Something Old

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. 

“A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS” by Thomas Heywood (first performed 1603; first published 1607)

            When a character in a play delivers himself of such a self-satisfied speech as the following, then we can be sure his happiness is about to crumble and his peace of mind be shattered:

How happy am I amongst other men,
That in my mean estate embrace content!
I am a gentleman, and by my birth
Companion with a king; a king's no more.

I am possess’d of many fair revenues,

Sufficient to maintain a gentleman;
Touching my mind, I am studied in all arts;
The riches of my thoughts and of my time
Have been a good proficient; but, the chief

Of all the sweet felicities on earth,

I have a fair, a chaste, and loving wife, —
Perfection all, all truth, all ornament.
If man on earth may truly happy be,
Of these at once possest, sure, I am he.

This is Master John Frankford soliloquising at the beginning of Act Two of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, first performed in 1603, the year James I took the throne of England, but rightly regarded as a thoroughly Elizabethan play in its dramaturgy. Thomas Heywood was born some time in the 1570s but died in 1641, at a ripe old age for his times. He was essentially an adept hack, who churned out plays and pamphlets with equal facility and was apparently most famous in his day for his comedies. The domestic tragedy A Woman Killed With Kindness is sometimes called his masterpiece, which does make me wonder how bad most of his output must have been, for this lumpy and uneven play is no masterpiece. Heywood outlived both Shakespeare and Jonson, but never came near their skill and subtlety in characterisation. Yet a recent re-reading reminds me that I have an odd sort of affection for this play. It does not have the rough, almost documentary, vigour of the anonymous Arden of Feversham [look up my comments on it via the index at right], which preceded it by a decade. Its characters are thin and often act without clear motivation. Its two separate plots do not fit together easily. But for all its crudities, much of it works and it has scenes that can play well on the stage and move an audience.

To get back to John Frankford’s hubristic invitation to nemesis.

Frankford has married Mistress Frankford. She is usually called just that in the play – Mistress Frankford. Feminists could justly complain that such nomenclature signifies a woman seen as a man’s property. Mistress Frankford is, however, addressed as “Nan” a number of times in the latter half of the play, so critics usually designate her Anne. John Frankford is a generous hearted man who feels that God has been good to him. Out of the goodness of his heart, Frankford invites a pleasant, but impoverished gentleman, Wendoll, to live with him and his wife. But when Frankford is away Wendoll, although he knows Frankfort is his benefactor, although he is aware that what he contemplates is sinful, embarks on an affair with Mistress Frankfort.

And how does Frankfort react when his faithful servant Nicholas tells him of this?

First with disbelief; then with prudence.

Unlike Othello, who is more easily confounded by Iago’s fabrications, Frankford will not believe what he has been told until he has real proof. So he pretends to go off on urgent business in order to come back and spy on his wife and his friend. He finds Wendoll and Anne in flagrante. Wendoll flees in panic. Mistress Frankford expects the severest of punishment from her husband. Instead, Frankford acts in a way that would seem mild in a husband four hundred years ago. In tears of sorrow, he takes exclusive custody of the couple’s children, then gives Anne every luxury and servants to attend her, but banishes her from his sight forever by making her live in one of his distant properties.

He declares:

My words are regist'red in Heaven already.
With patience hear me! I'll not martyr thee,
Nor mark thee for a strumpet; but with usage

Of more humility torment thy soul,

And kill thee even with kindness.  (IV, v)

So, in the last act, the banished Anne Frankford dies in sorrow and remorse, starving herself, but not before one final scene where she and John reach some sort of reconciliation. Reiterating the play’s title, the final words of the play are spoken at Anne’s deathbed by her brother Sir Francis Acton, and her husband. They go thus:

Sir Francis: Peace with thee, Nan! — Brothers and gentlemen, All we that can plead interest in her grief,
Bestow upon her body funeral tears!
Brother, had you with threats and usage bad
Punish'd her sin, the grief of her offence
Had not with such true sorrow touch'd her heart.

Frankford: I see it had not; therefore, on her grave
Will I bestow this funeral epitaph,
Which on her marble tomb shall be engrav'd.
In golden letters shall these words be fill'd: ²
Here lies she whom her husband's kindness kill'd.

This is an admission by Frankford that there has been a real cruelty in his “kindness”.

If this were the play’s sole plot, it could have been developed as a tense psychological drama. Unfortunately there is another strand of plot, which it is hard to call a “subplot” as it takes up as much of the play as the Frankfords’ marital problems do. Never – except in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling – have I met a play where there is such disjunction between two threads of plot.

The second plot of A Woman Killed With Kindness concerns a quarrel between Sir Francis Acton, Mistress Frankford’s brother, and Sir Charles Mountford. They fall out in a brawl over their respective falconry skills. The brawl leads to the death of some of their servants. Sir Charles Mountford is hauled before a sheriff and is financially ruined by a sharper called Shafton. Sir Francis Acton, after first gloating over Mountford’s ruin, falls in love with Mountford’s sister Susan and, in the hope of sweetening her feelings for him, tries to buy Mountford out of jail. In the end, despite the initial misgivings of Susan and Mountford, Sir Francis and Susan are wed. One could say that, in effect, Susan is sold to buy Mountford out of debt. There is possibly an intentional sense here too of a “woman killed with kindness” in the way Sir Francis lavishes unwanted attentions on Susan.

Given that both strands of plot concern, ultimately, marriage and the relationships of men and women, A Woman Killed With Kindness has been a happy hunting ground for critics and exegetes who want to explore the play as an exemplar of proprietary male attitudes towards women and (implicitly) also want to condemn the play’s antiquated male chauvinism. Go on line and you can read reviews of a recent London production of the play. The woman who directed it chose to costume the play in early 20^th century style, with a set that placed the John-and-Anne Frankford plot, and the Sir-Francis-and-Susan plot, side-by-side to point up parallels in these two examples of men treating women as property. Of course this is a legitimate reading of the play, though I think the most fruitful thing in this line is an article by Jennifer Panek called “Punishing Adultery in A Woman Killed With Kindness” (which you can also find easily on line). Panek’s view is that the play is really a sophisticated critique of John Frankford’s behaviour. As Panek reads it, Frankford does not treat his wife as a companion and equal, but instead chooses a male to fill this role. The male is Wendoll. By his foolish choice, Frankford invites into his home the very thing that destroys his marriage. Therefore failure to treat a spouse as an equal is the real enemy of marriage.

On the printed page such arguments are persuasive. And yet there is a great difference between what can be perceived rationally in a play by a critic, and the dramatic impact that a play actually has when read or performed. After reading ingenious efforts to fit the two plots thematically together, I still end up agreeing with T.S.Eliot (in his 1931 essay on Heywood) that the play has brilliant moments but the subplot is mainly padding.

I could note the play’s crudities. There are dead obvious attempts to appeal to the whole audience – hence the play opens with dancing among the gentlefolk just after the wedding of Frankfort and Mistress Frankfort (I, i), but then follows it with a scene of servants and others having a knees-up (I, ii) for no other purpose than to appeal to the groundlings. Characters change suddenly only because the plot demands it. Shafton treats the disgraced Sir Charles Mountford as a friend (II, i) and then (III,i) suddenly turns the law on him to cheat him out of his property. Sir Francis Acton gloats over Mountford’s fall and has lustful thoughts about raping and dishonouring Mountford’s sister Susan; then suddenly, in the same scene, he falls genuinely in love with Susan. In scenes like these, the play is almost like a medieval morality play where, subtlety and psychology be damned, characters wear signs around their necks saying “Villain”, “Dupe”, “Victim” and act strictly according to the exigencies of the plot. There are also uncomfortable leaps in time. The Frankfords are newly married in Act One, but in Act Four, when Frankford is parting from his adulterous wife, there are children to consider. It has not been clearly marked to us that years have gone by in the story’s unfolding.

So why do I still like this play?

Despite everything, its broad-stroke and slapdash technique does allow moments of wit and brilliance. The scene of falconry, which turns into a bloody and lethal fight between the followers of Sir Francis Acton and the followers of Sir Charles Mountford, could almost be seen as symbolic of a rapacious society where human animals prey upon other human animals. The scene where Frankfort plays cards with Anne and Wendoll, after his servant Nicholas has advised him of their adultery, shows the language of card-sharping becoming code for sexual betrayal. The suddenness with which Anne is seduced has troubled many commentators, but dramatically it is offset by Wendoll’s full awareness (in the play’s most famous speech) that he is committing sin as he moves to seduce her:

O God, O God! With what a violence
I'm hurried to mine own destruction !
There goest thou, the most perfectest man

That ever England bred a gentleman,

And shall I wrong his bed ? —Thou God of
         thunder !
Stay, in Thy thoughts of vengeance and of wrath
Thy great, almighty, and all-judging hand
From speedy execution on a villain, —

A villain and a traitor to his friend. (II, iii)

There is also the careful prudence of Frankford, who does not immediately accept Nicholas’s report of the adultery:

Away ! Begone ! —
She is well born, descended nobly;
Virtuous her education; her repute

Is in the general voice of all the country

Honest and fair; her carriage, her demeanour,
In all her actions that concern the love
To me her husband, modest, chaste, and godly.
Is all this seeming gold plain copper?
But he, that Judas that hath borne my purse,

Hath sold me for a sin. O God! O God!

Shall I put up these wrongs? No! Shall I trust
The bare report of this suspicious groom,
Before the double-gilt, the well-hatch'd ore
Of their two hearts? No, I will lose these thoughts;

Distraction I will banish from my brow,
And from my looks exile sad discontent.
Their wonted favours in my tongue shall flow;
Till I know all, I'll nothing seem to know.

It is in moments such as these that the play is capable of grabbing an audience (or a reader). And this is why the play appeals to me. For all his many faults, Heywood in his best moments can manipulate an audience like a skilful screenwriter. In the last act, a tearful Frankford clears the house of all his wife’s effects and lingers over her lute, recalling its harmonies. This is just like the larmoyant manner of Beaumont and Fletcher in a play like The Maid’s Tragedy, soliciting an audience’s tears by theatrical tricks. It isn’t Shakespeare, but it does work.

Idiotic footnote: “Comparisons are odorous”, says Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. I did know that Shakespeare was having fun with a saying that was already a commonplace in his day, but it’s nice to find a contemporary of Shakespeare proving how commonplace the saying was. In A Woman Killed With Kindness the servant Jenkin says (I, ii), in the “comic” scene of servant revelry: “O Slime! O Brickbat! Do not you know that comparisons are odious? Now we are odious ourselves, too; therefore there are no comparisons to be made betwixt us.” Just thought you’d like to know.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

YOU WILL APPRECIATE THIS PAINTING AS YOU ARE TOLD TO

It doesn’t keep me awake at night, but I am sometimes put out by the way modern art galleries often feel obliged to hector viewers about how they are meant to respond to paintings. Placards and notices don’t just identify who the painter was, when the painting was painted and what its inspiration was. They also wish to correct any erroneous or heretical thoughts we might have about the painting.

I am put in the way of these thoughts by what we are now told to believe about a particular painting. Louis J. Steele’s and Charles Goldie’s 1898 painting The Arrival of the Maoris hangs in the Auckland City Art Gallery, where I have viewed it many times since I was a child. It is often acknowledged to be New Zealand’s most famous “historical” painting and it has been reproduced innumerable times as a book illustration or as a book cover.

But of course it is not “historical” at all.

How Maori first arrived in this country is a matter of informed speculation, not of verifiable historical fact. The anthropological and historical consensus now suggests planned settlement from other parts of the Pacific some time in the 13^th century, after earlier voyages of exploration following ocean currents and guided by the stars. But Steele’s and Goldie’s painting, with its wide-eyed, emaciated Maori being driven crazy with hunger, suggests the notion of their arrival in New Zealand as an accident, not as a planned and organised migration. It could even be said to play to the earlier (and no-longer-countenanced) European notion that Maori arrived only after having been inadvertently driven out to sea, from their islands of origin, by storms. The art gallery’s official website now calls the painting a “romantic fabrication” and notes that the type of waka depicted in the painting didn’t develop until hundreds of years after Maori were settled in the new country.

So far, so unexceptionable, I suppose, although I do rebelliously mutter that nearly all “historical” paintings of the nineteenth century are equally “romantic fabrications” and the eagerness to single this one out suggests the curators’ dread that they might otherwise be thought to endorse the type of errors the painting encourages.

My hackles really rise, however, when both the gallery placard and the website suggest that Steele and Goldie simply copied and plagiarised Theodore Gericault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa. Both Steele and Goldie studied in Paris and both of them had seen and made copies of Gericault’s masterpiece, which depicts the aftermath of a notorious shipwreck with both corpses and the living drifting helplessly at sea.

There is no doubt at all that Goldie and Steele were influenced by Gericault’s painting. (Incidentally, the Gericault painting is many times larger than Steele and Goldie’s painting, as I can confirm after viewing it in the Louvre earlier this year.) As well as their kinship of subject matter (desperate people at sea), both The Raft of the Medusa and The Arrival of the Maoris are designed along a diagonal axis, rising from left to right, capped by a figure signalling to something on the right hand side of the frame – a distant sail in The Raft of the Medusa and the distant coast of New Zealand in The Arrival of the Maoris. In both, a sail billows on the left hand side of the frame. So Goldie and Steele took a major part of their conception from Gericault.

 And yet they are two quite distinct paintings.

Goldie and Steele were strongly influenced by, but they did not merely copy, Gericault. The tonal values of the two paintings are quite different. The skeletal bodies of the Maori voyagers bear little relationship to Gericault’s more muscular figures. To see the one painting merely as a copy of the other is to miss what is unique about each.

There is something else that niggles at me in the way we are now asked to respond to The Arrival of the Maoris. It is quite conceivable that first Maori settlement of New Zealand was orderly, planned and methodical, and that voyagers were well supplied with provisions and knew no hunger en route (“conceivable”, but of course not provable). It is conceivable that this land’s first discoverers undertook their voyages in a calm, rational, scientific spirit. And yet I find it hard to believe that there would not have been an element of fear and terror in setting off into vast and unknown seas on such small craft, and not being sure that the goal would actually be reached. No matter how much of a “fabrication” it may be, The Arrival of the Maoris does at least dramatise this terror, which seems to have been rationalised or wished away in more “correct” narratives determined to show that Maori did not merely blunder into this country.

I have not thought about this matter only in the last few minutes. Some time ago I wrote a poem drawn from viewings of Steele’s and Goldie’s painting – and my reaction to current wisdom thereupon. The poem appears in the November 2014 issue of Broadsheet – New New Zealand Poetry.

Here it is:

ARRIVAL

Enlightened story of the swaying raft

that gripped an ocean current for a drift

left-side of sunset, south-west by the stars

until the clouds and sea-birds spoke of cliffs.

No accidental voyage but the work

of priestly forethought,  founded on the spheres,

roots under rushes, hooks to trail for fish

and chanted prayers to make grey waves a bridge.

This is the story that the placard tells,

denying mad starvation and the sweat

of storm-forced sailors, lost,  Medusa-like,

in oceans of ungovernable salt.

True tale, perhaps, and mild: mystery shot out

to calm us with the certainty of plans.

There is no awe in oceans, just a route

as routine as timetabled train or bus, 

no bound hulls creaking, no coarse woven sails,

no angry white-caps and no hunger groans,

no sharks as scavengers, no ache for home,

no sailors spitting fear of the unknown.

Something New

 We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

 

“PEWHAIRANGI – Bay of Islands Missions and Maori, 1814 to 1845” by Angela Middleton (Otago University Press, $NZ50)

 

            My first cursory glance at the publishers’ description of this book led me to wonder if the author could possibly have anything new to say about the subject.

Pewhairangi concerns, as its subtitle indicates, the interaction of Maori with Anglican CMS (Church Missionary Society) missionaries in the Bay of Islands from the very first permanent English settlers in 1814 to the winding-down of the Anglican mission in that area in the so-called “Northern War” of the 1840s. (“Pewhairangi” is the Maori transliteration of the English phrase “Bay of Islands” and not the original name that Maori gave to that area.)

But hasn’t this subject already been covered in numerous history books – not just popular general histories, but also more recent scholarly studies? Was there really anything of significance that readers would not already know from other published sources?

As it happens, my misgivings were quite unfounded. Pewhairangi has much that is new to reveal to us, because Angela Middleton is primarily an archaeologist rather than an historian. Her book appears on the second centenary of the first permanent European settlement in New Zealand. It was, as she told a Radio New Zealand interviewer, over a decade in the making, as many of its key findings are based on a series of archaeological digs at the sites of old mission stations. Consequently Pewhairangi gives us not only the general history of the missions in those years, but also the intimate details of how people lived at the mission stations as revealed in the material artefacts uncovered by the archaeologists’ spades.

Middleton includes three general chapters on the development of the Anglican missions. “Into the Maori World” concerns the ways in which missionaries did or (more often) did not adjust to the Maori worldview and customs. “Maori Gardens and European Arms” considers how the missionaries inevitably became involved in trade with their hosts the Ngapuhi, and how this led, via the growing musket trade, to Hongi Hika’s first “musket wars” and his slaughter of the Ngati Whatua at Tamaki-makau-rau (Auckland). “The Escalation of War, 1845” outlines the period in which, with the influx of European settlers after the Treaty of Waitangi, the Anglican church in New Zealand was becoming more a settler church than a mission church, Auckland became the country’s capital, and the Ngapuhi took up arms as they saw the promises made in the Treaty not being kept. There is also a brief final chapter, “What Hath God Wrought?”, giving the author’s (mainly negative) view of what the missions achieved.

These chapters are, however, necessary mainly to give the book narrative and chronological coherence.

The originality of Pewhairangi lies in the other five substantial chapters in which Middleton examines each of five mission stations, one by one. Her method is to give the full history of each station in turn, from its first settlement to its decline and closure, with an account of its inhabitants and their success or failure in the missionary field, buttressed by detailed comments on the geographical site of the mission station and its archaeological remains. The stations are Hohi (founded in 1814), near Rangihoua Pa on the northern side of the bay; Kerikeri (founded 1819) up the river; Paihia (founded 1823); Te Waimate (founded 1830) far inland; and Te Puna (founded 1832).

Every so often, there are words that could be interpreted as expressing the archaeologist’s frustration at what is no longer accessible, such as this opening to the chapter concerning Paihia:

“Visitors to Paihia today have to search for clues to any trace of the mission and its lost structures. Little archaeological investigation has been carried out, as development has taken place over the years with scant regard to this heritage.” (p.134)

There are indeed passages in which Angela Middleton assumes an audience not acquainted with any of this early New Zealand history, as when her introductory remarks discuss the mutual misapprehension of two cultures:

“Evangelical missionary doctrine described a binary world, divided into good and evil. Thus, Maori cultural practices and beliefs were seen as the work of Satan or the Devil, often personified as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ in the reports and daily journals of the New Zealand missionaries sent back to the CMS in London. Missionaries saw themselves as fighting a holy battle against Maori practices related to mana and tapu. These concepts affected the missionaries’ everyday lives as Maori inflicted punishments for infringement of tapu by ransacking mission houses, taking goods or even physically attacking people. The Europeans did not understand that these were actually lesser forms of punishment, that they were being exempted from normal practices, such as the infliction of death, for similar infringements by Maori. When the missionaries responded to Maori transgressions by exacting European ‘justice’ or revenge, Maori were similarly confounded.” (Chapter One, pp.19-20)

Later, when she makes much the same point, she tends to cultural equivalence:

“The work of the mission, seen as a battle between good and evil, personified through the Christian God and the devil, Satan, was further exemplified by the missionaries at Paihia through the repudiation of tapu and the unforeseen consequences of offences against Maori cultural practices. This view was reciprocal, since some Maori considered European practices in a similar way, seeing the preaching of the Gospel as witchcraft.” (Chapter Five, p.144)

This, in turn, paves the way for her closing suggestion that the Bay of Islands missions achieved little in the way of real conversion to Christianity.

Some elements of the general story are familiar, as when Middleton explains the original CMS strategy, authorised by Samuel Marsden, to “civilise, then Christianise” Maori:

“None of the first missionaries were ordained ministers. They were artisans chosen according to Marsden’s belief that nothing could ‘pave the way for the introduction of the Gospel but civilization’, through the ‘civilized arts’. The missionaries and their wives were to teach Maori to read and write, how to grow wheat and other European crops, and such skills as shoemaking, carpentry, ropemaking, needlework and housekeeping.” (Chapter Three, p.69)

This was the fate of the Hall, King and Kendall families. Naturally, we are told of the choleric and bullying nature of Thomas Kendall as he became more attuned to the Maori world than his fellow lay catechists and shifted into trading. Equally familiar is the story of how the arrival of Henry Williams, an ordained Anglican minister, in 1823 changed the nature of the mission and changed the whole strategy for making converts. Williams insisted on “direct conversion through preaching”. However, Williams’ arrival also accentuated class divisions between the ordained clergy and the lay catechists who had preceded them. Says Middleton:

            “As an ordained minister, Henry Williams held a superior position, as did his brother, William. With his shift to ‘direct conversion through preaching’, rather than teaching practical skills and literacy, divisions between the old catechists and ordained ministers grew, along with parochial interests.” She instances the treatment by Henry Williams of James Kemp, and says such divisions hardened once Bishop Selwyn arrived, noting that “the (few extant) letters and journals of missionary women” present “a world where some of the mission families, in particular the lay catechists and mission labourers, were considered less desirable social companions.” (Chapter 4, p.108)

            Even more tensions within the mission came with the arrival of Bishop Selwyn, who had “high church” inclinations quite different from the more evangelical Anglicanism of earlier Anglican missionaries. By the time Selwyn arrived, however, the church’s focus was shifting away from the Bay of Islands:

“The significance of Selwyn’s occupation of Waimate was that it was synchronous with the arrival of settlers after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, British annexation and the development of the ‘colonial church’. With the departure of St John’s College, the bishop joined the list of those Pakeha, including government officials and settlers, who abandoned Ngapuhi and Pewhairangi for Tamaki-makau-rau, the seat of the old Ngapuhi enemy, Ngati Whatua.” (Chapter 6, p.205)

If I found myself greeting some stories told in this book as familiar from other books (the sins of William Yate, for example), I was nevertheless beguiled by the unfamiliarity of others. I would instance the detailed history Middleton gives of the stone store at Kerikeri and its various uses and modifications. Or the sad rearguard action of James Kemp in trying to maintain an active mission in Kerikeri in the 1840s when the church was letting the mission there run down. Or Selwyn’s pretentious (and brief) attempt to turn the Waimate station into a seminary before he moved St John’s College to Auckland. Or the frankly hilarious account (pp.216-219) of the urbane German visitor Karl von Huegel attempting to visit and socialise with sour-faced and unsympathetic missionaries.

If I regret anything in this book, it is the lack of detail about how the Anglican missionaries reacted to missionaries of other Christian denominations in the area at this time. There are only a few fleeting references to the contemporaneous Wesleyan (Methodist) missionaries in Ngapuhi territory, and even fewer to the Catholic missionaries who arrived in 1838 and who (in history) provoked outraged reactions from Anglican and Methodist alike. However, Middleton’s avowed purpose is to deal systematically with the Anglican mission stations and this she does handsomely. And I find it hard to resist a book which is so well documented and so thoroughly illustrated with appropriate images of places and sites.

Something Old

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.