Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights
By Salman Rushdie
(Jonathan Cape, €28.50)
In the near future, a huge storm rips through New
York, and thus ‘the strangenesses’ begin. Our hero, the elderly, widowed
landscape gardener Raphael Hieronymus Menezes, more popularly known as Mr.
Geronimo, finds there is a growing space between his feet and the earth. Jimmy
Kapoor, a young wannabe graphic novelist, awakens in
his bedroom to see a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee
creation, Natraj Hero. Abandoned at mayor Rosa Fast’s office, it emerges that a
baby wrapped in an Indian flag can identify corruption with her mere presence, the
guilty coming out in blemishes and boils. A seductive Latina gold digger with a
fierce temper, Teresa Saca Cuartos, is soon called upon, issuing lightening
bolts from her fingertips, to combat otherworldly forces beyond imagining. And
there are more, many more.
What do they all have in common? They are the
descendants of the 12th century union between a good jennia called Dunia, aka
the Lightening Princess, and rationalist philosopher Ibn Rushd, better known in
Western history as Averroes, who as translator into Latin of the works of
Aristotle preserved in Arabic at the library of Alexandria, was responsible for
bringing Aristotelian thought back into European culture. (There’s a personal
touch here, as Rushdie’s father changed the family’s name to honour Ibn Rushd.)
As though treated with early medieval IVF, they produce an astonishing amount
of children, all unaware of their semi-supernatural parentage, and inherited
fantastical powers.
It transpires that the strangenesses merely
foreshadow a full-blown invasion of the human world by malevolent spirits from
another dimension. Four
evil jinn, Zabardast, Zumurrud, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, have
broken through the wormholes separating this world from Peristan, or Fairyland,
and are hell-bent on unleashing an Age of Unreason, causing havoc in the 21st
century. If Dunia can round up her distant progeny in time and awaken them to
the power of their jinni nature, humanity might have a chance against these
forces of darkness. “The seals between the Two Worlds are broken and the dark
jinn ride,” she tells Geronimo. “Your world is in danger and because my
children are everywhere I am protecting it. I’m bringing them together, and
together we will fight back.” And so the novel, Rushdie’s 12th, like
a pyrotechnic C.G.I. literary video game, moves inexorably towards a showdown
between the twin abstractions, Good and Evil.
A further twist in the timescale is
provided by the fact that the story is related from far into the future, from
which narrative perspective it can be seen that the theme has been one of
Rushdie’s perennial favourites: the conflict between faith-based superstition,
spawned through fear (i.e. belief in a personal, monotheistic God) [= BAD], and
enlightenment Reason [= GOOD]. The front-piece, after all, is Goya’s ‘The sleep
of reason brings forth monsters’. But, as the becalmed Epilogue warns us: ‘We
read of you in ancient books, O dreams, but the dream factories are closed.
This is the price we pay for peace, prosperity, understanding, wisdom, goodness
and truth: that the wildness in us, which sleep unleashed, has been tamed, and
the darkness in us, which drove the theatre of the night, is soothed…. Mostly
we are glad. Our lives are good. But sometimes we wish for the dreams to
return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long
for nightmares.’ In dreams begin responsibilities, indeed.
So, does it all add up? Two
predominant critical views of Rushdie prevail: the ‘yea’s’ hail him as the ‘Ocean
of Notions’, an endlessly inventive, imaginative genius; the ‘nay’s’ dub him
the ‘Shah of Blah’, not so much as in ho-hum, but as someone who doesn’t know
when to shut up – a Wizard of Oz, Vaudevillian travelling show, snake-oil salesman,
unaware of his own charlatanism. While there are undoubtedly many pleasurable
passages of fine writing to savour here, this new offering often seems like the work of a man with too much time on
his hands. Which prompts the question: how much of our leisure time should we
readers give to it? The novels which made Rushdie’s name, Midnight’s Children and Shame,
married significant socio-historical events (Indian independence, the
foundation of Pakistan) to the magic realism he imported from his South
American and Eastern European predecessors. This work, like a Bollywoodised Mahabharata,
teeming with endless incarnations and avatars, reads like an amusing jeu
d’esprit, written because writing is what writers do.
Without realistic
roots or reference points to spring from, which feel more than just gratuitous
nods towards profundity, fictional magic can quickly morph into self-indulgent
whimsy. Scheherazade’s playful stories in the Arabian Nights, to which this book’s title obviously nods,
ultimately had the urgency of ‘stories told against death’. Rushdie’s latter-day
version is too much of an ornament to what is now a nice, untroubled life, to
be taken too seriously.
First published in The Sunday Independent 18/10/2015
First published in The Sunday Independent 18/10/2015
