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February 15, 2004
IN BRIEF
The Third World War: A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict
By Humphrey Hawksley
Pan Books. Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026. Email:
libooks@cyber.net.pk
Website:
www.libertybooks.com
Rs425 (PB) and Vanguard Books, 45 The Mall, Lahore
Tel: 042-7243783.
Email:
vbl@brain.net.pk
ISBN 0-330-49249-7
514pp. Rs395 (PB)
What sort of a place will the world we live in be ten years down the road? Given the recent events, it’s easy to be pessimistic. In his new incarnation as a novelist, former BBC correspondent Humphrey Hawksley has decided to milk this pessimism for all its worth. It would probably be unfair to accuse him of being an armageddon fetishist: if his latest offering is anything to go by, his take on the future is open to interpretation as a sort of pre-emptive strike, a stern warning against what may lie in store unless humankind mends its ways.
The Third World War offers us the worst-case scenario. More than one, in fact. And Pakistan figures prominently, chiefly as a source of conflict. That may appear to be an unfair characterization, but Hawksley’s plot is based on the premise that a post-Musharraf civilian phase will be short-lived.
The novel opens with the Indian prime minister preparing to address the Lok Sabha. The subject of his intended oration is Pakistan. But as Vasant Mehta drives up to parliament house, it comes under a well-coordinated terrorist attack, which includes a single-engine plane crashing into the building. Hundreds die, although the prime minister and his daughter survive.
Pakistan’s president, Asif Khan, calls up to condole. As children, he and Mehta were neighbours in Karachi; they know and like each other. Mehta asks Khan to drop by on his way back from Malaysia, where the latter is attending a conference. However, shortly afterwards Khan is assassinated. That turns out to be the signal for an Islamist insurgency in Southeast Asia, coordinated from Zamboanga in the Philippines by Ahmed Memed, an Arab academic who serves as the Osama bin Laden prototype — while his versatile bodyguard, Hassan Muda, is given the sort of role one would associate with, say, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Pakistan is taken over surreptitiously by the armed forces chiefs, whose apparent leader, Air Vice-Marshal Tassudaq Qureshi, loses no time in flying via China to Pyongyang, personally conveying a bunch of warheads to Park Ho, who has deposed Kim Jong-il in a quiet coup. Park has a personal axe to grind: as a child, he had watched American soldiers murder his mother in cold blood.
It would be unsporting to reveal much more about how the horror unfolds — although the book’s title and its subtitle, A Terrifying Novel of Global Conflict, are revealing enough. Suffice it to say that nuclear weapons are involved, as is a particularly virulent strain of smallpox.
The thriller borrows elements from reality, but also panders to prejudices, particularly as far as Pakistan and North Korea are concerned. The characterizations, as one would expect in a potboiler, are exceptionally weak: Mehta, Qureshi, Park and the American, Chinese, British and Russian leaders are one-dimensional figures. Perhaps not surprisingly, redeeming qualities are largely reserved for the US and Indian leaders.
For all its flaws, the novel is nonetheless a well-paced page-turner. And the only moral that could reasonably be derived from this 21st-century immorality tale is that nuclear weapons are a curse and an abomination, a scourge not only for India and Pakistan, but for all humankind. Their abolition alone won’t guarantee humanity’s long-term survival, but it would make such an outcome vastly likelier. — Mahir Ali
Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City
By John Banville Bloomsbury, London
ISBN 0 7475 6408 6
192pp. £9.99
The publishers, Bloomsbury, commission writers to produce a city in words: No photographs, no guide book stuff, just the authors’ thoughts and peregrinations. It’s a risky business but so far, (Paris, Florence, and Sydney) the results have been great — not least because the books look so good in their compact octavo format. The latest one is on Prague by the Irish writer John Banville, which more than lives up to the reputation set by the others.
Banville tells us that he had already described the city in his novel about the astronomer Kepler, so he was intrigued to see whether his description fitted the reality when he visited for the first time some years later. He was delighted to find that it did. Especially so when he gazed at that magical view across the river Vltava, along the statue crowded Charles Bridge and then upwards to the castle encrusted hill. That is the archetypal view of Prague, together with the quaint, enchanting Old Town Square with its intriguing clock tower. Here Banville watches the life-size figures emerge at chiming time. Banville reminds us that the clock was designed in 1552 half a century before Kepler had made his astounding revelations that the reverse was true.
Banville gives us the full Kepler story, painting a wonderful portrait of Prague at that time when the incredible, maniacal, melancholic Rudolf II held court in the Castle. He was the great grandson of Joanna the Mad and spent his youth in Spain with his uncle Philip II. No wonder he was a bit touched but he had a terrific intellectual curiosity and attracted all sorts of artists, scientists, alchemists, magicians and others of that ilk to Prague. Banville cleverly makes us feel that his shadow still falls over the city and colours our view of it even today.
Rudolf set a trend, for since his day Prague continued to attract and nurture a wonderful cast of characters over the centuries. Banville tells us about many of these, particularly the writers like Kafka but he misses out on the musicians, Smetena, Dvorak and Janacek. The first two of course were fervent nationalists, which should have struck a chord with the Irish Banville.
He visited Prague twice during the cold war and gives a poignant description of meeting a professor and his wife who clandestinely pass him twenty photographs for their son in America to sell to pay for his education. The photographs are by a typical Prague figure — Josef Sudek who lost an arm in the First World War and then spent the rest of his life obsessively photographing the city, attempting to capture its essential magical timelessness. There is something indefinable, ineffable about Prague which Banville returns to frequently in an effort to define the city’s peculiar ambiance.
Banville’s second cold war visit was during some serious snow when he found himself at a truly dreadful party in a dim, cold room with half a dozen people. Their weariness, boredom and restless dissatisfaction seemed to him to typify what happens to people when they are imprisoned in a vast, irresistible, wholly philistine system. — Elisabeth Davies
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