A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

Jonathan Cape

KRAIT venom is a deadly neurotoxin that kills seven out of 10 victims.
But that's not what laundryman Uncle Starchy tells Under Officer Ali Shigri in A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
It's a stoner, he says. It's only deadly if it touches metal. Then it will kill an elephant. First the elephant dances, then he drags his feet, then he dies.
Shigri has reason to be venomous. His father, Pakistan president General Zia Ul-Haq's sidekick and security boss, committed suicide.
Like a lot of Zia's friends who got a little too powerful, Shigri senior died suddenly.
In this tremendously entertaining novel, depiction of the fictional Zia steers close to his real-life counterpart, though perhaps more loveable.
A religious maniac who decides that there should be no name for God but Allah, Zia bans all other names, even the pet names mothers use in children's prayers.
He's been collecting enemies throughout his career, since he hanged his predecessor, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
His generals bug his rooms. The US ambassador can't stand him. But his most dangerous enemy is a mild-mannered blind woman, awaiting stoning to death (because she can't identify her rapists, so she's obviously an adulteress).
The Maoist head of the mango producers' union is cursing him from his jail deep underground. And like every assassin, Zia is paranoid of his apprentices.
Even God is out to get him, sending him messages through the Koran.
Young Shigri, his camp friend Baby O and a CIA man brought in to teach them the famous Silent Drill are all too innocent.
As A Case of Exploding Mangoes opens, we already know that we're looking at a bunch of dead guys. Hanif's consummate skill is in showing us how the guys got dead, and making us laugh the whole way to the kill.

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Jonathan Cape

A WILY mountebank hypnotises a Scottish privateer and steals the Scot's letter of passage from Queen Elizabeth.

Using it, he persuades Akbar, the Mughal emperor who first united India, that the English queen wishes an alliance.

Across the known world, in Renaissance Italy, three lads search for the magical mandrake plant, hoping that it will be brought forth by the sperm of hanged men.

One of the boys is Niccolo Machiavelli; another, Argalia, runs away to be a mercenary, and becomes a close friend of the Mughal Akbar.

Argalia brings home a dark-eyed Indian lover, who sets Florence aflame with lust.

Rushdie's latest story is full of religious and ethical theory, woven in with hot-breathed sexual descriptions and sleight-of-hand. I found it all a bit tiresome.

The descriptions are entirely sensational. Nothing can be ordinary; everything is a thrilling scéal mór an uafás with the gasping lip-smacking of someone describing a nasty traffic accident.

And in the middle of this Sargasso Sea of colour, sparkle, wit, jokes, tortures, wisdom, episodes and one new character after another, the story sinks and drowns.

The characters are the conscious stereotypes of the fairytale: the skeletal tart with the golden heart; the magician hero with a secret in his past.

There are occasional wonderful stories, though, as when the hero is saved from a rogue elephant by the besotted prostitute who has scented him with the body odour of the elephant's imperial owner.

This is a book for those who love magical realism, and feel sure that every map has a secret key.

xxx stars