Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“FURY” by Salman Rushdie (first published
2001)
Two
years ago, there arrived on my desk Salman
Rushdie’s Joseph Anton [look up my
take of it via the index at right], his over-long third-person account of
his years dodging the fatwa. I
reviewed it with mixed feelings. Acknowledging that Rushdie’s cause –
essentially freedom of speech – was a just one, sympathising completely with the
man who had been threatened with death and forced into hiding, I nevertheless
found the man’s attitudes and outlook egotistical, preening, gushy about
friends, often smug and superficial about pop culture. Of course much could be
forgiven a man who had suffered a decade under real threat. But – like somebody
babbling hysterically after a near-death experience – Rushdie burbled on for over
600 pages, with amazingly little self-awareness, settling scores against former
wives and lovers, and in bad need of an editor to tell him to cut it back a
bit.
I
admit that I have long had mixed feelings about Rushdie’s work. It all began
back in 1981, when I first read what is still his most famous – and best –
novel Midnight’s Children (the one
that was much later judged “the Booker of Bookers”). I was then new to “magical
realism” – which is what Midnight’s
Children really is, even if Rushdie rejects the term – and I was stimulated
and delighted by the novelist’s take on early Indian independence, his
celebratory tone about all of India’s various cultures and his lament for the
way things turned out in terms of partition and sectarian violence. His next
novel, Shame, was almost as good,
drawing on Rushdie’s Indian Muslim background for a less-than-starry-eyed view
of the origins of Pakistan. But thereafter, for me as a reader, things went
downhill. I have not read The Satanic
Verses (which gave Rushdie’s Islamic accusers their excuse for the fatwa). But when I read The Moor’s Last Sigh I felt that Rushdie
was recycling the literary ploys which he had used better in his earlier
novels. The magical realism had become a sterile game, a bag of stylistic
tricks. The characters were artificial constructs, not people with whom one
could engage. The tone was more often sardonic and condescending than
celebratory. A big part of Rushdie, the Western secular liberal, was now
looking down on the exotic societies which were his heritage. Rushdie as Mr
Smug had arrived; and Mr Smug seems to have stayed in control of the man’s
literary output.
The Moor’s Last Sigh was written during
the years of the fatwa.
Fury was written a few years after the fatwa was lifted. Unhesitatingly I call
it Rushdie’s very worst book to date, which is my only reason for giving it a
spot here.
So overwhelmed
by clearly autobiographic details, so determined to be hip in topical pop
culture references, Fury simply does
not fly.
Malik Solanka (born
in Bombay like Rushdie) and aged 55 (like Rushdie at the time novel was written)
teaches at King’s College, Cambridge (where Rushdie was a student). A professor
of philosophy, he has grown rich on the proceeds of something he created for
television (perhaps a sly reference to Rushdie’s early career as an advertising
copywriter). Malik Solanka created a puppet show called “Little Brain” in which
philosophers were discussed in accessible pop terms. But he is now disgusted
with himself for being involved in the world of television, where he is now
being muscled by the producers to “sex up” the format of his show.
Suffering a sort
of breakdown, and raging against the inanities of pop culture, he de-camps to
New York deserting his (second) wife and small son (just as Rushdie did). In New
York he is beguiled and disgusted by both pop culture and the money culture. He
has blackouts and forgets things. One plot has him wondering if, during his
blackouts, he could have become the serial killer who goes around beating up
and killing rich young women – but the serial killer turns out to be three
perverted and wealthy young men who also kill a reporter friend of the
protagonist. Another strand of plot – which gradually takes over as the main
one – has Malik Solanka succumbing to the suggestion of a beautiful model girl;
and creating the franchise for an on-line computer game. (Rushdie was involved
with a beautiful model girl at the time.)
But this is a
postmodern world. When “perception is everything”, people take media inventions
for reality. Malik Solanka’s invented characters in the computer game are appropriated
as inspiring symbols by ethnically-Indian rebels who topple the government in a
Pacific state which bears more than a passing resemblance to Fiji. By this
stage the protagonist is involved with an Indian woman who befriends the rebel
leader but becomes disillusioned with him and helps topple him.
She dies in the
process, reaffirming that the fictional world which absorbs those who play
computer games is not the real one.
The novel ends
with the main character, having worked through his fascination with New York
and its fantasies, wistfully stalking the wife and son he had deserted.
This is a
thoroughly confused and ultimately annoying novel. It is very topical, which
means that, thirteen years after it was first published, its hip pop cultural
references are already dated ones. Like the novels of Zadie Smith, it will in a
few years time – if it is still being reprinted – require footnotes to be
understood. It has very much what I would call the “Dennis Potter effect”. You
may remember that Potter scripted TV series (Pennies From Heaven, The
Singing Detective, Lipstick on Your
Collar) built around placing recordings of old pop songs in incongruous
contexts for dead obvious ironical effect. Potter repeatedly told interviewers
how much he regarded the old pop songs as trash – yet they were the very things
that made his teleplays popular and gave them point. Like Potter’s TV series,
Rushdie’s Fury feeds upon the very thing
it affects to despise. Rushdie (and his main character) are fully aware of this
paradox. Pop culture is attractive and absorbing, but it is also superficial
and corrupting.
The novel
suffers from cheapjack psychology – the professor, it transpires, is filled
with rage because he was sexually abused as a child. The first model girl he
has in New York is trying to re-enact an incestuous relationship with her
father. Translation? Rushdie wants to spice up his limp and scrappy tale with
soapy sensation.
After the very
knowing depiction of New York, the episodes set in the state resembling Fiji
are jarringly different in tone – a fantasy world. Had Salman Rushdie ever been
to Fiji? I do not know. But on the evidence of this novel he clearly understands
little about the place and maybe that is why he does not identify his
fictitious state with any real state.
All the time I
was reading this woeful production, the word I kept reaching for,
deprecatingly, was “clever”. Rushdie knows about, and can quote at length, pop
culture references. He does incidentally say some wise things about the blurred
line between fantasy and reality in a media-saturated age. But the novel adds
up to little more than a clever conceit and a rave. To give a really recherché pair
of comparisons, much of it reminded me of the in-group shriekings of Richard
Aldington’s Death of a Hero and
Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God.
Yes, great
writers can turn their private lives into great literature; but in Fury Rushdie merely turns his private
life into gossip and a series of op.ed.pieces.
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