The jinni's war

Salman Rushdie’s literary immortality is assured. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, lit up fiction in English with the exuberance of a Diwali firework. It was uniquely honoured, winning both the prestigious Man Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers, for the best novel in the prize’s history. With his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, Rushdie, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, inadvertently conjured a jinni of intolerance. The spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran denounced the book and called for Rushdie’s murder.

During his long period in hiding, Rushdie was protected by British security services but he received far from unconditional support. He was not just criticised by religious opponents; various secular politicians and commentators suggested that he’d knowingly kicked a hornet’s nest, and that he should have known better.

The central character of Rushdie’s new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is also a man who has been cursed and then gets blamed for it. Geronimo Manezes, a Mumbai-born gardener now living in New York, has begun to levitate. This isn’t the wish fulfillment of a flying dream; it threatens his livelihood and brings the increasing hostility of strangers. “Why do you imagine I consider my condition an improvement? he wanted to cry out. Why, when it has ruined my life and I fear it may bring about my early death?”

But Geronimo’s predicament is not an isolated case. It foreshadows an era of “strangenesses,” where the “laws which had long been accepted as the governing principles of reality had collapsed.” The strangenesses — some meteorological, some natural disasters, some simply miraculous — are the prelude to a full-blown invasion of the human world by malevolent spirits from another dimension.

It turns out that four evil jinn, Zabardast, Zumurrud, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, have broken through the wormholes separating the world from Fairyland and are bent on causing havoc in the 21st century. The only power that can stop them is a nice female jinnia called Dunia and her human descendants: Geronimo Manezes, the British composer Hugo Casterbridge, the young Indian-American graphic novelist Jimmy Kapoor and a femme fatale called Teresa Saca. If Dunia can gather them up in time and awaken them to the power of their jinni nature, humanity might have a chance against the 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.” Well, the reader feels, it’s a long shot, but it might just work.

Rushdie was never a writer who tiptoed stealthily into the reader’s imagination, avoiding the creaking floorboards of incredulity. He has always indulged the enchanter’s power to say “fiat lux” and populate his fictional world with whatever he chooses. “Capaciousness, inclusiveness, everything-at-once-ness, breadth, width, depth, bigness: These were the values to which a tall, long-striding, broad-shouldered man like himself should cleave,” Geronimo thinks. And Rushdie has been a courageous and liberating example of someone who’s consistently rejected any constraints on his imagination, aesthetic or theological.

But while it’s true that novels are capacious and composed of superfluities, if a book is everything it risks being a formless nothing. The new novel quickly becomes a breathless mash-up of wormholes, mythical creatures, current affairs and disquisitions on philosophy and theology. Behind its glittery encrustations, the plot resembles the bare outline for a movie about superheroes. There’s a war between worlds, lightning comes out of people’s fingertips and it all culminates in a blockbuster showdown between the forces of good and evil.

A further conceit is that the tale is being told in the future by a civilisation that has outgrown the needs of faith and religion. “This is a story from our past,” its narrator tells us, “from a time so remote that we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology.” The narrator may be foggy on the genre and some key details of the actual story, but somehow, after over a 1,000 years, his recollection of Jet Li, Batman, Kim Novak, Larry Hagman and the divorce arrangements of the Wildensteins remains undimmed.

Of course, complaining that Rushdie’s not a naturalistic writer is like criticising kimchi for its cabbagey funk. This invention and prolixity have been intoxicating in Rushdie novels when there’s been some compelling principle at work — a distinct narrative voice, a single central character whose story is unfolded more patiently as in his previous New York novel, Fury. But here the narrative sprawls; digressions and minor characters multiply. The author changes accents, cracks wise, lectures the reader on mythology. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un makes a cameo appearance; so does Al Qaeda; so do story lines by absurdist writers Beckett, Ionesco and Gogol.

The book has no shortage of ideas and allusions. Dunia’s children are the offspring of a liaison with the rationalist Muslim philosopher Averroes, or Ibn Rushd, whose name the author’s family adopted. There’s a continuing debate between Ibn Rushd and the theologian al-Ghazali about reason and religious belief. Yet the novel’s physical world is thinly evoked. The strangenesses multiply, but they are hard to picture. The book seems both overpopulated and underimagined. The prose is often portentously vague.

“Things had reached a point at which only science fiction gave people a way of getting a handle on what the formerly real world’s non-C.G.I. mundanity seemed incapable of making comprehensible.” Abstraction and competing negations turn this sentence into a mystifying fog. “Even though the normality of the city had been disrupted, most people hadn’t been able to get their heads around it, and were still dumbfounded by the irruption of the fantastic into the quotidian.” You get the idea, but what do you see?

As the storytelling grows more manic, what comes through clearly — much too clearly — is the novel’s controlling theme: an allegory about humanity’s struggle between superstition and reason.

The book’s title is a nod to One Thousand and One Nights, but this kind of overt commentary is a long way from the authorlessness and economy of fairy tales, which never lecture and whose bareness — envious stepmother, noble prince, dark forest — extends a more subtle invitation to the reader.

The most felt things in the book are about Geronimo the gardener, lonely and aging in an unfamiliar city. He is doubly uprooted, separated both from the earth itself and the Indian birthplace that he loved. The prose quickens with specific detail when he mourns the loss of his childhood home: “He wished he had never become detached from the place he was born, wished his feet had remained planted on that beloved ground, wished he could have been happy all his life in those childhood streets, and grown into an old man there and known every paving stone, every betel-nut vendor’s story, every boy selling pirated novels at traffic lights.”

It’s a huge relief when Geronimo finds himself back on more solid ground; it will be an ever bigger one when his author does too.

Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Nights
Salman Rushdie
Penguin
2015, pp 304, Rs 599