Word: bahal
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...heart of the book, dominating every page, is the narrator, MM, an intrepid Indian investigative journalist. Like his creator, MM catches top government officials deep in criminal doo-doo, dealing in drugs and arms, but the autobiography presumably ends there. Bahal pushes the concept of the antihero to the limit. MM has a voracious appetite for heavy drugs and unusual sex. The story begins with him embedded in a paratrooper brigade in the Indian army, where he figures out how to inject heroin in free fall. From that point on, he and other characters overindulge in every imaginable recreational drug...
...boiled dialogue is straight out of classic Hollywood, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Anglo-American spy spoof. If Bond and Matt Helm outrageously flout social norms, MM seems to follow an inverted morality, almost defying the reader to accept him. Yet there's something charmingly retro about Bahal's "outlaw" approach. His closest literary parallel is with the Beats: the grim, druggy surrealism of William S. Burroughs, the headlong rush of Jack Kerouac...
...suffers from some common flaws of the thriller. The love interest never rises above the level of a plot device, and the secondary characters are almost indistinguishable, with the standard complication that the good guys are just as bad as the bad guys. Yet on his first time out, Bahal has succeeded admirably at the genre's main requirement by creating a complex and compelling (if frequently repellent) protagonist...
...Aniruddha Bahal...
...True to its type, Bunker 13 has an old-fashioned surprise ending, which restores a coherent morality. Bahal's plot twist is certainly surprising, but it leaves some gaping inconsistencies in its wake, which can't even be hinted at without spoiling the fun. And make no mistake, getting there is exhilarating, ingenious...