Entertaining ... The events of Rebel English Academy are often grim — rape, murder and torture, with a pair of pliers going to work on a toenail — but the tone throughout is light and even buoyant. That’s the book’s charm, and also its limitation ... But a familiar pleasure is still a pleasure, and the book is alive throughout with a sense of death’s-head mischief. It won’t keep you thinking, but that bit about the pliers will make you both wince and grin.
Mr. Hanif has struggled to rebottle the lightning of his brilliant 2008 satire, A Case of Exploding Mangoes ... Rebel English Academy reprises the excoriating humor of that debut, but only erratically.
Hanif’s prickly new novel confirms his standing as one of south Asia’s most unnervingly funny and subversive voices ... Smart, taut and electrifying, the tale fuses slapstick and the fun of a cat-and-mouse thriller with the serious reckoning work of a state-of-the-nation novel.
Hanif's cleverly plotted fourth novel opens in 1979 at the inauspicious moment Pakistan's former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is executed on the orders of the military. ... A wildly entertaining drama brimming with opportunists.
Farcical and nightmarish ... The conclusion is somewhat abrupt, but Hanif strikes a successful balance between the darkly humorous and the deadly serious ... An unsparing view into human depravity.
