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Shattered idylls have always been central to Salman Rushdie’s fiction: the dream of a peacefully united India that turns into a nightmare as Midnight’s Children (1981) unrolls, long-gone havens of interracial harmony such as the spice plantations of Cochin or the resplendent Moorish civilisation of Andalucia sensuously celebrated in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the gloriously cosmopolitan Bombay that explodes into sectarian anarchy in several of his books. Kashmir — a one-time Eden of natural and man-made beauty with its Mogul gardens spread amid glittering lakes and snow-capped peaks — has also continuingly engaged his imagination. Alluringly evoked at the start of Midnight’s Children and in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), it now provides the setting for a novel that aims to show the breakdown of a paradise into a hell and of an artist into a terrorist.
As always in Rushdie, havoc is wreaked by racial and religious hatred. Islamic fundamentalists and Hindu nationalists bloodily rip apart a picturesque valley that was once a tranquil oasis of contented coexistence. Epitomising the relaxed tolerance of pre-war Kashmir, a Muslim youth who is its most acclaimed rope-walker and a Hindu girl who is its most beguiling dancer marry in a ceremony that jubilantly mingles rites, costumes and customs.
That tolerance and togetherness are good things and prejudice and segregation bad ones is a message Rushdie’s fiction has been voicing for almost 25 years. No sane reader would dissent. And, of course, events have made him acutely qualified to pronounce on one particular brand of bigotry: the neo-medieval horribleness of militant Islam, whose malevolences are itemised in Shalimar the Clown’s most telling pages.
What is dismaying to discover is that a trend swelling through Rushdie’s recent novels — an attempt to compensate for the sameness and repetitiveness of his themes by deploying ever more strident sensationalism — is here given wholesale headway. Deploring the damage done by gulfs between creeds and cultures, he opens up a crevasse between the seemingly serious intent of his novel and the trumpery nature of its techniques.
Much of this book resembles a retirement home for the doddery old clichés of magic realism. Psychic crones are widely in evidence: a Ukrainian “potato witch”, a toothless prophetess, a caster of “snake charms” (motto: “Snake wriggle, world jiggle”) who can mobilise cobras. Second sight is as routine as pairs of spectacles in more mundane novels. Heads scarcely touch pillows before significant dreams and spectral presences are in attendance. Bizarre maladies are rife. One man goes deaf from shock. Another is plagued by an inability to forget anything. He also hears colours, sees sounds and tastes feelings. Curses and omens work overtime. During a climactic jailbreak, a death-row felon walks on air. Clanky metaphor such as “the iron mullah” who has “skin the colour of rusting metal” and, after death, is found to consist of pulverised machine parts accompanies these flights of fancy.
All this could be seen as a bid to transmute actuality into allegory. Suggesting this, a central character is a tormented beauty once called Kashmira who has had the name India imposed on her. Around her, the novel’s personnel are allocated names whose meanings are spelled out with punitive insistence. The book’s title figure, originally called Noman, has renamed himself Shalimar after Kashmir’s most fabled garden. His lover, “Bhoomi-who-was-Boonyi”, has switched her name from the former (meaning “the earth”) to the latter (“the local word for the celestial Kashmiri chinar tree”). Her mother was “named Pamposh after the lotus flower, but . . . preferred the nickname Giri, meaning a walnut kernel”.
As the names of even the most minor figures are copiously explained, you grow to dread the recurrence of formulae such as “As his name suggested, Bombur Yambarzal was part black bumble-bee, part narcissus”. Mythic cross references — Greek and Hindu — are also thickly plastered on to the narrative. And there’s portentous cosmic talk of “shadow planets” (“heavenly bodies without bodies” that “actually existed without actually existing”) and their baleful influence on our world.
Any inclination to take any of this seriously is rapidly seen off by the kitschy dreadfulness of much of the writing. Gothic tosh is frequently given vent. Sections end with melodramatic hissings (“The time of demons had begun”; “The horror was upon them now and would not be denied”). Real atrocity can be trivialised into camp gamesomeness, as in preposterous pages about a sexily sadistic female Nazi “known as the Panther because she wore a coat of panther fur which she never removed, even on the hottest days of the year”. Prose veers from stagy histrionics (“her eyes met his and blazed their answer and the point of no return was passed”) to novelettish banalities (“sticking the knives of his infidelities in her heart”) to sentimentality Barbara Cartland might have coveted (“This was how she would remember him, his beauty illumined by love”). At times, the book is reminiscent of a Victorian tear-jerker. After her elopement, Boonyi frets in “a gilded cage” and miserably collapses “onto her illicit bed
of shame”.
At the core of this Bollywood hodgepodge, Rushdie sets up an infernal love triangle. Shalimar becomes a murderous psychopath moving through Islamicist training camps and out along the terror trails because Boonyi leaves him for another man. The ensuing, luridly rendered farrago of obsessive revenge never casts the faintest light on the psychology or procedures of terrorism. The more garishly grisly the story becomes, the paler its credibility. Every shrieking superlative (“a sex-goddess such as the Indian cinema had never seen”) lessens its impact. There are only the most intermittent reminders (as when a man recalls Kashmir in its calm heyday with “boats like little fingers tracing lines in the surface of the waters”) of the descriptive power Rushdie could once put to handsome effect.
The novel’s feeblest feature is its humour. As usual, Rushdie offers sarcasm, not irony; facetiousness, not wit. Characters are chortlingly given silly names such as Olga Volga (the potato witch). A man’s names are misremembered, with increasing unhilariousness, as “Jack Flack”, “Jock Flock”, “Jake Flake”, “Jay Flay”, “Joe Flow” and “Judd Fludd” (he’s actually called Jim). Flimsy whimsy of this sort goes along with excruciatingly off-key comic-turn dialogue. Mrs Shanti Dickens, an improbable Hindu London landlady, gobbles, “Nobody being ’urt, ’at is the mai’ thing, hisn’t it . . . Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it.” Asked out on a date, a grotesquely gawky county English woman splutters, “Ha! Ha! Well, I’ve absolutely no idea! . . . But, ahem! Aha! If that is you’re really, I mean! Serious, you know? . . . Not that it would be a bally imposition I suppose? Eh, eh, haha?” Ruinously riddled with stuff such as this, Shalimar the Clown doesn’t only portray a disaster zone; it becomes one.
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