Reworking Old Ground

...Rushdie, whose genius is as much political as literary, recognizes this, and with an often inspired insight he shows the mutual otherness of the two neighboring countries that were at one time part of a single British-dominated land...

...But as a successor, it gives one the feeling of a writer marking time, exercising himself before setting out on something new...

...The fantasy in Shame, with its strange births and possessed children, follows that of Midnight's Children...

...They are satirical portrayals on the grand scale of the kind of societies that arise in Asia when imperial powers depart...

...and Omar's three mothers, who cover the shame of one of them by sharing him as their child...

...The menace of the people is symbolized in the elder daughter of Raza Hy-der, the military dictator...

...It would be acceptable if the two books were part of a larger work, a trilogy or a tetralogy...

...There is no possibility of returning in Pakistan to what existed before the British arrived—the rule of the warring Emirs of Sind, the mini-imperialism of Ranjit Singh in the Punjab and the Northwest Province...

...It is in the area of political satire that the originality, the distinctiveness from the earlier novel, emerges...

...In fact, the pattern of political intrigues between demagogic party leaders and neurotic generals spouting outdated Sandhurst slang closely parallels the series of events leading up to the overthrow and eventual hanging in 1979 of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, while to anyone who has traveled from Karachi to Lahore and up into Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the land is physically Pakistan and nowhere else...

...The difference between Rushdie's not-quite-Pakistan and the Moslem realms that existed before the imperial interlude lies in the presence of a populace that has tasted freedom and has not forgotten the flavor...

...A gentle retarded child who in her 20s has achieved the intelligence of a nine-year-old, Su-fiya Zinobia suffers from occasional fits of possession when a demon enters her and she becomes a destructive were-monster, hypnotizing her victims and tearing off their heads...

...Since they are not, one inevitably wonders whether and how the next novel will depart from the general framework...

...And everywhere Byzantine intrigue flourishes, so that betrayals and murders again become the methods for determining political successions...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," "Mohandas Gandhi" If Salman Rushdie had not already written Midnight's Children, Shame would appear to be an extraordinary and unique book...

...In caricature fashion the features of the Mogul Empire that for 300 years ruled the northern part of the Indian subcontinent resurface, adapted to the circumstances of the 20th century...

...Thus the medical genius, Omar Khayyam Shakil, who gives the novel its wandering thread of unity and marries Sufiya Zinobia in the hope of saving her, only to become her last victim...

...Yet in each liberated country the old traditions in some way surge up, changing the borrowed forms...

...Instead, there is a divagation from the imperial model, from the traditions in this case of the British Army and of the British Parliament ruling through the Indian Civil Service...

...Midnight's Children presented the grandiose drama of India lurching into independence...

...For essentially, the two books are cast in the same mold...

...Crazy mullahs whisper in their ears and lead them to mingle religious fanaticism with modern methods of repression in the new regimes they impose...

...The similarities—in the use of English, in the borrowed manners of the upper classes—merely emphasize what one has observed often in the strange history of the Commonwealth: Imperialism destroys irretrievably the ancient political structures of conquered countries...

...Still, one remains troubled by that similarity with Midnight's Children...

...Consequently, as Rushdie faithfully demonstrates in Shame, the new dispensation in Pakistan is not only hostile to that in its twin country of India, born in the same midnight hour, but entirely individual...

...Pakistan, which never established a working democracy and has always wavered between sleazy partisan politics and ruthless military adventurism, is clearly a different country from India where, despite massive corruption, democracy has by a kind of miracle survived...

...even their language, spoken among the new rulers...

...Moreover, one of the special devices of the novel is the drifting from fantasy into actuality and back again...

...Warriors become rulers, as the successive dynasties of Moslem kings did...

...It is at this level of political satire that Shame takes on its individuality, extended in the gallery of obsessive characters who, as frequently happens in the genre, hover on the verge of becoming types yet succeed in remaining human...

...It is there to burst into riot, to vote Iskander Harappainto office (an opportunity he destroys by his own authoritarian arrogance), and to turn him into a wonder-working saint after he dies—nominally hanged, although actually shot in his prison cell...

...Sufiya roaming the countryside and filling it with terror as the political crises build up is a figure suggesting a people becoming aware of its strength and ready to break its chains as she broke hers...

...Even the ranks established by the conquerors remain...

...More of the same when the same is good is all very well, but not too often...

...Shame claims to take place in a country that is "not Pakistan, or not quite...

...Long stretches read as though the central political figure, Iskander Harap-pa, is Bhutto, and then some twist of action shifts the focus and we are once more in the world of fantasy, looking in at reality from a distance...

...and Arjumand Harappa, Iskander's power-driven daughter...