Quantum Siege Brijesh Singh Blue Salt/Penguin India Pages: 246 Rs. 250 The cat-and-mouse game of international espionage Brijesh Singh’s debut novel, about a Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terror attack on Mumbai, is a rare thriller that refuses to dumb down its leading man, writes Aditya Mani Jha. ADITYA MANI JHA 12th Jul 2014 Brijesh Singh p until a couple of years ago, I had always wondered why more Indo-Pak terrorism/espionage novels aren't written. As a teen, I devoured one Frederick Forsyth after another and discovered that a whole new generation of thriller writers had milked the Cold War mirthlessly. Yes, the inscrutable Kremlin, yes, the Iron Curtain is postively blood-curdling, yes nobody wishes to die of a headshot in a bitterly cold foreign land. Unfortunately, most of these books were merely cashing in on what publishers felt was a viable formula, not about to die anytime soon. A couple of years ago, I realised that we had our own little army of Indo-Pak terrorism/espionage novels. And most of them were pretty bad; so bad that you could see the trailers in your head, the trailers for the awful movies they would make. In this, as in many other ways, Brijesh Singh's debut novel Quantum Siege is a relief. After you've finished these 250-odd pages, you know that what you've just read would make a smashing thriller; the slick, well-made kind, not something out of Ram Gopal Varma's factories. Quantum Siege begins on a breathless note, with the proverbial series of unfortunate incidents around the world. At the center of this action lies Genereal Kemal Shahbazi, an Iranian defector who's "reaping the fruits of his apostasy", away from the half-a-dozen or so international agencies hunting for him. What General Shahbazi has done is nothing new: selling state secrets at a time of war has historically been very lucrative. Only thing is, Shahbazi has got himself deep in with the sharks (switching to action-movie lingo here) and has sold more than just secrets.Because of his treachery, a nuclear weapon has fallen into the worst possible hands. With this acquisition, then, the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba has swiftly become the number one terror group in the world and it's up to the author's supercop, Rudra Pratap Singh, to save the day. The two major areas where Quantum Siege scores as a thriller are the believability of the proceedings and the personality of its Jack Bauer-like protagonist. The former is largely due to the quiet effectiveness of Singh's writing and the level of detail that he brings to proceedings, thanks to his day job: he is a Mumbai-based IPS (Indian Police Service) officer. He describes weapons with practiced ease. He has a keen understanding of subcontinental geopolitics and writes about it without sounding clunky or didactic. { After you’ve finished these 250-odd pages, you know that what you’ve just read would make a smashing thriller; the slick, well-made kind, not something out of Ram Gopal Varma’s factories. Quantum Siege is a relief, in this as in many other ways. At a few places, the line between fact and fiction is decidedly thin. Or perhaps Singh had had enough of folks dissing policemen, ridiculing them for being dumb jocks. Like his creator, Rudra Pratap Singh is an engineer by training, grown weary with having to prove his intellect over and over again in front of pompus bureaucrats. ("Are you an engineer by any chance? Not that policemen don't have any brains. Generally, they are quite unaware of technology.") At one point, Rudra says, "It did not occur to you. Raghu, because you are a policeman. We are supposed to be worse than dead dinosuars. Any existence of brilliance in us is thought to be purely accidental and unintentional." It's refreshing to see an Indian crime fiction novel that talks about scientific stuff without getting too caught up in the technical aspects, and without the segue disrupting the flow of the story. uantum Siege is also noteworthy for the fact that Rudra's key moments, despite his action hero buildup and his general Jack Bauer-ness, are not marked by an almighty hand-to-hand combat spree. Video games, coding loopholes, encryption techniques or fuzzy logic: Rudra takes it in his stride and, in fact, displays an impressive range of skills during the course of the book. (Without giving away spoilers, I'll say that the game Dungeons and Dragons has an important role to play in the plot) And in the time-honoured tradition of super-sleuths with lovable tics, Rudra is fond of telling Zen monk anecdotes, often to the frustration of his commanding officer, Commissioner Kamal Kant. Quantum Siege is part of Penguin's new Blue Salt imprint (specialising in crime/noir fiction) curated by S. Husain Zaidi, the author of Black Friday and the brilliant Mafia Queens of Mumbai. With Chetan Mahajan's Bad Boys of Bokaro Jail and now Quantum Siege, it has got off to a good start indeed. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Joomla SEO powered by JoomSEF