Pawan: The Flying Accountant by
Sorabh Pant
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
On one level, the more superficial level, this is a superhero fantasy featuring a Vanara (a supernatural monkey-man creature from Indian mythology,) on another level it’s a political satire that riffs on the geopolitics and the military-industrial complex of India. It’s cleverer as the latter than the former.
The story has some clunkiness, including the occasional hard to follow description and sloppy story elements (e.g. the
deus ex machina.) That said, it’s pop genre fiction and with regards sloppy story elements they’re par for the course in superhero fiction. My point being that the fact that it’s amusing and mostly readable means it hits its target, strained credulity and logical inconsistencies aside.
The humor is of the broadest range with occasional laugh-out-loud hilarity, lots of mildly amusing jokes, and a few groan-worthy lines that go down like a lead-balloon. That’s not a terrible ratio for a novel.
If you want to check out a book featuring an Indian mythology-based superhero, and you don’t mind a lot of jokes directed at political and national security apparatus leadership, this book is worth looking into.
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