Pale Fury

...Fury's final fifty pages have the feel of a musty dogma whose time has passed, as though Rushdie had suddenly remembered he's a postmodern writer and had better throw something along those lines into the plot...

...Fury shows that he can write realistic psychological novels...

...So Nixon's scandals become a political novel called The Watergate Affair...

...The controversy over The Satanic Verses points to the difficulties engendered by the postmodern tendency to "play" with traditional myths, stories, and beliefs—specifically, that it only really works if no one cares enough to be offended...

...Like the author, the hero Malik Solanka has just left a third wife with whom he has a four-year-old child...

...the beautiful prose simply is...

...His latest novel, Fury—the story of an Indian professor who walks out of his marriage and leaves London for New York—points to an explanation: Rushdie's fascination with the techniques and tropes of postmodernism...

...Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came....I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country...

...Fury is a much better book than The Ground Beneath Her Feet or even The Satanic Verses: smaller, more compact— at 272 pages, a mere scribble for Rushdie—and more accessible...

...its fable-like qualities spring naturally from the largely Eastern sources it draws upon...

...But in their rush to defend him, critics largely overlooked serious flaws in the novel— especially the Mahound section, which was congested and stagnant, and added very little to an otherwise fascinating novel about two Indians who survive a mid-flight terrorist bombing on board a jetliner...

...What was striking twenty years ago is merely conventional now that all the new Indian writers—especially Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy—have caught what critic Pankaj Mishra calls "Rushdieitis...

...But it is nonetheless a classic postcolonial tale...

...John E Kennedy isn't shot but wins a second term...

...After more than thirty years of literary postmodernism, all this twinning, alternative history, reimagining, reconstructed myth, and faulty narrative has grown very tired...

...This world is visited by a procession of figures—one of them Ormus's dead twin brother—from "alternative universes...

...Yet the cause of Solanka's mental torment— the cause of his fury—is not supernatural but psychological, childhood abuse that is revealed in strikingly subdued, un-Rushdian tones...

...In all his previous books, Rushdie's protagonists have been misshapen by supernatural forces beyond their control...

...Even careful readers lost track of what was going on amidst the six or seven different plots that creakily contended for predominance in this sprawling, multi-charactered affair of nearly six hundred pages—with one vital character not even introduced until the last sixty pages...

...In a few pages, he will mix and match images or stories from Greek myth, Christian hagiography, and rock 'n' roll...

...The universe was a place of wonders, and only habitua-tion, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight...

...When he gets into trouble, it's not because words have failed him, but because his ideas have overpowered his words...

...This leader has decided that what's needed on the island is "no more nam-bying and pambying...

...Rushdie faced real danger from the fatwa issued against him...

...Why is this so...

...With much more deadly results, the same charges of novelistic plunder of cultural riches would be lodged against The Satanic Verses (1988) by Muslim fundamentalists, who objected to Rushdie's reimagining of the birth of a religion that sounds a great deal like Islam...

...Indeed, in an acerbic commentary, Mishra claims that Rushdie has caught his own disease, becoming in his most recent novels a parody of himself...

...Throughout, history is inverted and reimagined in ways that are confusing and not especially illuminating...

...The closing is forced, hurried, and altogether unsatisfying, and the tone shifts in exactly the same jarring manner as in the Mahound section of The Satanic Verses...

...It has, in fact, become an orthodoxy, and Rushdie's strengths as a writer shine through best when he is being unorthodox—which is perhaps why Rushdie has now attempted in Fury to jettison some of the postmodern techniques and elements that have weighed down his recent works...

...Rushdie has become, in a sense, a victim of his own success...

...And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time...

...But his novels can also be simply awful...

...This fury is assuaged by the love of a Central European émigrée, Mila, who runs a web-design shop, and then is finally healed by Neela, a stunningly beautiful television producer from a fictional island off India's coast...

...But during a political crisis, they are targeted by a sterilization campaign led by Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay, and driven to ruin...

...It is as though his determination to check down the list of postmodern techniques distracts him from what he does best: telling good stories well...

...The pulsing, fractured city perfectly mirrors the dislocation in Solanka's mind, and Rushdie proves himself remarkably adept at capturing a particular moment in the tech-driven frenzy of late capitalist society...

...Saleem can communicate through his thoughts with the precisely one thousand other children born at that moment, and they become a kind of prophetic class within India...

...The time has come to admit that the man has never quite lived up to his talent...

...Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity...

...After 220-odd pages, Rushdie brings Neela together with Mila and her fiancé—and also Eleanor and her present lover Morgen—in a strange scene in the professor's bedroom...

...Rushdie's natural lyricism and comedic touch get lost in all the Justin Torres is the managing editor of Philanthropy Magazine...

...But it is now twenty years after Midnight's Children, and Salman Rushdie is getting a little long in the tooth to be described as promising...

...only her assassination in 1984 saved Rushdie from paying significant money damages...

...The success of the first two-thirds of the book is a triumph for Rushdie...

...The burden of postmodernism grew stronger in Rushdie's grotesque 1995 novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, and became overwhelming in 1999 with The Ground Beneath Her Feet...

...Okay," she said, exhaling...

...the singer Lou Reed is a woman...

...It's notable that Rushdie's most perfectly executed novel remains Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991), a collection of Eastern fables he refashioned for his son...

...Only those with no humor—or not like Indira Gandhi, on the receiving end of Rushdie's barbs—could read it as an attempt at literary realism...

...Midnight's Children (1981), Rushdie's break-out novel, remains a gem of a book—a beautifully written, darkly comic allegory of Indian history that explores the "double parentage" of postcolonial writing...

...The leader of the coup wears the mask of a character who was based on Solanka— there's that old twinning again...

...The Mahound section had none of this level of wit and linguistic power...

...The book's fiercest critic, of course, was Indira Gandhi, who sued in British courts for libel and won...

...These bumbling guerrillas wear masks sporting the faces of characters from Solanka's web project...

...I have come to America to be devoured," Solanka thinks after an unspeakable incident involving his wife Eleanor and son Asmaan...

...There are passages in Rushdie's novels that are among the best of the past quarter century: funny and moving and written with real verve...

...Critics have generally ignored Haroun since it is not considered "serious," but the book is the best example of Rushdie's soaring talent as writer, full of twists and turns and wry comedy...

...It is possible to read Fury as a promising book, a transition to more realistic and serious work...

...The island has been taken over by a band of "Indo-Lilly" patriots who have declared an independent republic of "Filbistan...

...The story of Malik Solanka, an Indian professor who leaves academia in midcareer to write for a BBC series he created, Little Brain (about a doll who converses with philosophers), Fury is set in New York in the year 2000...

...A tale of rock 'n' roll, The Ground Beneath Her Feet did not involve play with deeply held religious beliefs...

...Much of the novel is classic interior monologue...

...And as Rushdie discovered with Indian criticism of Midnight's Children and the Muslim furor over The Satanic Verses, not everyone appreciates their beliefs' being "reimagined" for novelistic purposes...

...Madonna is a rock groupie who nabs a succession of musician husbands...

...So why did Rushdie feel the need to revert to a style that has failed him in the past to end a largely successful book that is quite unlike his others...

...But he is plagued by bouts of overwhelming anger that make him question his sanity and his actions during the long nights he spends roaming the streets of New York...

...He demands of Neela, who's come to make a documentary about the island, "If we say the moon is made of cheese, then of what, sister, is it made...

...After each of them lambastes Solanka, and Morgen lands a right hook that knocks him out, the book rushes into a description of a failed military coup on Neela's home island, called "Lilliput-Blefuscu...

...It's never quite clear...

...Fury—at least the first two-thirds of it—is more clearly autobiographical than anything Rushdie has written before...

...His worst books are close to unreadable...

...It was plodding and heavy-handed, written in that faux-literary voice many bad contemporary authors use to signal their "seriousness" to the reader...

...Consider this scene, where Gibreel, an Indian actor who is transformed into Gabriel, confesses his secret to his lover: He told her: he fell from the sky and lived...

...It has no self-consciousness...

...In the end, Vina Apsara, after letting loose a ferocious roar in her incomparable singing voice, is swallowed by an earthquake in Mexico...

...Outside of the Mahound section, the book put all of Rushdie's talent on show...

...She answers, "Cheese," and goes on to agree that the sun revolves around a flat Earth and never sets on an independent Filbistan...

...She took a deep breath and believed him...

...Despite its contemporary setting, Midnight's Children didn't pretend to be realistic...

...Rushdie has described it as "ultra-contemporary, smack up against the daily headlines," and Elián González, Tony Soprano, Monica Lewinsky, George W Bush, and Al Gore all make appearances...

...The thousand and one children, like the postcolonial societies of which India is one example, exist uneasily among their contemporaries because they are caught between the past and the future...

...John Lennon survives to mourn the death of an Indian singer shot by a crazed fan outside his apartment in New York City...

...Critics hailed the book as the beginning of a new era in third-world literature...

...Editorialists railed that Midnight's Children misrepresented Indian history and played fast and loose with Indian religious myths...

...The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too...

...Just don't tell my mother, all right...

...In a much-quoted review in the New York Times, Clark Blaise announced that reading Rushdie was like hearing "a continent finding its voice," and no one was surprised when Midnight's Children received the 1981 Booker Prize and later the "Booker of Bookers" for the best novel to receive the award in twenty-five years...

...She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds...

...But critics have long noted that in Rushdie's novels allusion is merely allusive...

...The book starts out strong, the first two-hundred pages among the best of Rushdie's career...

...reworking of history, double vision, and imperfect narration that marks literary postmodernism...

...Afterwards, the pair is transformed into the two Biblical enemies, Satan and the Archangel Gabriel, and begin a strange battle for control of greater London...

...This is Rushdie at his finest: richly detailed, archly comic, and keenly attentive to sound and language...

...his books contain literally thousands of references to myths and traditions from cultures around the world...

...But they are empty references—none of them referring to real belief...

...But already there were critics, mostly Indian, who suggested that Rushdie had taken unacceptable liberties with the history, culture, and traditions of his native land...

...If that could happen, so could this...

...The novel is the story of Indian rock star Ormus Cama, his female vocalist Vina Apsara, and a photographer, Rai Merchant, who grew up with them...

...Professor Malik Solanka," the opening paragraph begins, "retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age...

...These ghostly figures come to have sex with rock stars and drive Ormus, who can see them through a "tear" in the fabric of his universe, increasingly crazy...

...In the offending section of the book, the prophet "Mahound" (a name for Mohammed used in medieval Christian morality plays) is a weak and bumbling fool, surrounded by a ragtag group of thieves and prostitutes (whom Rushdie, in a nice inflammatory touch, gives the names of Mohammed's wives...

...The novel is a retelling of Indian history through the life of Saleem Sinai, who was born on August 15, 1947, as India declared its independence from Britain: On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact...

...In four quick pages the coup is resolved and Solanka is flying home...

...I'll buy it...

...Even in his best books, whole passages are pretentious, slow, confusing, and over-wrought...

...Without that distraction, critics focused on the novel and discovered that it was terrible...

...Most irritating to some was the book's habit of rendering the peculiarities of subcontinental English in a sing-song patois that called to mind Western stereotypes of Indian speech patterns...

...Rushdie suddenly shifts tone at the end and reverts to the strained postmodernism of his previous novels...

...Her death inspires millions around the world to join fertility cults that burn candles and chant in her memory...

...Or maybe she was taken up to heaven...

...Allusion is one of Rushdie's favorite literary techniques...

...British youths protest that country's escalating war in Vietnam and escape to America to avoid the draft...

...Mohammed's flight from Medina is reworked as the hasty retreat of a con artist staying one step ahead of his debts...

...All of his books suffer from this fault to some degree, but his recent novels are seriously flawed by it...

...But this early success only makes the failure of the last part of the novel more apparent...

...He is a prodigiously talented prose stylist with a remarkable ear and broad knowledge...

...But the saving grace of Midnight's Children was its comedy...

...For the next three decades, there was to be no escape...