Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)

There's a special joy in finding a really good book by a new novelist. I mean, not new to me, but new to the world. It's especially joyful when I haven't heard anything about the book, but picked it up more or less at random (actually, it was a gift but the person who chose it, my mum, also hadn't heard anything about it beforehand). It did win the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Europe and South Asia category, which is certainly something, but I am increasingly of the opinion that even prizes like the Booker don't predict much, quality wise. So, I wasn't expecting much when I opened it, because I'm getting awfully used to disappointing novels and this one didn't come with a recommendation. And I disliked (and still dislike) the title. A Case of Exploding Mangoes gave me a feeling that maybe the book was playing on some kind of facile exoticism. But it is not facile in any way. It is sensitive and poetic and also tough and violent and grapples with grand political historical narrative. It nestles itself within the events of final days of Pakistan's sixth president, General Zia-ul-Haq, who died in 1988 in a plane crash. Apparently the circumstances of the plane crash were never fully discovered, so the book has a lot of room to play with.

I say it nestles itself, it lives in that narrative, but it is both about the historical events and not about them. The main character is the son of a famous Pakistani general who committed suicide, and who is now a young man in the army himself. He becomes friends with a young man quite different from himself, one not at all used to military customs. Every scene leads you one step further along into the logic of the conclusion, in which the plane comes down, but it's always clear that the protagonist's inner (fictional) life is more important, for these pages, than is the fate of the government.

The literary establishment seems, at best, suspicious about historical novels, I guess because they seem conceptually so close to genre writing, what with their interest in plot and events and capitalizing on names and fascinations already present in the reader's consciousness. I think I like historical fiction about as often as I like non-historical fiction. I really enjoyed reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009; winner of the Man Booker prize) but that was more fast-paced and plot driven. It showed an amazing amount of imagination, but the imaginative bits were interstitial, inventions about what Thomas Cromwell might have been thinking the day before he arrested Thomas More, or some other historically verifiable event. Here, the connection to plot is less central. The events, though they are capital-H History and recent, to boot, are only a small part of the life of a novel. I'm not advocating for one type or the other, and I loved reading both of them, but they are very different. Wolf Hall is more of a page turner, and A Case of Exploding Mangoes is more emotionally affecting.