James Bond is a Choirboy

In

Bunker 13, his first novel, the Indian investigative journalist Aniruddha Bahal works so hard to be shocking that it's difficult not to love the guy. He has concocted a story preposterous enough for Austin Powers, never mind James Bond, extravagantly overstuffed with sex, drugs and gore interwoven in Baroque variations. The action begins with the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir and ultimately embraces rottenness and greed on a global scale.

Bunker 13 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.

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At the 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—with no guilt or ill effect. After a night of acid or heroin, MM is fresh as a daisy and deadly as a daisy cutter, ready to set up an international arms heist, polish off a cover story about it for his magazine and have time left over for an orgy.

Twenty pages into the novel, the reader cottons on to the fact that this is a darkly bizarre fantasy world that bears superficial resemblance to the real one but obeys few of its laws. The book's strangest quality is that it has only the faintest tint or scent of India. Except for proper names, the book's vernacular and cultural references are almost entirely American, and impressively authentic at that. The hard-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.

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 fun.