There are things to admire about this novel, however. The parallels with the present situation — war in Afghanistan, Americans running all over the place, an army man as President — are quite fun and the story is compelling and energetic.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the tale of Ali Shigri, an Air Force cadet with his own reasons for hating Zia. His account is interwoven with descriptions of events in the President’s immediate circle. A bizarre cast of characters including a hash-smoking American officer, an Air Force cadet in silk underwear (Shigri’s lover) and a laundryman with a taste for snake venom jostle for the reader’s attention. A curse-bearing crow flaps through the novel and may — or may not — play a part in the drama. There is genuine comedy, as in the meeting between Zia and Ceausescu and in the appearance of Joanne Herring and her relationship with Zia.
After a while, though, the knowing allusions pall and you begin to groan as you see the story creaking up for another set-piece. The heavy-handed account of a tall young Arab fighter at the American embassy’s Fourth of July party culminates with deadening predictability. ‘Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up’ the local CIA chief says, snubbing him as he moves off to talk business with the head of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence).
Throughout the novel the ironies come thick and fast and yet, maddeningly, Hanif fails to reveal much about the Zia years or about Pakistan. There is the occasional telling phrase, as when General Akhtar, head of the ISI, sees Zia as ‘fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia’. But these insights are few and far between. More often, the period details are distracting. If Ali Shigri, whose interest in alcohol is established early on, had known that Russian soldiers in Afghanistan were spreading boot polish on bread he would have known that they were not eating it, as he tells us, but trying to extract the alcohol from the polish.
There is a novel to be written about Pakistan’s military. But this is not it.
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