Monday, Aug. 29, 2005

A Fable of Fury

By Aravind Adidga

On the very first page of Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie's new novel, the reader has a horrible presentiment that a literary disaster is in the making. Rushdie is trying to describe a woman speaking in her sleep: she is "like Sigourney Weaver channeling a demon in Ghostbusters." This is the kind of bathos—the desperation to prove his hipness by making asinine references to pop culture—that helped sink Rushdie's last novel, Fury, generally acknowledged to be the worst he has written. After a first-page blunder like this, it requires a leap of faith simply to turn to page 2. But it's a leap worth making, because even though Shalimar is a flawed novel, it shows why Rushdie remains such a force to be reckoned with.

The book comes out at a time when the career of the man who was once the world's most famous literary novelist is in deep crisis. The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) was the last in a string of superhits that began with Midnight's Children (1981). Rushdie-watchers were divided about The Ground Beneath Her Feet(1999), but almost no one was prepared to stand up for Fury (2001), which tells the story of a middle-aged thinker who makes a fortune as a TV doll-maker, then flees a bad marriage and goes to New York. There, while falling in love with a young, Indian-born beauty, he expresses in very long paragraphs his rage at the shallowness and money-mindedness of modern Western civilization. Fury wasn't just over-written, poorly plotted and ludicrous. It emitted the creaking, splitting-wood sound that comes when a great literary reputation is about to topple over and crash into the earth. It was widely dismissed as a shrill, almost hysterical defense of the author's own personal life. Many reviewers thought the hero seemed rather too much like Rushdie, who had himself famously fallen in love with a much younger, Indian-born supermodel.

Shalimar the Clown could also have been called "Fury", but the anger in this book is of an entirely different kind. The novel is an allegory of the rape of Kashmir, told as a story of love's betrayal and vengeance. When we first land in it, Rushdie's Kashmir is paradise. In this bucolic valley, Muslims live in peace with their Hindu neighbors and share a common culture, woven of Indian and Islamic traditions. Embodying this syncretic culture is Pachigam, a village of theatrical performers and cooks, where a tightrope walker nicknamed Shalimar has fallen in love with an actress named Boonyi. There is opposition to their marriage, because he is Muslim and she is Hindu; but this is Kashmir, and love triumphs over religion. Before they can have a child, however, their village gets a visitor: the American ambassador to India. Since this is a Rushdie book, he isn't just a diplomat; he's also the scion of a cultured Ashkenazi family, a hero of the French Resistance and a chum of Marlon Brando's. This is the kind of preposterous, over-laden detail that bends and almost cracks the novel at various points. Yet the plot somehow works. The ambassador falls for Boonyi, she betrays Shalimar, and the two elope to Delhi. Shalimar goes mad with jealousy, and vows to kill the two lovers. As he gets deranged, so does Kashmir.

While telling a story of the fall of true love, Rushdie—blending myth and politics, magic and realism—also tells the story of the fall of Kashmir. One day, Pachigam's residents find a strange mullah in their midst, preaching hatred. How did this hatemonger slip into paradise? Because of the Indian army, which has been in the valley to keep the Pakistani army out. Over the years, this army has left behind piles of junk: "Then one day by the grace of God the junk began to stir. It came to life and took on human form. The men who were miraculously born from these rusting worn metals, who went out into the valley to preach resistance and revenge were saints of an entirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs."

The mullahs overrun the valley, women are ordered to wear the veil and Muslims are separated from Hindus. This Islamic brutality is reciprocated by the Indian army, which destroys villages suspected of harboring terrorists. The mullahs and the army take turns in grinding paradise into hell, and Rushdie chronicles their misdeeds with mounting anger. As he recalls the violence that forced the Hindus out of the Kashmir valley in the 1990s, words gush out of him in a reflux of rage: "... and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that."

This is fury, the vintage Rushdie kind, not the phony outrage at the shallowness of the Western world that sank Fury, but a wrath aimed in the opposite direction—at the medieval barbarism that lingers in our only half-modern world. Shalimar, weak and improbable whenever its action leaves Kashmir, is not of the caliber of Midnight's Children, but it does mark Rushdie's re-engagement with the themes of political injustice and religious bigotry—themes that have made him one of our most important living novelists. The good news for his fans is that, once again, Rushdie knows what to be angry about.