For those who have always wondered why we’ve never quite had satisfactory “airport thrillers” or what is often unfairly dismissed as pulp fiction set in the Indian subcontinent and its vicinity, here comes Janet Wise.
A technical writer and international development professional who has travelled extensively (Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Dubai, Palestine…) and is now based in Kabul, Wise certainly has had enough inspiration working in some of the most conflict-torn regions of the world.
In The Black Silk Road, her first novel, and what you could also deem a “(romantic) thriller”, Wise looks at the new Great Game being played out in Asia; the war for oil, not one ostensibly against terror, and sets its plot firmly within that framework.
For a first attempt, this certainly is an ambitious one. Wise paints in broad strokes even as the narrative moves from Karachi to New Delhi’s “Shantipath boulevard” and diplomatic life, to Capitol Hill, terror camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, London and even to the idyllic Mediterranean, where, finally, the hunted can rest and find sanctuary.
Cassandra is the American widow of a French journalist assassinated in Karachi in 1990. The book begins with the murder — but don’t go looking for Daniel Pearl just as yet. The protagonist is firmly the young woman, who, like her namesake, the “cursed” prophetess, has a strange case of ESP too.
Eight years later, she moves to New Delhi on a diplomatic posting and decides to fly to Pakistan one summer to finally find closure and put to rest ghosts. In come the CIA, the ISI and all the rest. Caught firmly in the midst of the Great Game for oil, the intricate links between imperial powers, politics, money and terror begin to become apparent to the till-now innocent and she must resort to subterfuge herself.
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As Cassandra finds a protector — and lover — in an influential and rich Pakistani journalist working with the BBC, it makes for a satisfactory, cross cultural love story as well. But the problem with the plot primarily lies in its convolutedness.
Too many characters and motives mar the storyline and while international politics — not to mention espionage games —can be fairly complicated in themselves, Wise could have done well to have a clearer narrative going. And since this is supposed to be a thriller, not a lesson in oil politics, a little of that much-abused term “raciness” couldn’t have hurt either.
The most enjoyable parts of the book, on the other hand, are the episodes dealing with the spies — CIA hands here — who cut lose, guided by their own personal interests (and love interests) and outsmart the might of the organisation. If it is Bond you prefer, you’ll find not one but two gentlemen who may fit the bill here.
For those who may like to read this not just at a superficial level of the whodunnit, it is interesting to look at the politics: Wise’s. While much of the Muslim world (and liberals elsewhere) have been pointing fingers at the “cleanup” in Iraq, the complicity between the US high-ups and the bin Laden family and questioning America’s very motives as it moves unilaterally against sovereign governments, Wise, an American, raised in a small farming community in Nebraska, says as much in her work of fiction.
Uncle Sam’s indictment couldn’t be any stronger. This is Michael Moore territory, almost a Fahrenheit 9/11 revisited, but with many more frills.
THE BLACK SILK ROAD
Author: Janet Wise
Publisher: Harper Collins
Price: Rs 195
Pages: 436
