Review of ‘The Fix’ by Omar Shahid Hamid: Cricket with cardboard players

A confusing mix of melodrama and realism

Match-fixing, that dirty word, is actually not the villain of The Fix. But that’s to Omar Shahid Hamid’s credit, for having sussed out the underlying vice and differentiated it from the obvious crime. A sort of quasi-fiction, The Fix will reveal, to whoever can read it without over-expectation, that ambition always entails corruption, defiance of which demands a lethal degree of heroism that no one should sign up for.

It’s a topic that’s all too close to home for cricket-lovers. We all know about the existence of match-fixing — that symptom of a world where renown reaps reward as well as risk. On paper, the book threatens a plunge into an disenchanting abyss you might want to avoid if you want to preserve your love for the sport. But the real-world parallels are so unsubtle, the entrapments so obvious, and the literary-thriller tropes so clichéd you might just survive. Still, the book does succeed in bringing out the human tragedy arising from commonplace profiteering.

Hamid’s characters are predictable cut-outs — perhaps he means them to come across that way as a metaphor for how badly the system is rigged, its players programmed, its outcome scripted. The idealists are no match for the pragmatic — it’s a world where the villain is designated to thrive and the virtuous to implode. Yet, you wish their lines wouldn’t sound like the rattle of a wind-up doll. The editing could be better — you will find the odd misspelt word or misnomer embarrassingly undercutting the gravity of a scene.

The typical racy sport-tournament whodunnit always has a nefarious string-puller whose machinations are undetectable till they drop their mask in the climax and receive their comeuppance. Hamid’s novel reads like one such Hardy Boys mystery all along, but come the fatalistic denouement, he not only allows his silver-tongued villain to evade his just desserts but, in a morally jarring way, also cajoles the reader into reconciling to the might-makes-right maxim.

The Fix; Omar Shahid Hamid; Pan Macmillan India, ₹399

mihir.b@thehindu.co.in