A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES
Mohammed Hanif
Jonathan Cape, $26.99, pbk
Mohammed Hanif uses a well-honed, satisfying satiric style to poke fun at the self-important, sometimes barbaric, dictatorial forces which held sway in Pakistan.
Hanif, head of the BBC's Urdu Service in London, was formerly a pilot officer in the Pakistan Air Force.
He thus can be expected, more than many writers, to have intimate knowledge of the often dark forces at work in Pakistan.
He does, in fact, inject a significant historic date into the novel: the death on August 17, 1988, of the country's military ruler, General Zia ul-Haq, in a plane crash which killed everyone on board, and the cause of which has never been revealed.
General Zia quote (in the novel): He had introduced the new laws in Pakistan "and by the grace of Allah hundreds of sinners have already been convicted: we have 200 thieves waiting for their hands to be amputated, thousands of drunkards have been lashed in public".
The novel winds its labyrinthine way through events signposted through the eyes of Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, who falls foul of superior forces and is subjected to highly demeaning, soul-sapping treatment, dungeon incarceration included.
It is a delicious story - perhaps rather too drawn out - possessed of an undertow making all too plain the malevolent forces lurking behind masks of dictatorial respectability.
Sardonic humour is one of the novel's most compelling attributes.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn from Hanif's own television interview in New Zealand that the book has achieved big sales in his native land.
That says something, perhaps, about openness in today's Pakistan.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes won for Hanif the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Best First Book Award.
His success was announced at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on May 16.
- Clarke Isaacs is a former chief of staff of the Otago Daily Times.
