Hanif hugely admires.) One British reviewer called the book “as grimly, intelligently comic as if written by an Asian Joseph Heller.” And the New York Times noted that the “obvious fictional predecessor” of the book’s narrator — an “irreverent, lazy and sardonic” junior trainee officer in Pakistani air force — is “Joseph Heller’s Yossarian.”

“Much of Hanif’s novel is set in the Pakistani Air Force Academy an institution staffed by crazies and incompetents who could have walked straight out of Heller’s novel,” it wrote.

And as for its theme, there was nothing novel about that either. “Assassination has long been an appealing subject for male novelists. Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1939), Richard Condon’s Manchurian Candidate (1959), Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal (1971), Don De Lillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995): all are fictions plotted by men about men plotting to murder other men,” it pointed out.

It’s a view also echoed by others. Priyamvada Gopal, a Cambridge academic, wrote in The Guardian that Hanif’s novel was “shaped as much by the subcontinent’s fascination with history and historical figures as by political thrillers in the tradition of Forsyth and Le Carré.”

For her, it didn’t work as “a serious novel of Pakistan’s difficult recent history… despite its ambitions.”

“In the end, what we get is a story about a few bad men rather than a far-reaching and complicated political alliance whose global legacy shapes our lives. …. The incisive work that remains unwritten inside Hanif’s promising novel can only emerge when we become more demanding readers of other places. In this case that would be a Pakistan not reducible to generals, jets and jihadis,” she argued.

That however is a deeply academic view and should not put off ordinary readers looking for something more substantial than airport pulp.

Meanwhile, beware of literary incestuousness. In a leading British magazine, Hanif’s novel was reviewed (more a hymn, than a review) by one of his close friends who is also incidentally mentioned in “Acknowledgements”!

***

Talking about first–time writers , Ashish Jaiswal, a post-graduate Indian student of Oxford University, has just written his maiden novel and is lobbying for pre-publication publicity.

In an email he tells me that that the novel, True Dummy - A Fable of Existence will be published by Rupa in December.

With some modesty, he writes: “By no means I am of the stature of Salman Rushdie or Kiran Desai, nor as charming as Chetan Bhagat to be the ‘largest selling Indian author in the history.’ I am a simple storyteller who wants to use ‘writing’ (or for that matter ‘movies’) to stand somewhere in the middle of the aforesaid two categories.”

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