IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE a society in which young men might find it unremarkable to be flying fast jets before learning to drive. California could conceivably do it in, say, 50 years' time, but only if climate change turns out to be a hoax. North Korea in a national emergency? East Germany circa 1970?

In Pakistan in the 1980s it actually happened. Mohammed Hanif, fresh from his parents' farm in the Punjab and barely an adult himself, had not been in command of any land-born vehicle more powerful than a bicycle when, high over Karachi, he took control of an American-built T-37 trainer in the colours of the Pakistan Air Force and vomited into his oxygen mask.

He didn't like flying much. The newspaper ad that had induced him to approach the Air Force had made the training seem “like an incredibly exciting thing to do”. It turned out not to be. It was nine parts square-bashing to one part flying and even that was “hard work without any interest”. He had terrible eustachian tube trouble, and quickly learnt that “if you throw up into those oxygen masks you are truly f***ed.”

Hanif the tousled metropolitan journalist - for that is what he now is - giggles extravagantly. That he was a flyer at all, he adds, has made it into the publicity material for his dazzling first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, only because publicists need stories to tell about authors who in reality “are just boring journalists like you and me”.

At this I'm brought up short, not because of the shared slight but because his flying is actually entirely relevant to any discussion of his book. It sets the surreal tone and provides a pleasing aerobatic sequence halfway through (Hanif's aerial barfing experience is fully deployed). It is what brings the protagonist and his best friend together for shared torment, poetry and eroticism in an elite Air Force barracks. More broadly, the flying provides a getaway plane for the friend, whose disappearance drives the plot, and serves as Hanif's entrée into the top tier of Pakistan's frighteningly unhinged military government in the age of General Zia ul-Haq (left).

It does not spoil the story to add that Hanif takes readers where no fiction writer of any nationality has taken them before: into the corkscrewing C-130 Hercules in which General Zia and the US Ambassador to Pakistan at the time died in a spectacular and still unexplained crash on August 12, 1988; and, with the help of a monosyllabic doctor and a rubber glove, up Zia's inflamed and excrucicating rectum.

“It will probably offend a couple of people,” Hanif allows with magnificent understatement. “Maybe the families...” He is referring to the families of General Zia and General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, General Zia's intelligence chief, who also looms large in the book and whose son was a near-permanent feature of Pakistan's Government until this year.

In fact it has already offended more than a couple of people. “I was probably quite naive,” Hanif says, implausibly. “There are not too many Zia-lovers left in Pakistan and friends and colleagues who've lived and worked there - some have read it and seem to think it's all right; no big deal, nothing saying you can't write stuff like this.” But mainstream Pakistani publishers have begged to differ. None of them have dared to print the book. A Karachi news magazine for which Hanif once worked was enthusiastic and planned to publish it as a one-off, but its chosen printer took the trouble to read it before switching on the presses and at the last minute decided against.

So, like The Gulag Archipelago, A Case of Exploding Mangoes will debut outside its author's home country. He doesn't seem too bothered. London has been his adopted home for a decade and seems more likely than Islamabad to receive his book in the spirit that he intends.

More than an up-yours to the regime he left behind, it's an evocation of a resolutely crazy time and place in which a military dictator with a pencil moustache worthy of Grandpa Potts was falling hard for fundamentalism in search of his legacy while also serving as Washington's chief ally in its proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Hence a terrific scene in which the doomed American ambassador is dragged from his fortified residence late at night by a phonecall from General Zia because Bill Casey, the legendary cold warrior and CIA chief, and Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Interior Minister, have just raced each other to Islamabad from Riyadh in their respective private jets, and they want company. Later, we encounter a thriving civil engineer named Osama bin Laden at a July 4 barbeque at the US Embassy. Imagined? Yes. Conceivable? Absolutely.

This is such fertile territory for fiction that you wonder why it hasn't been ploughed more often. “I just went with what I knew,” says Hanif, who is much less rakish and insolent than his narrator, and much more the self-effacing workaholic that you might expect to find holding down the job of head of the BBC World Service's Urdu service - which he does - even as he skewers the icons of contemporary history after long days in Bush House. “I was trying to capture the period and at the same time tell a story which you want to keep reading. I aimed to write a thriller with jokes.”

It's certainly funny. It's also a long sigh of frustration.

When he moved to London in 1996 there was, he says, “a consensus among political pundits in Pakistan that you could not have more martial law, that you could not have another dictatorship. This was the view of senior journalists, colleagues of mine, regardless of their political leanings. And look what happened. This guy [Pervez Musharraf, whom Hanif has dissed in a New York Times comment piece as a “garden variety dictator”] came in and he's basically still there.

“For 9½ years Musharraf was the all-powerful, slightly macho version of General Zia, doing exactly the same things but in reverse, trying to undo what Zia had done, and making the same mistakes. General Zia was basically the godfather of modern, multinational jihad. Before him, we didn't have it. And now Musharraf is going around picking up jihadists in the name of Allah and sending them to Guantanamo.” He laughs again, but ruefully. “So I think there's a lot of anger that might have fed into the book.”

Hanif left the Air Force a month after General Zia's death. He then spent seven years as a journalist in Pakistan before joining the BBC. In all it has taken 17 years - though only two years' actual writing - for his experiences as a cadet to percolate through his anger over Pakistan's permanent political crisis and produce this book.

With Musharraf now shorn of his army uniform and most of his power, Hanif hopes to return to Karachi as a correspondent. Does that mean a London novel will eventually follow? I do hope so. No politician's rectum will be safe.

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