The Spinner’s Tale – A Review

Another Pakistani thriller by Omar Shahid Hamid, The Spinner’s Tale is a tale apart from ‘The Prisoner’, the first novel by the author. The Spinner’s Tale is a story spun from the portraiture of three school friends and the spin their lives take…

The story begins in Karachi’s prestigious school where three best friends start their life journey. Eddy and Sana both move abroad for further studies whereas Ahmed Sufi is left in Pakistan in a local university where he joins a political party. Thereupon the personal storms in his life maneuver him to a jihadi movement which he becomes a part of, and serves in both Afghanistan and Indian occupied Kashmir. Until his stay in the UK he still seems like a hero of the story but thereafter his metamorphosis into a killer who kills with alacrity and a genius which is hard to crack by the law enforcement agencies is something the reader finds hard to grasp especially since his personality is in stark contrast to his previous deportment.

At the end of the story, I still find it hard to believe and relate to the central character’s last homicide before he escapes again. A reverse swing no doubt if one uses the cricket terminology to describe the turn of events. It not only takes all wickets but even the most endearing characters in the novel and the reader by surprise.

The depiction of the turn of events and the central characters through a series of letters lends a very lucid and personal touch to the whole story. The character of the SP in-charge of Shaikh Uzair, Omar Abbasi, is developed from the very beginning of the story, someone who believes in merit and hard work in his profession, against a back drop of encountering the rich elite who never consider him their equal. This depiction makes his character seem very life like and relatable. Some aspects in the book though, are too fantastic even for a fictional narrative for e.g. how Shaikh Uzair Ahmed Sufi manages to sweet talk two policemen into killing the Superintendent, but at this point in the story the reader is so shell shocked by the turn of events that the threshold level of noticing the threads in the yarn of the tale has all but diminished. Omar’s frank style of narrative is not without its witty humor for e.g.:

“…a burger is someone who is totally out of touch with the local scene, a ‘wannabe gora’ you know, someone who is so westernized that they only eat burgers as compared to salan roti”.

An engrossing read; leaves your mind spinning at the end.