HOWZAT

Bhoomi, Boonyi loses her body to greed and drugs in Delhi, then she loses the ambassador’s love, but she carries his child. Max’s embittered wife takes the child and sends bloated Boonyi back to face the destructive force that was once a clown in love.

This book is a colossus almost bestriding the great and growing rift, though sometimes losing its balance. We have a double helix that spins together information and misinformation. Perhaps Rushdie expects us to be able to distinguish between truth and fiction, almost line by line. But this is a novel, and that must not be forgotten, particularly when it turns from tightrope to razor’s edge in the most powerful parts of the book, the ones that will be written about and argued over most.

These sections may also inform many people’s view of the cancer in the Kashmir Valley that is, like Rushdie’s characters, called by many names: the separatist movement that became the insurgency, that morphed into the state of terror. From there it slipped into the generic of “the conflict”, an era that has defined this generation of Kashmiris, turning them from the almost mythical laughing blue and green-eyed inhabitants of Elysium into victims or fighters.

Rushdie’s boy-guerrillas driven by unearthly forces and passions, the clanking mullahs, and his personification of military frustration, are more Koestler or Marquez than those that I have lived among in Kashmir since 1989. Partial truth and part-anachronism recount that these fighters are baptised into a state wherein they become “the truth”, a concept more of Che than Osama. In practice these disenfranchised and easily influenced boy-men are trained to fight to the death as servants of a strangely distorted version of Allah. They are god-gun-fodder.

Rushdie collapses time, stirring the Soviet-Afghan war and the valley insurgency together, as though they were concurrent, and similar in military nature, rather than being sequential; the first a clearly defined war, followed by Kashmir’s deadlock conflict. To blur ideologies, to overlay them with templates from a different time, to telescope time, all this is allowed in the novel form. The risk is that the puppeteer can seem to be educating us. There are those who will close this book thinking that this is how it is.

This is an important book, a wonderful reversing story with a cast of characters with names that are not their names, and ideals that have been thrust upon them, but this is not a real study of the anatomy of terrorist warfare or its perpetrators. Remember this as you read this vast story set in a splintering world reflected in lakes.

SHALIMAR THE CLOWN
By Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, £17.99; 416pp
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Salman’s back pages

1975 GRIMUS: the first novel

1981 MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN: the Booker of Bookers winner

1983 SHAME: black comedy

1987 THE JAGUAR SMILE: Rushdie’s portrait of Nicaragua

1988 THE SATANIC VERSES: earned its author a fatwa

1990 HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES: children’s book about a storyteller who loses his gift

1990 IN GOOD FAITH: critic-appeasing essay

1995 THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH: Whitbread-winning fatwa response

1994 EAST, WEST: nine cross-cultural stories

1999 THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET: Rushdie’s rock ’n’ roll

2001 FURY: middle-age rage

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