In a world with Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and Islamic State, you wonder if there is still a need for magic realism, made a bedrock of literature by Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and deployed to dazzling effect by Salman Rushdie in 1981’s Midnight’s Children, adjudged the Booker-of-Bookers.
Perhaps, if it’s well-written; but Rushdie’s latest, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, does not make a case for it. Rushdie’s novel is a tedious disappointment, despite his efforts to write the jinns of Scheherzade’s One Thousand and One Nights — the numerical equivalent of his novel’s title — into a loud pop-culture Hollywood blockbuster like Age of Ultron.
Rushdie’s craft is intact: he can do wordplay in the most tangled forests of description, he can find puns in the most obscure historical-literary references, and he can create poetry even in his skyscraper-like paragraphs. It’s just that the stories now elude him; the plots that ought to cohere all the magic and wizcraft have deserted him. In this reviewer’s humble opinion, his last great novel was 1988’s The Satanic Verses, and the fatwa that it occasioned (the book was first banned in India, we proudly remind ourselves, which hellishly snowballed into a global controversy) also banished from his fecund imagination the ability to tell a story.
No wonder then that the only great thing that he has written since is his third-person memoir, Joseph Anton. Otherwise, the novels since the ’90s have been dreary and repetitive, each new publication a Groundhog Day-like deja vu of the same fantasmagorical meditation on story-telling, in which only the characters change (and that too, only in names; indeed, you tend to feel there’s a sorcerer and a horseman in every damned story he writes). You wonder why the great man keeps at it: despite his over-the-top style, Two Years... is very low-energy. It is so turgid that perhaps it should have been titled “This Will Take You One Thousand and One Nights to Read”.
The narrative begins with a 12th century philosophical dispute between Ibn Rushd and Ghazali of Tus, mirroring the struggle between science and faith. Ibn Rushd is defeated despite his adherence to Aristotle and logic and reason. Ironically, it is a jinni named Duniya who comes to Rushd’s rescue, begetting an army of offspring which proliferates freely over the centuries till our modern time, when the “wormhole” between the world of humans and that of jinns opens up and is threatened by the dark jinns, who unsubtly resemble Al Qaeda, Taliban and Islamic State. Duniya returns and gathers her descendants to fight off the dark jinn, which (spoiler alert) they do successfully.
Of course, no modern reader can empathise with dead philosophers or smoky jinnis, so the real main characters are ethnically-Indian Americans: Geronimo, a gardener who has just buried his wife in a rich pessimist’s verdant estate; Jimmy Kapoor, a budding graphic novelist whose style is “Frank Milleresque (he hoped), sub-Stan-Lee-universe (he conceded), post-Lichtensteinian (this when in the company of snobs, himself included)”; and a baby abandoned at the Mayor’s office, with the magical power of disease-scarring the faces of the corrupt. Yet getting to their stories takes so long, with so many uninteresting detours, that you often wonder if Rushdie himself has lost interest in writing.
Maybe not, as he notes on page 218 about the consequences of the 1,001 night war between the jinni and the jinns:
“All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the pleasures of duration, of lingering.”
Not quite, Rushdie-Sir. Russian literature has lately undergone a renaissance of new translations, so that knocks off one bottom from your lament. As for your novel, what do you say when the only genuinely LOL moment comes late, on page 243, when, while talking of jinns’ preferences for stories, you write: “‘South America?’ complained Shining Ruby. ‘What do they know about magic there?’” Or that you are clearly deluded on page 158: “One of the reasons she preferred an ‘older’ human lover, she murmured to Geronimo Manezes, was that they found it easier to control themselves. With young men it was over in a flash.” (Young men or old, it’s always over way too quickly.) Or that you resort to banal exchanges such as this on page 175:
“I’m not a fighter, he told her. I’m not a hero. I’m a gardener.
That is a pity, she said, a little scornfully, because right now, as it happens, heroes are what we need.”
How bizarre that a timeless and formless being like a jinni spouts lines that belong more in a self-serious yet shallow American TV serial.
Probably the weakness of the narrative is the lack of chemistry between Duniya and Geronimo, who meet at the centre of the novel. He reminds her of Ibn Rushd, and she reminds him of his dead wife; they become lovers. Not only that, Geronimo’s inner jinn is unleashed, and they find a Chinese box which, like the Matryoshka doll, is a series of boxes nestled inside the other, made of tattooed human skin, and which carries the final key to the battle.
But this whole section is so bereft of magic, excitement and passion that you wonder if “love” really deserves to triumph over “hatred”. If only the stories were as exciting as the idea of the Chinese box, if only they had nestled in one another satisfyingly. Rushdie fails in making us empathise with any of his characters; perhaps he loathes them more than we do.
The only explanation for the literary failure of Two Years... is that by now, Rushdie’s mind is willing but his body is not. Don’t go near this book; you’d be better off getting a cool recipe book by his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi. As for the great Salman Rushdie, he should follow Philip Roth’s example and quietly retire.
Aditya Sinha is the former editor-in-chief of The New Indian Express and DNA
