The Late Dictator

Reviewed By ROBERT MACFARLANE

A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES
By Mohammed Hanif. 323 pp.
Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

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 DeLillo's "Libra" (1988) and James Ellroy's "American Tabloid" (1995): all are fictions plotted by men about men plotting to murder other men.

Mohammed Hanif's exuberant first novel, "A Case of Exploding Mangoes," extends this tradition of assassination fiction and shifts it east to Pakistan. The death at its center is that of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988.

Zia's fate is one of Pakistan's two great political mysteries, the other being the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The
established facts concerning his death are as follows. That on Aug. 17, 1988, after inspecting a tank demonstration in the
Punjab, Zia boarded a C-130 Hercules - "Pak One" - to fly back to Islamabad. That he was accompanied on board by a number of his senior army generals, as well as by the American ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel. That shortly before takeoff, crates of mangoes were loaded onto the plane. That shortly after takeoff, the C-130 began to fly erratically, alternately dipping and rising: a flight phenomenon known to aviation experts as
"phugoid." And that the plane crashed soon after, killing all on board.

Theories as to the cause of the crash have ranged from simple machine failure to the idea that one of the mango crates
contained a canister of nerve gas, which, when dispersed by the plane's air-conditioning system, killed both pilots. Among those many groups or persons suspected of being behind the assassination - if assassination it was - are the C.I.A.,
Mossad, the K.G.B., Murtaza Bhutto (Benazir's brother) and Indian secret agents, as well as one of Zia's right-hand men,
Gen. Aslam Beg.

"A Case of Exploding Mangoes" is set in the months before and the days after the crash. Far from coming to a conclusion about the cause of Zia's death, Hanif gleefully thickens the stew of conspiracy theories, introducing at least six other possible suspects, including a blind woman under sentence of death, a Marxist-Maoist street cleaner, a snake, a crow, an army of tapeworms and a junior trainee officer in the Pakistani Air Force named Ali Shigri, who is also the novel's main narrator.

Ali is irreverent, lazy and raspingly sardonic, and his obvious fictional predecessor is Joseph Heller's Yossarian. Indeed, like "Catch-22," "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" is best understood as a satire of militarism, regulation and piety. 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. Among them are Lieutenant Bannon, known as Loot, a languorous American drill instructor who douses himself in Old Spice, and Uncle Starchy, the squadron's laundryman, who - as we witness in a fine scene - self-medicates with snake venom, using a live krait as his syringe. The academy cadets, meanwhile, are so maddened by celibacy that they have sex with holes in their mattresses, and so erotically sensitized that copies of Reader's Digest circulate as substitutes for pornographic magazines.

In the midst of all this lunacy is Ali Shigri: sane, if not entirely so, and bent on revenge. Ali is convinced that his father, Col. Quli Shigri, was killed on the orders of General Zia. By way of retribution, Ali develops an intricate assassination plot, which involves Loot Bannon, Starchy's snake and "Baby O" Obaid. Baby O is Ali's best friend and occasional lover. His idea of relaxation is to watch "The Guns of Navarone" while wearing Poison perfume, and he occasionally imagines himself to be the avian hero of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull."The novel cuts cleverly between Shigri's self-told story of his assassination plans and third-person scenes from the last months of the man he is trying to murder, General Zia. Zia's depiction is one of the book's great achievements. Hanif summons all his satirical disdain for this pious and violent man, whose years of power have left him "fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia." At morning prayer one day, Hanif writes, Zia "broke into violent sobs. The other worshipers continued with their prayers; they were used to General Zia crying during his prayers. They were never sure if it was due to the intensity of his devotion, the matters of state that occupied his mind or another tongue-lashing from the first lady."

The jokes start early in "A Case of Exploding Mangoes," and they keep on coming. There are times when the novel feels just a touch too fond of its own one-liners. Satire is, after all, a comic mode that asks to be taken seriously. Certainly, this
novel doesn't have the sustained black anger of "Catch-22," a book that - as an early reviewer observed - seemed to have been "shouted onto paper." But there are shocking scenes in Hanif's novel, and the shock they deliver is greater because they occur as interludes to the comedy. One subplot involves Zainab, a blind woman who is to be stoned to death for adultery, even though this alleged offense occurred while she was being gang-raped. Shigri himself is arrested and incarcerated in a torture center in Lahore Fort. From his cell, he listens to the screams of other prisoners being branded with Philips irons, and communicates through a hole in the wall with a man who has been in solitary confinement for nine years.

During Shigri's time in Lahore, it emerges that his father was responsible for converting the fort into a torture center. "Nice work, Dad," Shigri observes wryly. "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" is full of such topsy-turvy moments or incidents of farcical reversal. Absurdity operates as a scalable quality in Hanif's vision of the world: it is visible in tiny details and
geopolitical shifts alike. The largest of these reversals concerns America's foreign-policy relationship with radical Islam. For as Hanif reminds us, America enthusiastically collaborated with General Zia to finance, train and supply the Afghan mujahideen in their insurgency against the Russians during the 1980s. It was Zia who permitted the shipment of American arms and billions of American dollars to the rebels, and who allowed the border regions of Pakistan to be used by them as a haven and training base.

Hanif has written a historical novel with an eerie timeliness. It arrives as NATO troops battle the Taliban insurgency in
Afghanistan; as General Musharraf fights Islamic extremism within his own country; as Pakistan assimilates yet another
unsolved assassination; and as the menace of Al Qaeda persists worldwide. The most darkly funny scene in "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" imagines a Fourth of July party in Islamabad in 1988, hosted by Arnold Raphel. The American guests dress up in flowing turbans, tribal gowns and shalwar kameez suits, by way of ridiculous homage to the Afghan fighters. Among the invited guests is a young bearded Saudi known as "OBL," who works for "Laden and Co. Constructions." As OBL moves through the throng, various people stop to greet him and chat. Among them is the local C.I.A. chief who, after swapping a few words, bids him farewell: "Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up."

Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
His new book, "The Wild Places," will be published this month.