But in all honesty, would you call it a mistake? No. Now, if after the interrogation it turns out that no, he really wasn’t going to do it, that we were wrong, what would you do? You would let him go, obviously. Let’s say we got someone who we thought was going to blow up the Army House. “Let’s say you caught somebody who wasn’t really a threat to national security. That plot concerns Pakistan Air Force Junior Officer Ali Shigri’s quixotic quest to understand his father’s suicide, a quest that leads him by labyrinthine paths into the acquaintance of an eccentric cast of misfits and eventually into the orbit of General Zia-ul-Haq, a deeply ambiguous figure and the novel’s best, most Falstaffian creation.įamily and the bonds of friendship therefore form large parts of the book’s matter, but the true heart of A Case of Exploding Mangoes is wry and penetrating social commentary, always delivered with exquisite care (and quite often with the Bush administration’s misdeeds hovering in the background), as in Fort Commander Major Kiyani’s unwittingly damning military double-speak: The author of this mordant and extremely smart debut novel is a graduate of the Pakistan Air Force who now works as a journalist, and from that unusual background has grown a book that is as wise as it is silly, whose grimness is always offset by gallows humor, and whose plot, not inconsequentially, will have you reading compulsively to the end.
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