FULL disclosure: I’m a Salman Rushdie fan. Is there a writer alive with a thousandth of this man’s bravery as he faces down the intolerance of millions? Who writes on despite a crazed attack from one of his enemies?
His books celebrate humanity in all its messy glory, its inventions and wanderings, its miscegenation.
Rushdie champions the many faiths and beliefs that might co-exist peacefully as typified in the invented city of Bisnaga in his new novel, a place exemplifying “this cross-pollination, this mingling” that is our true lot in life.
He’s well aware his plea for understanding disturbs the dogmatic, irritates the ideologue. Remember those 1980s chants that he should hang? Rushdie is for tolerance on a bigoted planet; it’s one world, like it or not… We’re in another of his mythical creations – the Bisnaga Empire in Southern India based on the actual Vijayanagra Empire circa 1336-1565.
Pampa Kampana is a young woman who attains godly powers and becomes a poet. Her saga is told by a modest narrator, a mere “spinner of yarns” – Rushdie himself.
Like that other literary exile – James Joyce – Rushdie can conjure “home” in his head. Pampa lives for 247 years; her history of the Hydra-headed empire revels in its rise and fall.
The ease of Rushdie’s imaginative facility recalls his love of the One Thousand and One Nights, the folk stories of Italo Calvino, the angelic whisperers of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.
There’s visual splendor as he describes a Baroque court with its ornamental pools, its royalty wearing pearls and rubies sewn into silken cloth, the kings in gold brocade.
If Rushdie’s imagery were painted they’d resemble the canvases of Raqib Shaw: pullulating scenes crammed with incident and detail.
As ever the novelist is an expert at mixology; he’s the DJ Shadow of text with references and allusions to high and low culture from Finnegans Wake to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Mahabharata to Sleeping Beauty, Buñuel to the Jungle Book.
If anything Victory City reins in Rushdie’s more polymathic urges: this novel is not as flashy or knowing as some of his earlier works. The tone here is gentler, less furious, in short it’s simpler: less grim/more Grimm.
We might even propose late Rushdie to be almost Hitchcockian in his methods, that is to say he aims to please on three different levels.
Firstly there’s the storytelling, the well-told tale that gets bums on seats. Secondly there’s the pedagogical intent – all those cross-references – let’s learn the names of exotic birds and local confectionary. And then thirdly there’s the real meanings/morals of the book.
Which are what? That intolerance is always a threat: that nationalisms can have a dark side. You do not need to be an expert on contemporary Indian politics to know that Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is pursuing an ever-exclusionary social agenda.
Victory City’s allusions to modern day struggles are evident: we learn of goon squads that arrest a man for handing out blank sheets of paper in protest at the government, an incident similar to that seen recently in both Russia and the UK. But there is optimism. Rushdie places his faith in women and words. Women are the future in Victory City. Women are to be empowered.
As with contemporary Iran and Afghanistan the empire has puritanical forces targeting the “free-spirited women of Bisnaga”. But this is a story where men are asked to “start considering women in new ways”.
If fundamentalist men burn books written by women Rushdie insists their words will not be forgotten. If it’s good for nothing else ChatGPT will see to that.
Does magic realism – as a story-telling form – have a future given this recent (threatening) innovation?
Are Rushdie’s talking parrots alive or dead on the page?
To quote the narrator: “Such passages … are not, we believe, to be interpreted literally. They are a part of the poetic vision that infuses the whole masterwork, and like all such visions must be interpreted as metaphors or symbols.”
Poetic words will indeed survive. We can imagine him being sceptical of Larkin’s lines from An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.”
For Rushdie “words are the only victors”. Guy’s a legend.
