This fanciful piece of fiction is based on solid historical fact — the death in a 1988 plane crash of the Pakistan dictator General Zia ul-Haq. Dozens of different theories have been put forward over the last 20 years to explain this mysterious event. So far, though, no culprits have been collared, no satisfactory explanation provided. Depending on your point of view, the guilty parties could be the CIA, the KGB, Benazir Bhutto, the Afghans or Mossad.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a debut novel by a former Pakistan airforce pilot turned journalist and playwright, has its own theory to peddle about the crash, one involving overambitious generals and CIA operatives, plus a wandering crow, several crates of suspicious mangoes and a disgruntled airforce cadet. If this rich stew of disparate ingredients puts you in mind of Salman Rushdie, you wouldn’t be far from the truth. His work, along with that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Joseph Heller, is a low-key but persistent influence.

The novel begins with a confession of sorts by a young trainee airforce officer called Ali Shigri, who claims to have been involved in the dictator’s death. “I was the only one who boarded that plane and survived,” he boasts. The exact nature of Shigri’s complicity isn’t apparent at this stage, but his motivation as we venture back in time is soon established — the supposed suicide of his father (a shadowy army officer) and the brutal treatment meted out to Shigri himself following the disappearance of his lover and fellow cadet, Obaid.

As the novel begins its countdown to Zia’s death, Shigri’s story of maltreatment alternates with events within the president’s inner circle. Zia himself, a bumbling figure of almost comic-book ineptitude, has had premonitions about his demise, and is locked away behind rings of guards, feverishly consulting the Koran as to his fate. His closest advisers, meanwhile, jostle for influence, swear undying loyalty to their leader and plot tirelessly against each other.

Despite the space Mohammed Hanif devotes to his sometimes ingenious plot, it becomes clear over the course of the novel that establishing the validity of his theory is not his main priority. Instead, he seems more interested in taking satirical swipes at a number of rather large and obvious targets — Pakistan’s political system, its military, American meddling in the region, local religious zeal. To make the parallels with today more obvious, there is even a walk-on part for someone called OBL, a Saudi businessman looking for the limelight and being courted in a rather half-hearted fashion by the Americans.

Some fuss has been generated about this novel in the lead-up to publication — Hanif is, after all, a graduate of the University of East Anglia creative writing programme, and his subject has unmistakable modern resonances. Sadly, his book feels only half-formed, an early draft that should have been taken away for serious surgery. The plot simply isn’t defined enough, the characterisation isn’t rich enough, the structure isn’t robust enough, and, above all, the satire really isn’t sharp enough to carry the reader or the book. Even the magical realism introduced at various points in the narrative feels half-hearted, while the attempts at political analysis can sometimes be embarrassingly naive. Hanif may show undoubted promise as a writer, but he really should have allowed himself more time to develop this novel properly.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

Cape £12.99 pp295

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